Jessica: Days 1, 2, and 3

Since I was the one who suggested this challenge after seeing on Facebook that my cousin completed it, I wanted to start Day 1 off with something big. I'd already decided that my focus would mostly be in the basement, which is where all the junk tends to migrate, because of gravity or something. There are several big items down there worth getting rid of--unused pinata? box of old 45s? about a dozen broken dining room chairs?--but I decided to start with the one that was giving me the most grief. So, for Day 1, I got rid of this:

This was my crib. I used it for all three of my kids and it's served us well, but it's from 1977 and so no one else will take it and I can't donate it to anyone. (Yes, before our oldest was born my husband and I pored over the actual safety regulations used for modern cribs and it met all of them. I never worried about it. Still, the law's the law, and I probably wouldn't take someone else's baby equipment from four decades ago either.) I'm definitely done having kids, so I wasn't wistful about it in that sense, but it's a good sturdy thing and you hate to see something like that turned into trash. There's nothing else that could be done about it, though, so it was time to rip off that band-aid. 

For Day 2, I got rid of a bag of trash that I'd filled several months ago and not bothered to take out of the basement, and also this big bookshelf support that we haven't used since we moved into this house and reconfigured our bookshelves. 

That was in 2009, so--yeah. It was time for that to go. This was an easy day because I didn't have any sentimental attachment to any of it, so it was just a matter of carrying two things out. 

Today was Day 3, and I decided to start tackling the jigsaw puzzles in the basement. We have a whole lot of these, and I knew some were missing pieces but I didn't know which. They don't take up all that much space, but it was a project I'd been putting off. I decided the way to count it was to go through the puzzles until I found three with missing pieces, recycle those, and call it a day. Here are the results:

On the right in the wooden boxes are puzzles with missing pieces. (No surprise there. Those Melissa and Doug four-packs got a whole lot of use in this house.) They went into the recycling bin. The pile in the middle went up to the snowday emergency shelf. The ones on the left, which are in fine shape but which I think all the kids have outgrown, went back to the basement and will probably get sorted into a box for Goodwill later in the challenge.

Not too shabby for the first three days! I'm pleased.