Later that week, I started cleaning my office drawers, then the shed (with 12 years of project leftovers - you can imagine) and the basement storage room! I then moved on to cleaning 11 years of property, and retreat pictures up AND cleaning up the hard drive on my computer. Yesterday I finally finished the project of transferring about 15 old audio recordings into electronic form and throwing the tapes away.
All in all we've made about 10 trips to the thrift store and about 4 SUV loads of building materials and tools to the Habitat for Humanity store - SO FAR, 'cause we're not done yet!
It hasn't happened all at once though. I usually wait for a rainy inside day for much of this sort of "work", but with each newly recaptured area we noticed we had extra space and only could find the stuff we do use easily. Removing the unnecessary made us feel "lighter" and gave use space for the things we DO want in our lives (like Tubes for floating the river, Bikes and Musical instruments)!
My advice? Start small and "reclaim" one part of your house, garage, life, at a time - it'll feel so good you'll what to do it again and even though it's hard work, the pay-off is huge!