The goal was this: clean out the linen closet, then move whatever linens I could from the spare bedroom into it. Donate whatever was usable, throw away what was not.
Once done with the linen closet I moved on to the bedroom. Today I only really made it as far as sorting through all the clothing strewn on the bed and the floor. I separated clothes by "his and hers", then threw away about eighteen pairs of old underwear and about a thousand worn-out or stained sweat socks. I vacuumed, put things into either the laundry pile, the linen closet, or the towel cabinet in the bathroom. Vacuumed and organized, made the bed, it looks a million percent better than it did this morning.
Result: five bags of trash--mostly old linens and clothes, too stained or frayed to be useful--taken out of the house today. Two boxes of books and one bag of stuff for donation staged.
Now that I think of it, actually, it ought to be six bags. One item tossed was an old comforter (vintage 1990) which had worn through on one side; it was a double-size comforter, big and fluffy, and if I had bothered to bag it, it would have taken up a trash bag by itself. So, yeah, make that six bags of trash taken out today.
This is really the first time I've dug into that closet since Mom died. Certainly it hasn't been looked at since then, and a lot of these old linens were really old. We don't need any of them; we have plenty for the double bed in the spare bedroom without needing sheets Mom and Dad bought in 1987. Crimony.
I kept two blankets: an old electric blanket that works, and a much older wool blanket that came from my maternal grandmother's house. The rest of the bedclothes? Gone. I decided to donate all the books in the closet, the textbooks and the yearbooks. Even after retaining all the pictures and stuff and putting some things into the linen closet I still have about 40% of the linen closet free.
It's ridiculous, how much junk there still is to contend with here. I'm not done with this project, not by a long shot; the bedroom still needs more work and then once that's done I need to finish the basement. Getting a strategy is the hardest part; once you've got that, it's just effort.
But damn, it sure looks good.