100 pieces of crap

While I am not a Hoarder's level crap-keeper, I tend to keep stuff that I really don't want or need.  I think it is a combination of being cheap, broke, and having been a teacher.  Anyone who has even been a teacher knows you can find a use for just about anything, especially if that shit be free!

Yes, the teacher just used improper English.  While I can't stand it when people mix up the "your"s or write things like "breath" when they mean "breathe," I feel that it is perfectly appropriate to intentionally misuse words or play with language when you do it on purpose.  

Anyhoo, we live in 1500 square foot of crap avalanche potential.  I am sick of it.  

So I was reading one of my fave blogs and had a guest post regarding that blogger's 100 things challenge.  And I was all "Yay, I can do dat!" (Yes, again intentional.)

So we are, as a family, doing the 100 things challenge.  The idea is simple.  We have to find 100 things around the house that we do not want, need, like, or use.  Then we have to either get rid of it (trash or donation) or re-purpose it.  I can already anticipate that my cheap-teacher-hoarder tendencies will have issues with the re-purposing thing, because I can reuse anything.  Anything. I get twitchy thinking about throwing out potentially useful stuff. 

So knowing I needed to keep myself in check, and I have a thing for fancy forms and tables, I made this. 

I made a 100 Things chart for the house, and one for our backyard/shed because the shed is ready to pop.  Because I am a bit of a glitter-burping unicorn and am hopeful that 100 things will be easy in this house, I also made a "bonus" sheet, so we can document anything over 100 from either page.  

In addition, I'm a teensy bit OCD and love highlighters, so incorporated color coding: if you are re-purposing the item you write down it has to be highlighted yellow.  You must have an immediate purpose for it -- I am quite good at saying "I know I can use this someday."  I won't let that cut it.  Orange stuff is for donation, and it needs to be donated by the next weekend as things for donation tend to set up semi-permanent residence in my garage.  Trash stuff is trash, therefore it doesn't get highlighted because I don't want to waste highlighter ink on garbage.  Yes, I said I was cheap.  

But since I am inherently weak and have no self discipline to speak of, I am doing the color coding so that my husband can ride my ass.  Which he will.  Gladly.  Sigh.

I would gladly post a PDF of my charts were anyone to want them, but alas, when our computer got "fixed" the programs got erased.  This included our Microsoft Word, and we only have the "update" disk because the compute was originally Vista loaded when we got it.  When everything got erased we had nothing to "upgrade" and now I have some free word processing program, which works okay but I can't save as a PDF.  Anyone want to help a girl and give me Word or tell me how to save as PDF I'd love 'em for it! ;)

I will post an update once I break it to the troops we are doing this and that each of us has a 25 item minimum.  Mutiny surely will follow.