Sunday, May 24, 2009

Spring Cleaning

When we moved to South Bend in August 2007, we unpacked all of our essentials and left lots of the non-essentials in boxes in the basement. Of course, the plan was to sort through the stuff in the coming weeks. Well, the "coming weeks" lasted a bit longer than intended; until this weekend, in fact!

What can I say? I'm a pack rat (and so is Della). It amazes me how much junk I hold onto. My favorite sort of thing to keep is made of paper -- news clippings, magazine articles, entire newspapers and magazines, old reports and tests from college, and almost anything I've ever written -- good, bad or so-so.

Over the past 5 years involving two moves, I've tried very hard to break the paper habit. I've probably recycled at least a ton or two of paper. Yet, no matter how much paper I recycle, there's still way too much of it. Boxes and boxes filled with paper.

So, this time around I'm culling more of it. If I keep doing this every few years, I might get to the point in which I'm only left with 2 or 3 boxes filled with paper. Ya know, the best stuff for the those trips down memory lane.

One of those boxes will be filled with reams of copy paper. Over a decade ago, we bought a pallet of office supplies at an auction for $98. Aside from lots of stuff we really didn't need, we did find that we had purchased two cases of Valley Forge Parchment paper. At the time, each ream cost $11.50 (retail). Twenty reams would have set us back $230, so getting this paper for $98 was a steal.

As I'm going through yet another box, I find 4 reams of the paper. I already have a ream of 80% recycled paper -- so I now have 5 reams or 2500 pieces. This should last us for the next 10 - 20 years.

Now, if I can only figure out what to do with the dozen or so golf balls I've found in boxes! (Note: Neither Della nor I plays golf.)

1 comment:

  1. We're out of copy paper. My kids go through it like crazy..

    ReplyDelete

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