CK & GK Podcast

CK & GK's 5-Step Guide to Tackling Big Projects: The Ultimate Garage Purge

June 06, 2023 Jenny GK and Caitlin Kindred Season 2 Episode 72
CK & GK Podcast
CK & GK's 5-Step Guide to Tackling Big Projects: The Ultimate Garage Purge
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

How GK Conquered Her Cluttered Garage and Built a Framework for Crossing Other Big Tasks Off Her To-Do List

We finish what we start. —Jenny GK

Jenny GK tackles the daunting task of cleaning out her cluttered garage by implementing ruthless guidelines, accountability, and a deadline, and in doing so, created a framework for getting all of those other big items from “to-do” to “all done.”

Key Takeaways: From this episode, you will be able to

  • Master the art of managing overwhelming household projects with actionable tips.
  • Balance emotional attachment with practical decluttering when handling sentimental items.
  • Understand the emotional investment in large-scale tasks and celebrate every milestone achieved.


3 Tips We HAVE to Share:

  1. Activate deadline mode by setting a specific date to complete the project. 
  2. Employ body doubling by bringing someone along on a task that you don't want to do.
  3. Separate cleaning, tidying, and organizing as separate small projects to avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Find more tips in this week's blog post! 


Host Bios:
Jenny GK recently took on the challenge of cleaning out her own garage, and she's ready to share her tried and true tips for success. In her conversation with Caitlin Kindred, Jenny will dive into the importance of setting clear parameters, building accountability, and creating deadlines to keep you motivated throughout the process.


Resources mentioned in this episode are:


For more information on this topic, see this week's blog post. 

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00:00:00
OOH Tuesday. Wasn't ready. Didn't know what was gonna happen. Never. I always am like, okay, I think I'm ready.

00:00:09
And when she is okay, and then she'll start it, and then I'm never yay. We're so glad you're here today. We're talking about the purge, aka Jenny. Clean out her corrupt. I did.

00:00:26
Okay, so this is the first in a series. They will not be consecutive episodes, but we're doing a lot of work at our house. And so this will be the first breakdown of that. Work into it. And because this is about cleaning out the garage, we will call Caitlin the Swiffer.

00:00:46
She swept us right off her feet. Oh, well, you gracefully golden haired hottie. You look all can out in the sun. Is it summer for you now, Miss Honey? Yes, I am off.

00:01:00
I have hung up the Miss GK title, and I am fully mom. Love it. I'm going to be just as pasty because I work inside. Right, and you're going to be tan because you go outside. Yeah.

00:01:14
It's so great. Should we catch up? We should. It's been a while. Okay, so let me talk to you about my current session.

00:01:21
Let's do that. Besides being outside in the sun, I have been inside in the sun. Explain. We got our fish tank. The big fish tank.

00:01:31
The big fish tank. It is 130 gallons in the real tank, but it also in the cabinet has another tank underneath that's the filter. And that's like another 30 gallons. Okay. Can you explain this to me in terms of let me be able to actually talk in terms of, like a people.

00:01:53
I'm short, so I don't know if I'm the best. Okay, so when I say I've been inside in the sun, first off, it has three Led lights that mirror the sunlight. So, like, throughout the day, the wavelength of the light changes. So mid morning and late evening, it's like sunrise and sunset. And then in the middle of the day, it's bright white light.

00:02:18
It kind of turns blue at a point. I mean, it's really that's so fancy. I love. But those lights are above my head. The tank comes to about my chin, and then I'm not even kidding you, it is like 5ft wide.

00:02:35
Whoa. It is a bathtub. It is a bathtub. And then it's on a cabinet that is like countertop height. Okay, so this is like you go.

00:02:45
To the doctor's office. The fish tank is taller than this one. Oh, my gosh. It's nuts. It's huge.

00:02:52
So at its height, it's taller than you with the lights. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I need to see this thing. You do need to come over.

00:03:00
Really? So I'm going to tell you all about it. Okay, so first off, the cabinet, like, is where all the equipment is, right? And that extra sump tank where the filter happens. But what you see inside, there's sand and there's rocks, and it's a saltwater tank.

00:03:16
So we have some crabs, we have some snails. We have two sea urchins. Their names are Roscoe and Janice. Janice wears a hat. This is like a real thing with sea urchins.

00:03:28
I didn't know it, but I recently learned it. They love putting things on their heads.

00:03:35
But it's a circle. It's like a little ball. The whole thing is their head. For some people, it's a nuisance because they'll pick up different things in your tank and just put it on their head and then walk around. Favorite thing?

00:03:46
Yeah, it's so great. How could that ever be a nuisance? Please pick up what I want. So people have, like, 3D printed hats and drop them in the tank so that the sea urchins will pick them up. Janice right now is wearing a bubble of algae just on her head, and she, like, walks around with this bubble, as you do.

00:04:06
Sure. We also have two starfish that Kit named Banana Head and Chocolate Face, which we changed the chocolate drop because he's four, so he doesn't understand that Chocolate Face probably isn't the best name starfish. When it looks like a poop hole. Oh, my okay. But the starfish, they bury themselves in the sand, and then they come up for a little bit, and then they bury themselves again.

00:04:36
We watched one do a backflip the other day because it got stuck. So cool. That's so cool. Yeah, it's really fun. And then we have a coral named Nick because it is orange and kind of squiggly, and it reminds me of the old school Nickelodeon sign.

00:04:49
But my favorite name and again, a recurring theme on CK and GK is while we may be only about two months apart in birth, we are about five to seven years apart in pop culture references. Okay, so we have a coral. It's actually an anemy that looks like a coral at the very top of the tank. But when we first got the tank, she was at the very bottom and wasn't getting sunlight, so we had to move the rocks around and move her up to the front. We had to rescue her from the well, so I named her Baby Jessica.

00:05:28
I knew as soon as you said, I heard the R, and I was like, she's going to say rescuer from the well. Stop it. You did not name her baby Jet. I did. Oh, my gosh.

00:05:41
This is so perfect. I love it.

00:05:46
Messed up and hilarious. Yes. Banging on the mic.

00:05:54
Oh, goodness. Okay, for those of you who don't know, baby Jessica fell down the well in 1987, and it was a national news phenomenon as they tried to rescue her. And she was in the well for like, 14 hours or something. Ridiculous. It was a huge deal.

00:06:11
They did a Will and Grace like spoof of it where there was another kid who was the actor who was in American Pie. The main character of American Pie, the one who's famous for Jason Pie thing. Jason something. Is that right? Yeah.

00:06:31
Does that sound right? Jason okay, whatever. His some of people are screaming right now. He was baby Nicholas or something like that. And it was a funny thing.

00:06:42
They did it on Willie grace. I'll find it. I'll put the GIF in the I love it. Blog post for this. I need to see a picture of this.

00:06:48
You need to take a picture and we'll put it on the screen. Okay. Yeah. Because we also have these really cool corals. I sent you a little video of those.

00:06:55
They are green and they kind of wave in the water, and it's like watching grass. It's really great. But we have moved the couch from the living room into the reef room so that we can just sit on the couch and look at the tank. I love it. This sounds really soothing.

00:07:11
And I think I'm going to relocate my office to that room yes. So that I can just sit in there and be done. Because, you know, one of the things that I do when I'm working is I have a fish tank video. Oh, my gosh. I love it.

00:07:24
That's great. I did that when I was teaching, like, and the kids were testing. I would put a fish tank video on, and I do it when I'm working, too. It's really helpful. Thank you.

00:07:31
I love it. That's great. Well, what else? Anything else? Well, I told you that we moved the couch, right?

00:07:39
So we're actually in the midst of furniture shopping because you need another one for the living. So we're actually replacing the living room, and then we're buying a new one for the reframe as well, because this couch is the one that Abigail spilled an entire milkshake into, and the dogs have torn up, and it was our COVID couch. Okay, I can see why you might. Right? Like, we worked and sat and lived on that couch.

00:08:04
So even though it's only five years old, it has aged much more than five years. I know. We have a couch like that, too. It's time to replace it. It's gross.

00:08:13
Yeah. So we bought a lot of furniture in the last few days, and I was going to get LASIK, but instead I got two couches. There's always next year, right? Okay, so mine we've talked about this already. I'm still really obsessed with scandalvall right now.

00:08:35
If you're not a vanderpump person, you just need to probably skip ahead, like, 30 seconds. But I cannot with this. I'm going to tell you this post that I saw the other day that explained this in a way that people who are not vanderpump people could make sense of. Okay? Okay, here we go.

00:08:53
Imagine this is the cast of Friends. All right? I did not make this up. This is someone else's thing, and I'm going to put it up on the blog post this episode. Imagine now that Chandler was sleeping with Rachel while he was married to Monica for seven months.

00:09:13
Wow. And Jenny knew about it for most of that time and never told Monica but then acted like nothing was wrong to her face. That is what this situation is. It is nuts though, okay? Just completely bonkers crazy.

00:09:37
And that is why I am obsessed. And they've been doing the Vanderpump reunion and they got right down to the nitty gritty and it has been so good. And if you don't subscribe to Peacock and you are a Vanderpump watcher, you need to start subscribing because they have the unedited version. Oh my God. And they are milking it like you can't fast forward through commercials or anything.

00:10:00
They are milking those episodes and they're so good. They're so good. And this is the other thing I'm obsessed with when it comes to Scandalval. The person who the scandal scandal is named after is Tom Sandoval. Yes.

00:10:16
Fun fact tom Sandoval auditioned for The Hills. Nah. Yeah, hilarious. There's like a picture or there's a whole video of him sitting in a chair in his beach outfit and Lauren Elsie is looking at him like, no, it's really funny, but he's the Chandler in the situation. Dirty Chandler.

00:10:43
Which sounds like something inappropriate, but it's not. And he's been wearing white nail polish this entire season. I love white nail polish. I think it looks like just especially for summer, I just think it looks really fun and cute. He's ruined it for so many people.

00:10:59
Well, don't worry, because nails inc. The brand of nail polish, created a white nail polish that is literally called the shade is literally called for everyone but Tom Sandofall.

00:11:14
It is so good.

00:11:19
Do you already own it? No. So I do gels most of the time and this is just a regular nail polish. However, if it comes out in a gel, then I will. But you know what?

00:11:29
Either way, the fact that this is here, this tells me that I can reclaim it. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to reclaim my white nail polish because I love it. It's so fun and cute. And I'm a no annoyed that this guy's been wearing it all. There's even a scene in one of the episodes of Vanderpump this season where he's like, holding his hands up in front of his face and he's like, I had to go get my nails done.

00:11:49
But he was blowing off his best friend for a business meeting. So like, they're supposed to be opening this restaurant. And he's just like, oh, I wasn't going to show with busted nails. It's like, put your white fingernails down. You don't get to have them.

00:12:02
So yeah, I'm going to reclaim the white nail polish. But also, these two memes are so funny. They totally encapsulate all the things anyone who's obsessed with Scandalvall is into right now. And I will put them on the blog post for this episode because it's great. That is amazing.

00:12:17
Hilarious. Let us transition to the gem of the week as if for everyone except Tom Sandoval is not a gem itself. It is. It's such a good one. Okay, so Abigail, who is eleven, was talking to my husband about how a friend taught her a dance that goes with a specific song.

00:12:40
And he looked at her and said, wow, you're just really growing up.

00:12:47
That's a true middle school thing to learn, a dance that goes with a song. Then he followed it up with, if I see you practicing that dance at the grocery store with no music, I swear I'll disown you.

00:13:04
He needs to show her that Instagram account called Influencers in the Wild because it is hilarious. And I'm just picturing her showing up as a kid, practicing in front of the macaroni and cheese. Right?

00:13:20
He was like, you cannot do that. And even Abby was like, no, that's weird. That's weird. No, you cannot fake practice those dances. I see it all the time.

00:13:28
It's weird. Do you remember being like 14 and pretending to dance to Bye Bye Bye or whatever?

00:13:38
And everyone we all looked clearly 13 or 14 years old, and now these girls just look so much older. I don't want to see her doing that. She's not allowed. You can just ban her from all the cute you're growing up TikTok dances. No thanks.

00:13:53
There was a guy in my high school band who knew all the moves to all those boy button dances. And I went to a really big high school, so the band had like 350 people in it. So we had our own socials. Right? There was no reason for us to I went to the prom, don't get me wrong, but there was no reason for us to go to all the school dances when we could just do the band dance and there's like already almost 400 people there.

00:14:20
And it was all your friends, and it was all our friends intermingle with people that you don't want to right? And every time we had a social, joseph would get up and do one of these dances. It was insane. It was insane. So my mouth just dropped because we had one of those guys, too, and his name was Jenny.

00:14:39
Nah. Yeah. Whoa. That's so weird. Oh, my gosh.

00:14:45
Yeah, well, his name still is Jenny. Okay, so mine's just not mine's a little dorkier, but it's precious. Okay, so my child is I don't know what it is about like, right before their birthday, where they all of a sudden seem like they are their age, right? You don't really feel your age until it becomes becomes a thing. Right.

00:15:09
Or it's like, okay, so I'm this old, but I finally feel the age that I just turned last year, so you know what I mean? It's weird. Anyway, he's turning seven he finally seems like he's turning seven, which is really cute, and he's starting to make word jokes, like puns. Oh, nice. So the other day, he's eating some scrambled eggs and he finishes them up and he looks at me and he goes, well, that was unspected.

00:15:43
And give me a little side eye. It was so cute and so funny. And I just was like, what did you say? And he was like, you heard me. Didn't want to repeat it, but he knew it was really funny.

00:15:58
And it's just like a cute it's a cute age. But it made me laugh because it's like did it crack you up? It cracked me up. Yeah. Just super cute.

00:16:10
Okay, so back to the thing about age, feeling your age. Yeah. Okay. I went to the optometrist this week, which was what brought up the possibility. Of you need readers.

00:16:20
I do need readers. I do. So I almost texted you because I was dying in the optometrist office. I was like, no, I'm going to tell her face to face. And this is the same Optometrist I've been going to since 2006.

00:16:35
It is the only doctor I have had a very long relationship with. Right? Yeah. And I said, yeah, remember about ten years ago I told you that I'm having trouble with my night vision? And your response was, yeah, welcome to your thirty s I cannot turn back.

00:16:49
No. He was like, I can't turn back the clock, thank you. He says to me, Are you having trouble with your eyes? And I said, yeah, I'm taking my glasses off to read. And recently, even worse than that, I'm taking them off to have a conversation across the table.

00:17:04
Like, I can't even focus on someone's face in the mid range. And he looks at my chart, and then he looks at me, he says, you're 39, you need Bifocals. We'll get you some readers.

00:17:20
Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness, y'all. Welcome to your late 30. Yeah. I am dying.

00:17:29
It's so funny. I was like, cool. This couldn't have waited like, six months before I turned 40? And he's like, Nah, man. Just happens, right?

00:17:38
He didn't even ask me any questions. He just heard what I said and said, oh, let me look at your age real fast. He didn't even put a piece of paper in front of you and tell you to try and read it? No, he didn't even suggest, oh, well, let me try some tests. He just looks at the paper and he goes, oh, you're just old.

00:17:57
We're going to get you some Bifocals. Thank you for that, sir. So funny. And he's like, well, we can also. Correct it with LASIK.

00:18:06
You can get one eye close and one eye far. Your eyes will adjust. He said, I've had it and I did it ten years ago, or whatever. And he's like, It's totally fine, and you just have one eye. That's better for reading.

00:18:17
And one eye that's better for distance vision. I'm totally picturing you with, like, an eye patch. I know that's how it works. But this is slide it over for my rover, right? Exactly.

00:18:27
Can you imagine? I'm teaching and I'm like, reading something up close, and then I want to look at the class. I have to slide my eye patch over. First of all, this is amazing for two reasons, right? One, who has the answer?

00:18:40
Let me see who's raising their topic. Pirate Day will be so perfect for you because you already participate wholeheartedly. And two, think about the faces of those 7th graders when they look at you and they're just like, did she just move her eye patch? They're going to be so freaked out because when you have it, most people, when they're wearing an eye patch, one, they're not pirates, and two, they're doing it because there's something going on with that eye. So if you just flip it over from side to side, but you do it subtly so they don't notice, and they'll be like, wait, I thought it was on the other is it men.

00:19:15
In tights where the guy's mole keeps moving around on his face?

00:19:23
Yeah, they'll just be like, wait, what? Somebody will see you do it, right? Somebody will see you do it. And they'll be like, oh, don't worry. This is my reading eye.

00:19:33
It's fine. This is my whiteboard eye. This is my reading eye. Don't worry, it's fine.

00:19:42
Well, looks like he expected that he would have to tell you that someday soon. It's such a bad joke. We're going to come back after this break. Or was it a bad yoke? Oh, my God.

00:19:55
All right, guys, I don't want to mix things up. It caused too much of a scramble, but we're going to come back in.

00:20:04
Hey. Oh, sorry for the bad jokes. No, I'm here for it. I'm making it. I mean, I got more than a dozen of them.

00:20:14
These are grade A for sure. Oh, wow. Nice. Okay, so like I said at the beginning, I am imagining this turning into a series, so hopefully it does. If not, it's just like any other ADHD project I had where I started an intended finish.

00:20:31
Yes. Okay. We cleaned out the garage and I came up with five guidelines that I think can help with any big project, and I'm going to talk about those five guidelines and then how they applied to cleaning out the garage. I love it. Okay, so let me tell you this.

00:20:52
First, we have been in our house for five years, okay? And our garage was so full of things that it was hard to park a bike in it. So are you telling me that there's five years worth of stuff in this garage and you've never used it in that whole time you've been the only. Time it's ever been cleaned out was when we had a roommate move her entire one bedroom apartment into our garage. Oh, that's right.

00:21:20
So even then, you guys didn't get to park in it? No. And then when she moved out of the apartment, we then moved a bunch of stuff into the garage. Right. And it's just been piling up and piling up, piling up in so much junk.

00:21:36
Now, the impetus for this was the tank, because you have to do a 10% water change every week, which for us is 15 gallons. Ish and you have to make salt water. So we need to be able to get to the water filter in our garage to have fresh filtered water to make the salt water for the water change. I see. Okay.

00:22:00
So that's why we needed to clean out the garage. Besides, of course, also we had a two car garage worth of trash. Okay. So the first thing for me in doing a big project is defining the parameters. And I'm going to quote Brene Brown and say, clear is kind.

00:22:17
Unmet expectations are the worst. Right. It's like the cancer of a relationship is unmet expectations. Very true. So I wanted to be really ruthless in this.

00:22:29
I wanted to throw away as much stuff as we could and really, really purge. There were boxes in the garage that had never been opened since we moved in. We have that, too. And I was very concerned that the other party in my marriage was not going to be as ruthless as I wanted him to be understood. So days beforehand, I told him that and said, I am concerned that you're not going to throw away enough stuff.

00:23:00
I am worried that you're going to want to keep things that I don't think we need to keep. Okay. I didn't tell him what I thought he should throw away. I just came to him and said, this is what I'm concerned about. If nothing else, prove me wrong.

00:23:16
We all know the way to really get engaged is to turn it into a competition. Right. The only way to really keep anyone's. Attention hey, I quit soda ten years ago on a dare. Yeah.

00:23:28
John said to me, you drink so much Diet Coke, I know you couldn't quit. And I was like, yes, I can. I pour the rest of it down the drain. I haven't touched this stuff in ten years. Good for you.

00:23:36
I want to show them that I can do it.

00:23:42
All right. So the next thing is, I need to build in some accountability, right? Like, I'm doing something at work, there's a deadline. Someone else is expecting me to turn something in. In fact, when our school does these really great narratives where we write all about the student and we showcase their work, and it was assigned at the beginning of spring break, but it was not due until May 1.

00:24:06
So when did I do it? April 30. April 30, right. Like any good ADHD, you thrive on a deadline, and you knocked out a ton of them all at once. Yeah.

00:24:17
So I built in some accountability. I scheduled and prepaid for a roll off dumpster to be delivered to our driveway. That's smart. I knew the dumpster was coming. I had to do this project.

00:24:30
I'm not going to spend the money to have the dumpster come if I'm not going to do it. So I had some accountability. Now, on the same thing, I also activated deadline mode. So I've got the accountability of the dumpster is coming. You have to do this project.

00:24:44
But the dumpster is here for 14 days. Right. You don't have I don't want to. Wait until day 13 to do it. Right.

00:24:52
So in order to activate deadline mode, we picked the day before John left for a business trip to do the garage. Yeah, we have to do it today. I'm leaving tomorrow. We have to do it today. I'm leaving tomorrow.

00:25:05
So that was really, really great. I also have linked an article about this, and I'm sure you know about it, but we employed body doubling, and this is a fairly new term, and it's connected to this ADHD revolution that the Internet is going through. It's the idea of bringing someone along with you on a task that you don't want to do. Yes. And either that person is doing the task with you and making it social and it's fun and you guys are doing it together, or the person is just in the room being with you while you do it.

00:25:43
This is something that our friend and friend of the show, Ariela, and if you haven't gone and check out her blog post that she's written for us, please do so. Has talked about a lot. She has a person in her community that she will go be their person. So she just sits there while they clean out a drawer or whatever it is or do laundry, and then the same person will do that for her, where it's just a person who's having a conversation with her. Their job is just to sit there, and one, help her be accountable, but two, like, kind of pass the time while you do some mindless task that you don't want to do.

00:26:17
Right? Yeah. But you know that that's what they're there for. I love that idea. Yeah.

00:26:21
So this was the task of the day. John, Kit and I were all out there until the task was done. Kit two is impressive. Yes. Kit two, he liked the dumpster.

00:26:32
Well, yeah, right? Yeah. And you got to climb inside it.

00:26:39
Hey, if John can put my daughter. In the sewer, the other one in a dumpster. We're real classy here in Cedar Park. I don't know how you guys do it in Austin.

00:26:53
The first one was defining the parameters. The second one is building some accountability. The third one for me is activating deadline mode. I body doubled and then the fifth idea I have around doing a big project is our family rule, which, you know, our number one family rule is don't waste meat. Right.

00:27:12
Our number two family rule is we finish what we start. Do you have something in there about, like, if it hurts, don't do it? No, that's a good rule, though. Yeah. Okay.

00:27:21
Just throwing that out there for other families who need another rule. Okay, so finish what you start. So we finish what we start. We ended the day by packing up donations in the car so that it wasn't like, oh, one day we'll donate this. Like, no, it's in the car, it's ready to go.

00:27:38
We don't have to take it today, but the next time we go out, we're going to want to take it because there's no room in the car for anything else. Well, and you didn't put it back in the garage, which defeats the whole purpose of what you're doing. If you had just put it down on the floor of the garage and been like, okay, those are here. They're ready for me, you could have still just walked right past them and gone to the car. Exactly.

00:28:00
We stacked all the stuff that needed to go up in the attic. Okay. And we brainstormed ideas for storage. So sometimes finishing is just like accepting a lack of closure and creating a game plan to continue, but actually setting yourself up to continue. Yeah.

00:28:19
So for us, the task was filling the dumpster and throwing away everything that we could. But the overall goal is to have a clean garage. So like you said, we can't leave the donations in the garage. We can't leave the stuff for the attic in the garage. It's got to go next to the attic stairs.

00:28:35
It doesn't have to go in the attic right now, but it does need to go up there, and the donations need to go. Okay, so what did we keep? What did we not? We threw away anything that was damaged or unused since we moved in five years ago. Anything that was incomplete.

00:28:53
Board games, craft kits, you name it. If it didn't have all the pieces, it's gone. Baby clothes that were stained. Yeah, I saved a lot of clothes. Yeah, me too.

00:29:08
But as you go through and you see over the years, spit up stains, yellow on clothing. Yeah. It's gross. Yeah. And you don't see them when you put it away.

00:29:17
Right. I would not have saved something that was gross and nasty, but when I pulled it out of the boxes over the years, these clothes have kind of deteriorated. So we threw all of those things away. Also, in the realm of baby, we threw away any outdated baby items. So I hated to throw away a whole crib.

00:29:40
And you only get, like, I think it's five years is for a car seat. Right. So you don't get a lot of. Time. Like, we saved all of Sam's stuff, but he's almost seven, so I got to take it to a trade in someday, right, where they recycle them.

00:29:58
Yeah, because I'm teaching at a new school and I've kind of gone through all my materials. I had a ton of old teaching stuff to get rid of. And I had a lot of old cleaning and yard items, like nasty old mop no, get rid of a broken rake. Like, why am I keeping these things? Yeah, that's why we throw all that.

00:30:20
Kind of stuff away. As far as donating only clean and undamaged clothing and toys, we had a couple of working small appliances that we donated and then a bunch of books, of course. And then things that we did keep were all of these memory items, right? Like old yearbooks, a scrap of paper from this DA DA, like pictures, blah, blah. But we took all of those items out of cardboard boxes and put them into bins.

00:30:48
So Allah, Marie, Kondo, we held every single item, decided, does this bring me joy? If it does, I'll put it in the bin. Otherwise it stays in the cardboard box. It's getting thrown away. But the other thing that we kept that most people would not is about 150 VHS or DVDs.

00:31:07
Okay. So you know that I did this one summer, right? Like my summer project was that I went through all of our DVDs. I went through and I bought those giant CD binders that you had when you were the huge ones, and I put all of our DVDs in those and I donated all the cases. Because you can take the cases and either recycle them or give them to the library, and the library will take them.

00:31:34
Yeah, you can just call a library and ask them if they need them. And then I recycled the rest because you can do that. But that really helped. It saved a lot of space. But the VHS tapes is a different thing.

00:31:47
I don't know if they're going to. Play after being garageous are like the old you know, like the Disney cases that were plastic. Those are the ones we kept. They're all cracked because the plastic gets all hard. Yeah, I totally know what you're talking about.

00:32:02
So we already shouted out Ariela. How about another guest that we've had, jennifer, my friend who puts a fun in funeral. She gave me a box many, many years ago of all of her old Disney movies from when she was a kid. Like here. Abby might like these.

00:32:19
So for like a decade, I've had these VHS tapes. I was like, I know, and if you have Disney Plus, you don't need them. No, we have Disney Plus, we don't need the case. No, but I couldn't part with them. And the reason I bring that up and kind of close with it is I am not here to say I did a great job cleaning out my garage.

00:32:42
I was perfect and I purged everything I wanted to. I am here to tell you that I gave myself grace. And even though I started with I want to be ruthless and I need John to throw away more stuff, turns out he did really, really great. He threw away all kinds of stuff, but I was not ready to throw away some things myself. So here we go.

00:33:04
All things considered, I'm pretty impressed that you actually tackled this. And again, you also had accountability because you really wanted the fish tank. So there's a lot of pieces in this that are moving, parts that you synced up really well. I think keeping one or two weird things or one or two boxes of weird things is totally fine because at some point, you'll decide that you are ready. Right.

00:33:28
And that's an okay thing, too. Or I'll have grandchildren and pass them on to them. Right. What is this? So the other thing I want to point out with this that you did is you talked about your continuation game plan, which I'm assuming has organization as part of it, right?

00:33:46
Yes. This was just purging. Exactly. This was not organizing. And there's a really great ADHD person.

00:33:56
Her name is Casey Davis. She has a podcast. It's really good. But the one episode that really hit me was she talked about how cleaning, tidying, and organizing are not the same thing. And I think I've brought this up on the show before.

00:34:11
Right. I was going to say it. I've heard this super helpful to remember that you don't have to do them all at once. And where a lot of people, especially myself, get overwhelmed and frustrated is that they think that they have to do them all at once, but cleaning is not separate them out and make them small projects so that you don't get overwhelmed. Because I love that you handled this.

00:34:32
And also, I'm impressed that you had a non closure. Accepting non closure, accepting non completion is like a really hard thing for me, where I'm like, I need to go back to the Container Store and buy more stuff right now. And you just have to let it go and know that that's part of your plan moving forward. It's hard to say, okay, I'm finished, because I'm not finished. Yeah, right.

00:34:56
Like, I'm at a place right now where I can stop. Yes, I'm at a stopping point, and. I have thrown away all the trash. There's still work to be done, but right now there's nothing to be thrown out. Yeah.

00:35:08
That's awesome. Until next week when it fills up again. Put the car in there. If you put the car in, then there's no that room. Just put the car in the garage, at least one of them, and park it weird so that you can put no other stuff fits.

00:35:25
We did put it in the day that we cleaned it. We did put the car in like, look, we kicked it in a car. Yay. But trying to back it out around the dumpster was.

00:35:38
Well, I'm impressed. Good job. I love it. You said, define the parameters. Build in accountability, activate deadline mode, get a body double and finish what you start.

00:35:49
I love it. Great framework. We're going to use it again for sure. Yeah, I think so. All right.

00:35:56
All right. Well, when you are deciding if it should be tossed, kept or donated, make your choices. That was good. And keep the VHS tapes, like the Beanie Babies or whatever. Keep them.

00:36:10
They might be worth something. These are Beanie babies. That's exactly what these are. I still have mine and I'm keeping them. And I'm going to sell them at some point.

00:36:20
That's a goodbye. Bye.

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