The Lego has left the house – about time, really, since no one has even looked at it for more than a decade.
We are, however, keeping my husband's Wolf Cubs uniform (circa 1967) and we are looking for someone interested in an entire collection of Hockey News from 1970 to 1974. My husband simply can't bear to pitch them and wants to find an appreciative owner, although I compromised and turfed the skinny jeans I bought in Paris in 1982.
We are baby boomers whose two children have left the nest. We are moving and, like so many other couples of our generation, we are downsizing. Three weeks after our youngest left for his first year of university last fall, we put our house up for sale. And so we are now in the process of stuffing a four-bedroom house into a two-bedroom townhouse.
It has not been easy, and that's why we have Robin Bailey. (More about her later.)
She charges $60 an hour and is much like a personal trainer. Instead of encouraging or cajoling you into doing another rep or lifting a heavier weight, she (ruthlessly) challenges you into giving stuff up – the collection of our son's orthodontic moulds, our daughter's Grade 8 graduation dress...
We are moving from a 2,400-square-foot traditional family home to a brand-new modern three-storey townhouse, just down the street from where we live now. It has basically no basement or nooks and crannies for storage. It has no grass or yard. (Instead, it has a very chic rooftop terrace.) The open concept means there are not a lot of walls to lean furniture against.
The two bedrooms mean there is not a lot of room for adult children.
And I have tons of stuff – too much stuff – all crammed away in boxes and closets in our old house.
There are so many books, including my first-year university textbooks. There are piles of pictures. There is my memorabilia, including my collection of political buttons from the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention that saw Joe Clark (who?) win.
I have too many clothes and shoes (really, really great shoes) and I have my tax returns, my husband's and some of my late father's.
I have my children's report cards, notebooks, essays, journals and the Christmas, Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations they made from toilet paper rolls, pipe cleaners, construction paper and papier-mâché in elementary school.
We love our children but they are not gifted in the fine arts.
We have the little blue urns containing the ashes of our two little dogs; they both died in 2004.
We have my husband's first pair of eyeglasses from when he was three years old (they are pink). I have my old Barbies and my Ken doll, who is losing a bit more of his fuzzy blond hair every year.
There is my husband's collection of 45s, including the original Canadian pressing of Wild Weekend by the Rockin' Rebels on Reo Records.
We have a collection of hockey sticks in all sorts of sizes; we have skates, shoulder pads, big hockey pants, little hockey pants and too many pairs of hockey socks and warm-up jerseys. You get the idea.
I just didn't know where to start or what to do; inertia set in.
This is where Robin comes in. A professional organizer, she owns Emerging Order, a business she started in 2006 to help “busy, overwhelmed professionals.”
Robin, who is a boomer too, comes from a family of “procrastinators and pilers.”
She charges $60 an hour and is much like a personal trainer. Instead of encouraging or cajoling you into doing another rep or lifting a heavier weight, she (ruthlessly) challenges you into giving stuff up – the collection of our son's orthodontic moulds, our daughter's Grade 8 graduation dress, foot massager, ugly wedding present vases, broken barometer and drill set.
