The Clear Out

I have to confess that I’m known for my impulsive decisions, but this time I think I’ve excelled myself.

 

“Stop!” I yell as we drive past a DIY shop. “We can get fence coat from there. Let’s get some and I’ll weatherproof the shed this afternoon... I haven’t done it for two years and it’s looking a bit sorry for itself.”

 

They haven’t got the colour we want, so we get the next best – because really it makes sense to do it today while the sun is shining and I have time, and that’s more important than the colour.

 

Back at home, I regard the shed. All 5 x 12 feet of it. Hmmm…. “I reckon we could clear some of this out and have a smaller shed. Wouldn’t that be great? The garden would look so much nicer.”

 

Hubby agrees and so we begin. The first things to be hauled out are the bikes – unused and unloved for years. A quick phone call and we are off on a one -hour round trip in the car, with bikes in the boot, to deliver them to a charity that will check them over and then ship them to Africa, where they will be used by people to get to work, or school, or medical appointments.

 

Next out of the shed are the deckchairs. Why do we even keep them in the shed? They’d be much more useful in the house to make it easier to grab them when we get those precious few hours of sunshine, instead of spending so long looking for the shed key that the sun has gone by the time we’ve found it.

 

“But there’s not room in the house..” points out my lovely husband.

 

Sure there is! We just need to clear out the cupboard under the stairs and they’ll fit in there.

 

And that’s how we come to find ourselves, half an hour later, knee-deep in all of the stuff I’ve pulled out of the cupboard – who knew such a small space could hold so much junk so many treasured possessions!

 

We make three piles: charity shop, rubbish tip, keep. The pile of things to donate is quickest to deal with – we pack the car and drive to our nearest charity shop. That clears quite a lot of space on the floor.

 

Anything for the rubbish tip gets piled outside. Now we can see what’s left, and there is still no way, so my husband says, of fitting the deck chairs in there.

 

Sure there is! We just need to clear out the kitchen cupboards and then some of the keep stuff can go in there.

 

And so we empty the kitchen cupboards…. The dustbin fills up and we create another pile for the charity shop.

 

I decide that while the cupboards are empty, it makes sense to wash them down before we put things back. We reorganise everything and now there is room for the things from the cupboard in the hallway, and we can fit the deckchairs under the stairs.

 

It’s hard to move outside the back door now, so we load the car up and we drive to the tip.

 

And then we confront the shed – again. The bikes and deckchairs have gone, but what else is there?

 

We’re not really fond of pottering in the garden, so we pull out flower pots, gardening gloves and balls of string. We don’t need those. Nor do we need trowels, forks or spades. They can go. We have someone come once a fortnight to mow the lawn and tidy up, so the lawn mower and leaf blower can go…

 

When the shed is empty, there are three piles on the lawn: charity shop, rubbish tip, keep.

 

We make another trip to the charity shop. We make another trip to the tip. We put the stuff to keep back in the shed.

 

We look at each other. We’ve been working all day. We’ve forgotten to eat. It’s too late to do anything else today, but we agree that we can definitely get away with a smaller shed.

 

Before heading inside, we lock up the shed, which now contains only one item: a tine of fence coat.