what I am left with.

I have struggled with organization for as long as I can remember. my family was never big on having what i always though of as a "nice" house. The only place that was ever really home was our house in p.r, but all the rest of our apartments in NYC as I grew up were just placeholders. No-one had the home decor gene, and if they try did it all went wrong. I remember getting furniture from the salvation army and having to move many times from apartment to apartment.

As a result, I never had a lot of "things". It is kind of sad when you think about it..nothing was ever really mine. once I married in 1991 and had some type of stability I started accumulating. My husband was raised in the same way I was, so he held on to a lot of things also...you know, just in case. Moving from an apartment to our teeny tiny townhouse was GRAND. We had three floors of space. Wow. Things started gathering. First in closets, then in boxes in the closets, then in cabinets and the scary basement.

Our house did not have a finished basement and let me tell you, it was scary. Like sixth sense Bruce Willis in the wine cellar scary. As soon as I had another box to store, i ran to put it down and came up those stars like Chuckie himself was chasing me. It was bad. Things started overflowing and we were running out of space. The girls were getting bigger and we needed to reconfigure. Something needed to give.

Minimize. What a loaded word.seriously.

It freaked me out at first. I mean all my stuff? I loved it. I loved that I had boxes of things that I KNEW I would need at some point. It was security and a grounding point for me. Sure, I could tell my husband that he had too much crap and that he didn't need it and that it should all got to the salvation army, but not MY stuff. I had books, magazines, scrap booking supplies, stamps, inks, papers, old clothes, empty boxes, full boxes, I had stuff. Serious stuff. At one point I crammed my three girls into one bedroom so I could put all my stuff into my "office". Never, not once, did I stop to think that it was not such a good thing. Oh, and I kept buying, yes i did. My drug of choice? Scrapbook stuff. Any and all of it. Did i mention that a lot of my supplies were free? That's a whole other chapter.

Hoarder. Another seriously loaded word.

My loving husband decided to finish the basement about three years ago. and that was this story really got good.