being not easy going

I am becoming stringently anti-clutter. I think this happens to people when they move. Also, my practical side is expanding. I am willy-nilly throwing out/giving away things, even lovely things sometimes, if they don't serve a current purpose and aren't achingly sentimental. Maybe even if they are. I am not good with the past, because I don't live in it, and I forget it. I keep digital copies and throw out the originals.

We're moving into a basement that is full (really) of several decades worth of 90% (in my eyes) junk. Dusty, claustrophobic, almost hoarder-level junk. It is lighting a fire under my ass. Can you BELIEVE I used to self-identify as 'easy going?!' I am not. I am discovering pet peeves by the bucket full these days. Like TRINKETS. DAMNIT, I AM ANTI-TRINKETS. I married into a family full of them, but luckily to a man who leans away from the pull of acquisition in his genes. I am almost disgusted, I'm afraid to admit, by multiple sets of novelty china, and specialty bowls and pie plates and half melted candles. I think I'm becoming my mom? I'm fighting, not to eliminate specialness and beauty, but to make sure that the specialness and beauty is utilitarian, and doesn't sit unused and dusty in a basement for ten years.

I have a vision of how to make the basement hospitable, and it involves a lot of gently urging S's parents to allow us to get rid of as much as we possibly can, and consolidating the rest into a neat pile on one end that I never have to look at. And then mopping and dusting and shampooing the current carpet and laying new rugs and scrubbing the baseboard and BLEACHING THE FUCK OUT OF THE BATHROOM and hanging curtains to cover the cracked cinder blocks and maximizing the small windows by actually washing them, and rigging up some room dividers and and and getting rid of as much of our stuff as we can stand and boxing up everything we won't mind not seeing for a few years and organizing--militantly--what remains in big tupperware bins and particle board cabinets in our little corner and then keeping the interior of our bedroomlivingroomkitchen as clean and usable as I most possibly can. My face is red.