Some Pretty Fierce Spring Cleaning Went Down This Year

Spring is in the air! And also my annual desire to rid the house of all the random things we have accumulated over the past year.

See, this is the problem with home ownership. When I was a renter, and moved to a new apartment every year, I had an annual reason to perform a good ol' purge of my belongings because I certainly wasn't about to go to the trouble of transporting sacks of rubbish from old casa to new casa.

One of our old buildings - Andre and I rented the flat on the top floor, on the right.

But now we've been happily settled in Casa Nest for over three years now, and it can feel quite hard to summon up the energy to have a clear-out without the motivation of a landlord chasing you out with a stick. So, whenever the first daffodils start coming out, I spend a few weekends going through boxes, drawers and cupboards and chucking away a whole bunch of stuff. Some years I am more ruthless than other years - this year I was FIERCE.

Here are just a few things that I had been carefully hoarding:

• A half-used bottle of fake vampire blood
• A pile of winter coats that I haven't worn in years, and will never wear again
• A pair of bright pink swimming goggles (I don't, and have never, worn goggles)
• An entire box filled with scraps of material - you know, the ones that aren't big enough to use for anything remotely useful but you keep them just in case
• A tin full of out-of-date coins
• At least nine nearly-full tubes of Boots Soltan suntan lotion
• A couple of pieces of laminate wood off-cuts
• Stacks and stacks of magazines.

Nice. And out the back door to the bin they went.

Enrique had a glorious time helping me spring-clean - all these boxes! Paper and card everywhere! He kept abstracting the items that particularly pleased him and stealthily making away with them:

Penny, on the other hand, mostly spent the time sleeping on top of a pile of old clothes and working hard on her full figure:

There are some things that I never throw away - like old postcards, birthday cards, cinema and concert tickets, letters, restaurant receipts, and so on. While I don't keep every receipt from every meal I've ever eaten, of course, I do keep the ones from significant events (birthdays, holidays). And what do I do with all this paper history? Why, I slip all the bits and pieces into the pages of the hundreds of books sitting happily on our Ikea Expedit. It works very well - choose a book at random, slip a postcard between the pages, place back on shelf. Choose another random book, slip theatre ticket between the pages, place back on shelf. I'm one of these people who re-reads books over and over again and it's always lovely to come across a memory of the past tucked unexpectedly between the pages.

Here are some of the storage boxes that are now surplus to requirements:

Now I just need to tackle the Cupboard of Hideousness. Shudder.

Do you spring clean your cupboards? What do you throw away? What do you never throw away?