The building work began this week and the many weeks of hard work clearing the garage and the existing extension ready for demolition payed off as we put the last box of random items that didn’t fit anywhere else into the car minutes before the demolition of part of the house began.

I’m not sure what our ratio for reduction was, we had some storage space, we sold a lot, assimilated various bits into the rest of the house and into the shed, but there was a lot that we had to lose.

It was very much a loaded process for us as each item seemed to hold another branching tree of memories. One example being a cardboard box which we had been keeping some paper work in, once cleared I picked it up ready to dismatle it for recycling, only to read the label and find it was the box that delivered the toys for my eldest’s first birthday, many years ago.

Notes from lost loved ones, postcards from the other sides, keep sakes from when we had time to keep stuff.

Some of the most difficult things to go through were artwork of various kinds. Especially the children’s, we have three so there were large quantities which we had to reduce or else we would not have had any room to live.

Then there was our own artwork, a constant stream of surprises, as we discovered forgotten box after forgotten portfolio. We tried a loss rate of 2:1 (thus keeping about a third of what we had).

So I was quite pleased with myself when I managed to reduce a very large plastic container of art, comics, notebooks, animation drawings into this suitcase.

It’s nice to lose some of the lazy stuff I could see in there, you could easily tell if a hand was drawn from looking properly or just drawing an approximation of a hand preprogrammed in.

I’m reasonably pleased with what is left.

I suppose I ought to digitize some of this stuff and put it on the site here. If it stands up.

Speaking of standing up, the garage this picture was takenin  just a few days ago isn’t anymore.

Exciting times.