I’ve begun to pack things away for the “100 Thing Challenge”, and it’s interesting to see how it’s coming. Not the packing away part, that’s easy enough. The challenge is feeling like I have enough to cover the “what-if” questions that pop up while being realistic about the answers.

For example, I continually worry that I won’t have enough clothes. What if some event comes up when I need a particular outfit? Realistically, what I’ve set aside is more than I actually wear on a week-to-week basis. On a long-term basis, if I really needed something else, I would go out and either borrow or buy it. I can do the same thing this month, unless I already happen to have it, then I can just pull it out and be good to go (which is just another form of borrowing).

I get to cheat a little

It’s easier to plan what clothing to keep since I’m only covering a month’s time. If I were planning for a whole year, I would have to be prepared for temperatures ranging from 0°F to about 100°F. That makes for additional clothing that I would need (especially for the colder temperatures).

Of course, this advantage didn’t occur to me until I was separating my clothes. I started to stack my shorts on the upper shelf in my closet, right next to my sweaters, when I realized how good I have it. Of course, I then went back and added two sweaters and a hoodie to my list, since I’m trying to be realistic about this. (Good thing that I have those extra spaces left!)

Current progress

1. All of my socks, underwear, doo rags, and bandannas now fit into a single drawer in the dresser.
2. I’ve moved the clothes that I’m “keeping” onto one shelf, and the non-100 onto a separate shelf.
3. My motorcycle gear was already separated, so I didn’t have to do anything different about that.
4. The shoes that I won’t be wearing are stashed in the back of the closet, out of sight.
5. I cleared my desk of non-100 items.
6. My dresser and bedside table are now empty of non-100 items.
7. Purged my backpack of non-100 thing items.

I think that I’m mostly done and ready to go. The hardest part is separating school stuff from non-school stuff. Do I need to keep out that canvas, or am I just doing so because I might “want to maybe use it sometime?” Hard as it might be, when I run into a question like that, it’s time to pack it away.

I discovered that other than clothes, most of the pruning consisted of decorations and doubles. I stashed away a lot of things that I never use (jewelry box with jewelry that is never worn), some mementos, and a lot of spare items (ie: the 15 pencils and pens that I had in my backpack)

Fortunately this wasn’t hard work. It consisted more of making the time to move things things around than it was a challenge to separate them. If I were actually getting rid of things, that might have been a whole different story!