I’ve made some decent progress since writing about my desire to downsize my possessions last week.
Perhaps the most significant step I took was to do a quick run through of my bookshelves. Keeping in mind that great book-related article I linked to last week, I pulled over fifty books off my shelf in about 30 minutes. I divided up the discards into several piles:
- Young adult books I read but don’t need to hang onto went to the Grant Street Neighborhood Center, a youth-focused drop in center that I helped develop through my awesome job at City Hall.
- Borrowed books that I’ve read and haven’t returned, or that I will not be reading in the near future. I bagged these ones up according to their owner and was surprised by how many of them I had acquired. Yikes!
- Books I’m going to try to sell on half.com, mostly former college textbooks. I’m giving myself until October to sell them and then they are being donated. There are five of them in total.
- Books that Powells.com wants. I input the ISBNs of about 15 good-quality, used books and Powells accepted five of them. I opted to get $15.00 in virtual credit and plan to use the money to purchase the next book in my Book Club’s reading queue.
- To-read books that I’ve placed on a particular shelf in my living room bookcase. If I don’t read these in the next six months, they’ll go.
- Finally, the biggest pile of books: books for the Really Really Free Market on September 11.
If I still have unwanted books after the Free Market, I will look for other ways to get rid of my no-longer-needed tomes. Perhaps the Prison Book Project if my books fit the bill?
I plan on doing a more thorough review in the near future but I’m pretty impressed with what I came up with in 30 minutes. The next focus in my downsizing will be my home office, which is already torn apart because I’ve moved my desk and reading chair to the new writing studio. The studio, by the way, is very sparse and has very little stuff in it. It’s also exactly where I want to be. That says something, no?
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courtney - Good work, bb! I also think breaking it down into small manageable tasks is helpful too. I think a lot of people stop before they start because they big-picture downsizing right off the bat, instead of phasing it into manageable tasks. You rock.
Teresa - Brava! The first pass is always the hardest–like everything, it gets easier with practice. There is a great little used bookstore in East Aurora that runs half cash half credit for turning in books, with a maximum of 12 turn-ins per visit (obviously you can buy as many as you want). It’s called The Bookworm. That is where I take most of my books that I am choosing to not keep. I have also donated bags to the library (they resell them at their annual book sales). Once I even took a huge sack of books into my office (this was when I was at 1199) and sent an email to the staff to come pick out whatever they wanted. For me, the hardest part has been not aquiring such a mountain of books. I have gotten much more discriminate about what I purchase, even from the bargain tables and library book sales. Plus, I really love using the library so it just gives me more excuses to go there to buy less.
LizzieB - The Paperback Trading Post on Seneca in South Buffalo is great – the guy who owns it was a friend of my grandmother’s. Great big old house full of books. Jerry has some pretty severe physical limitations, so we used to go with Grandma to help vacuum the books every once in a while. Fun to browse and a great way to trade in your books.
whitney - Thanks for the support and suggestions everyone!
#reverb10: wonder, let go, make | oh, what? - [...] go, on the other hand, is something I’ve written a lot about. This year I’ve started consciously and aggressively letting go of my stuff. My stuff was [...]