Do you want this box? Part One

I am moving house soon, and I only realised last week that I am going to need a lot of cardboard boxes. And I only realised that when a colleague said to me "You're moving house soon, you'll need a lot of boxes. Do you want this box?".

Yesterday I set myself the challenge of finding one cardboard box every day until I move and I found three (all in commercial bins on my walk home). Depending on how easy it is to find these boxes, I will either stick exactly to the "one-a-day" rule, or allow an average of one a day (so that the three I picked up yesterday will see me through til the weekend if there's slim pickings today and tomorrow).

I find it easier to do this kind of thing if I make it into a challenge.

I've been at my present house for around six and a half years now, and I have amassed a lot of stuff.  If I have less stuff, I will need less boxes. I'm not going to take this to its logical extreme, and get rid of everything that won't fit in my three boxes, but I am trying to be quite ruthless and downscale my possessions. But how do you even start?

(I own two microwaves and two copies of Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body" and two cast iron casserole dishes. In all these cases I only regularly use one of each, so maybe my duplicates would be a good place to start...)

One friend of mine, when moving from Sheffield to Leeds, set herself the target of reducing her books, film collection and clothes by a third. This appeals to me in its boldness, but for it to really work accurately, I would have to either tackle each category in one go, or I would have to keep count of the number of items kept and discarded to make sure I really did a third/two thirds split. Maybe this system worked for her because she had a less precise, literal interpretation of "a third" than I do.

As I like to gradually pair down my possessions I need a different approach. Another person I knew of apparently gave away one item a day. Unfortunately I acquired this information secondhand, and didn't know him well enough to ask at what point he stopped. What if I use this method and it gets completely out of hand?!

When it comes to sentimental items, I have started taking advantage of any level-headed and unsentimental moments when they occur. I knew that keeping hold of the first flowers my ex ever gave me (three years on they were completely shrivelled and faded as they were never intended to be 'dried flowers') was a bad idea, and to transport them to my new house would be some kind of oversentimental madness. I try and pack that kind of past-relationship-ephemera away into boxes even when I'm not about to move (shoebox after shoebox of letters and trinkets that I don't want to part with, but if I was confronted with them on a daily basis I would find it hard to get out of bed, to misquote the Tindersticks), and the fact that these flowers had sat in a wine bottle on my shelf for so long was a regular reminder of the relationship that I didn't need. And it's not like no one has brought me flowers since then. But I had tried and failed to compost them in the past, and each time I got close I remembered the circumstances they had been presented to me, when after several heartwrenching months of are we/aren't we she decided if she decided she *was* sufficiently over her ex to give the relationship the chance it deserved, and met me at the bus station after work with a bunch of flowers to tell me.
But then this weekend, I thought about the relationship, and realised that even if I throw these flowers away, the relationship still happened. I don't need to keep them to prove that once upon a time, she wanted to be with me. And I threw them away.

And I felt a little bit better.