For months I have been itching to tackle the staggeringly large project of purging my apartment, and Christmas finally put me over the edge. There’s something about this time of year when there is this sudden influx of stuff into my home that makes me want to reorganize and purge.

I got to it last weekend starting with the metal trunk we use as a coffee table in the living room that is full of random art supplies. There were ridiculous things in there, like a wall calendar from the year 2000 which I had apparently brought with me from Ontario when I moved here in 2004. Nutso! When I eventually made my way into the kitchen drawers I found all sorts of useless things including an object one uses to core a pineapple (I have a multi-purpose tool called Boris for that), and three extra vegetable peelers I didn’t even know were in there.

The only area I wasn’t able to get into on the weekend was my studio. By the time I’d gone through almost everywhere else in the apartment it was late afternoon on Sunday, and I knew the studio needed an entire day dedicated to it in order to properly sort it out. It needs it badly too, because my studio has become far too cluttered to keep tidy, and it effects how I think and work in there.

Other people I know have done the same thing recently, so it must be something about this time or year. A need to have less stuff in a time of excess, and a desire to make room for new things (not materials things) in the coming year.