Last weekend, we culled the herd. While I wasn’t sure what this entailed, I knew we were doing something that involved a myriad of trips to the landfill, a number of overstuffed trash cans, and a friends and family free grab fest. After hearing the term used repeatedly over the weekend by my husband, referring to our end-of-week activities, I went to the dictionary to look up the actual definition. The first entry reads, ‘Literally, to separate or remove inferior animals out of the herd.” This was almost offensive. This did not describe what we were doing. I continued. The next entry made better sense. “By extension, to separate or remove people from a larger group.” While we were not removing people, we were removing, thinning out, extracting and clearing our excess “stuff.”

This all began with the sale of a vacation home. When my husband and I got married three and a half years ago, we were immediately thrown into a massive society shutdown due to a widespread viral epidemic. As the shutdown continued to stretch out over weeks and then months, we decided to purchase a home in St. George since this looked like the only option for travel in the immediate future. At the time, I believed my new husband thought that we could retire there someday. Either way, we had a fully furnished second home, including a second set of every item that we had in our initial home.

Fast forward three and a half years and my husband has since learned that I have no plans on retiring until I fall over and my heart stops. We have both learned that we don’t go down there enough to justify owning a second home. Now that we can travel, we would like to explore other frontiers as well. We decided to sell — after all, I know a good Realtor.

Our plan was to sell the home fully furnished, and while that was the case, the new buyers did not want all the other stuff. We had linens and bedding, toiletries, tools, food, small appliances, cleaning supplies, dishware, cookware, area rugs, games and puzzles, bikes, paintings and décor, and so forth. We would have to go down and collect it, and since I had appointments all weekend, “we” would actually mean “he” (husband). Little did I know that I would end up flying down Saturday afternoon to drive his car back since he had to rent a U-Haul for the myriad of unneeded items we were bringing back.

Once we were back, we laid everything out on the garage floor with the exception of the art. First, we had our own kids come and get anything they needed or wanted and then we called the friends and neighbors over for a “free” garage sale. By the end of the day, everyone had made a good haul, but we still had stuff left over. Most of it was nearly new or like new; however, we were not willing to let our junk drawer become our junk garage and so we came up with a type of formula to decide what we would keep. We first cleared our heads of the initial cost of the item. These are sunk costs. After all, it wouldn’t matter if we paid $3,000 for a IBM PC DOS back in 1995, it is useless and obsolete today. We had to ask ourselves if we would ever really use 47 hand towels or 19 flashlights.

This initiated a purge fest for my husband. Since I have little to no attachment to much of anything (pictures and journals excluded), he was free to “cull” to his heart’s content. He spent the entire day Monday expulsing. How often do I use this? What is the condition? How many do I need? This was his formula. He returned items that had remained unopened, took another trip to the dump and gifted whatever was left. “Someday I might use this” is profanity in our house.

Today we stand relatively clutter free — and that, my friends, is priceless — and the intrinsic value of our home has increased, and some underlying value has been added from a room or garage creating an echo never before detected.

Jen Fischer is an associate broker and Realtor. She can be reached at 801-645-2134 or jen@jen-fischer.com.

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