We're having some work done on the house, some non-glamourous, but structurally necessarily work that will put our minds at ease, but not be as immediately noticeable as re-doing the kitchen or adding on a new room. I imagine it to be like spending $300 at the grocery store and opening the fridge to find it still half-empty.

But since there's been construction workers in the house, I've been trying to keep things tidier/neater/more orderly. We have a lot of odds and ends crammed into our cozy house. I donated a pile of books to the little free library in the park. That let me take some books that had been piled on top of a different bookcase and put them upstairs, which now looks organized. But ultimately I came back downstairs to the stacks of books on the coffee table and dining room table. I hadn't made as big a dent in the clutter as I thought. Alas, it's a work in progress, like so many things are. I could undoubtedly repeat this same subtle shifting of things in every room in the house until the end of my days.

My husband did the same in the closet, donating old shirts and sweaters of questionable taste gifted to him by well-intentioned family members. I tossed in a few things myself. A cloud of guilt always haunts me when I do this, especially when I'm getting rid of items I didn't buy myself. I don't buy into the "if it doesn't spark joy, get rid of it" idea - because there are other feelings than joy. A few years ago, I threw away a few objects in anger that now a piece of me wishes I still had. At the time they had taken up space and their presence made me recoil. Now, I wonder how I'd feel if I still had them, and so I'm hesitant to chuck everything into the donation bag.

Are there things you had gotten rid of that you now regret?