Decluttering, Guilt and Being Sentimental

During this final burst of beautiful weather, I decided to paint my kitchen cabinets.

Just the uppers. White.

To get at the side of my cabinets, I had to take down the messy shelves which hold my cookbooks (and cooking utensils).

oops. I was obviously in the middle of removing the cookbooks when I thought to take my before picture. Bad blogger!

This is about the cookbooks. I haven't figured out what to do about the utensils, yet.

This is the pile of cookbooks I actually use. If there were no guilt in life, this is all I would put back: less than one shelf's worth. (I just measured. Yep, I did. That stack takes up 11 linear inches of shelf space.)


This next pile is also a no-brainer:

If there's that much kitchen dust on it, it's begging me to be let go!

But I had to sort the other cookbooks into various piles before I could go on. And I had to take pictures of them--and discuss them here before I could process why it is so difficult to let these go.

I don't think this post is going to make any sense to anyone but me--but cookbooks--for some reason--are hard.

Here's the pile of cookbooks we meant to use: they're full of funky ethnic recipes or vegetarian cooking. These recipes I can find on the web, so it's OK to let them go.



This next pile is OK, too, actually. It's full of cookbooks I should look at--cookbooks I meant to use for one reason or another and never did: but I can find these recipes (or these kinds of recipes) again, should I need them, so they're OK to let go of.


Here's the next most difficult pile: It's the pile of books which people (sometimes me) spent good money on--but won't get used again.


I just asked hubby if we could get rid of The Joy. His Mom gave it to him. He said, "OK."

And here is the most difficult stack. The sentimentals.


On the bottom:
Betty Crocker's New Boys and Girls Cookbook
Golden Press. No publication date. It looks like about 1975, though!

This is the very first cookbook I ever had--my Mom saved it to pass on to my daughter which she has now done (in addition to buying her a new, better, updated version of a kids' cookbook for her very own. That kind of dented its impact--and certainly made it useless to us).

Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres
Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. 1984.
Did I get this second hand? I must have. I was married in 1997--and I poured over this book planning out all the finger food--which I made--for our wedding reception.

Peasant's Choice by James Barber.
Urban Peasant Productions, 1984.

This is the husband's. I was quite impressed that he was making the effort to learn to cook. It was just one of those things which brought us together.

The notebook. Ah, the notebook. It's chock full of recipes from the family of a guy I lived with for a couple of years. Most of the recipes I actually use from this book have been transferred into my binders. So, I really don't need it. And, come to think of it, there's a heckuva lot of useless emotion attached to it, too. I really don't need it.

So, obviously, it's really just these last four books which are causing all the angst. Hmm. Interesting. Just four. Out of all these.


I still don't know what to do with them.

Well, not the Notebook. I know what I'm doing with that.