Do I really need this?

As the kitchen and bathroom renovations are now to start at the end of October instead of the beginning of this month and it is too early to start packing up everything in the kitchen, I thought I would sort out a few things in the rest of the house especially the rooms in which we might be having some airconditioning units installed mainly for those 40C days which seem to arrive each summer now. The thought of having tradies traipsing through the rooms is a bit daunting so it is time to get rid of a lot of the excess 'stuff' that I haven't used for years but the problem is....what to throw out!!!

For example, do I put the photo frame in the above photo in the Op Shop when I love it so much but haven't even looked at it for years as it has been sitting in a pile of photo frames waiting for me to sort through them so I could decide what to keep but .....do I really need it? Hmmm, probably not even though it looks perfect with ....

...the mug rug/hot pad which I started at our Simple Living Toowoomba Toothbrush Rag Rug Workshop and finished last week. It isn't perfect but I don't do perfect anymore :-)

Then there are the many family photos to sort through although I won't be getting rid of my parents' wedding photos.

Can you believe my mother burnt that beautiful wedding dress that she quite possibly made herself as she didn't think anyone would want it? She was very gifted where sewing was concerned and made all my clothes when I was a child.

When our Mum died I inherited a box of postcards and I am not sure what I should do with them.

I think she kept every single postcard she was ever sent including lots of really old ones like this one of the Great Barrier Reef....

...this one of Southport on the Gold Coast....

....and this one of Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast taken in the 1970s. My my, how both the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast have changed since then. Do I throw these out? Hmmm!

To top it all off there is another box of postcards sent to Mum from her relatives in Scotland and there are also some which were sent to my grandparents years before that. They moved to Australia before WW1 and my grandfather came from a very large family so there was a lot of correspondence going back and forth as they kept in touch. I don't think I could bear to throw some of these out so I will have to be selective. Who knows...perhaps some day down the track one of my grandchildren will be interested in finding out about their family history and would like to read some of the postcards.

Our mother was a real family history buff in the days before the internet made research so much easier but none of us were really interested at the time and our eyes used to glaze over when she would tell us about her latest family discovery. Unfortunately since she died we have had many questions about the family which she could have answered and now I wish we had paid more attention. As I have aged I notice I  have become more interested in my family history so Mum would be pleased if she was still alive. 

So I think I will pack up the postcards once again and move on to another drawer or cupboard. Perhaps I should start going through all the photos I took when my children were little and keep the better ones for posterity. There are boxes and boxes of them. Oops! It is hard to be ruthless when decluttering, isn't it?