Lately, I’ve been figuring out what to keep and what to toss around our house. I’ve been in a quandary about coffee mugs. When we finished our kitchen remodel a year ago, it was Christmas. No time to organize the drawers and cupboards. (I love that word cupboard. It’s such a quaint word that reminds me of cozy books on my shelves like Rosamund Pilcher,  Jan Karon, Katie Scheurmann.)

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So a year later and that cupboard is semi-organized but really scattered. Kind of represents my life.

Am I alone here? I have a bunch of mis-matched coffee mugs. A Concordia University Irvine mug that says “Mom” and transports me back a few years to moving our two kiddos into dorm rooms, driving away in tears, and returning to tears when they walked across the stage. Thankfully, I was not in tears the entire four years they were away at college.

There’s a faded Big Red lighthouse mug I bought when we first moved here to Holland, Michigan. It was bright red four years ago. Many dishwashings later, it’s just not pretty anymore but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.

Another dishwasher-faded mug that used to have names of classic painters that my sister gave me after a birthday visit to The Art Institute of Chicago.

If I listen to Marie Kondo’s advice in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (a tad out there for me when she writes about talking to our household things but lots of advice worth considering), I should keep those things that bring me joy.

So here are my choices.

1. Keep all the mugs because they are functional if not pretty. This would be my sweetheart’s suggestion, if I asked him. Wink.
2. Keep only the sentimental mugs.
3. Donate the faded mugs because they make me a little crazy when I look at them. Buy why would anyone else want these?
4. Transfer the faded mugs to a box and decide later. That’s really just delaying the decision.
5. Watch for sales and buy an all-new-pretty set of matching mugs.
6. Research coffee mugs because I’m that kind of person who gets tempted to go down the rabbit hole and learn something new. Seriously. I’m fascinated by things like why are my grandmother’s fancy coffee cups — which I inherited — so teeny tiny?

So how do you go about figuring out what to keep and what to toss when it comes to mugs, glasses, and other such practical things? I’d really love to know!

Photo by John-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash