I'm not counting "things" this year... and it's kind of bugging me

I made the decision at the end of last year not to keep count of the things I removed from the house in 2016. We were gearing up to have our kitchen gutted and I knew the house was going to be chaos and I didn't want the pressure of a List. Then I ended up extremely sick with congestive heart failure and I REALLY knew that monitoring how many things I got rid of would need to be low on the priority list.

So, I haven't been keeping track. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I haven't been getting rid of stuff, but I haven't been tracking. When I was sicker and the house was a construction zone, I was fine with that.

But now construction is done and I'm feeling better and... not having the list is starting to bug me. I tossed a few things the other day and sure, it was good to have the space back but the TRUE thought running through my head was THAT COULD HAVE BEEN A TICK MARK ON MY LIST.

Strange much? (Yeah, I know, don't even go there.)

The other factor is that I'm prepping to paint the bedrooms. I've emptied the office (our third bedroom) because it is slated to become Kid#1's bedroom. That room has held junk for eleven years! It has always been a dumping ground for stuff. And it held two bookcases full of, you know, books. I've also taken the storage shelves out of each bedroom (and the office). Those shelves were temporarily in each bedroom to hold renovation stuff from the rest of the house.

Now all of that stuff is in our previously quite empty and lovely living room. Three sets of storage shelves and, oh, 12 piles of books. Plus the paper shredder and space heater. It all stares at me. It looms. I'm kind of wondering where all that junk from the office is supposed to go? OK, books are one thing. I have a plan for the books (get rid of some and the rest will go in the living room shelves). The rest? Where is it going to go???

OK, I could dump it all in the basement, but I really don't want to. I'm tempted to throw most of it out.

But if I throw it out and don't count it... that's going to bug me.

Do I start keeping track now - at the end of August? What would my goal be? Should I just see what the total is at the end of the year?