A renovation, like a move, is an opportunity to go through all your stuff and decide, do I really need to be hauling this around for the rest of my life?

In our case, we were both moving — out of our Toronto apartment — and renovating our Stratford house, which meant clearing out the entire main floor in Stratford and storing it elsewhere while the place turned into a construction site.

We also quickly furnished the Stratford house three years ago with auction and thrift-store finds so we could set it up as a rental property. We’re now going down to one abode, which means, no, we don’t need two toasters.

So it was time for a “best of” audit. In some cases, I surprised myself with the results. As I wrote in Peak teak, I never thought I’d sell my grandparents’ dining room table but I did when we realized the teak set we’d picked up at an estate auction was a better fit, and no-one else from my family wanted the grandparent set. Other decisions were easier and more obvious: We donated a whack of stuff to Fife House in Toronto, selected by a neighbour who worked there and had a list of items residents needed, including a Queen bed frame, side tables, small bookcases, area rugs and more. Our Toronto TV went to the neighbourhood grade school. Many other kitchen and small household items returned to the thrift stores from whence they came.

Neither of us had an excessive amount of clothing, but we had far more than would fit comfortably in the smaller closet spaces of our little old Stratford house compared with the sprawling walk-in closet we had at the Toronto apartment. With that in mind, we reviewed everything and realized we were currently wearing few of the clothes we owned, given we were both working from home and spending most days in comfy pants and slippers, with the odd jacket (me) or collared shirt (him) thrown on for formal business meetings via Zoom.

My winter work uniform used to be dark pants with a dark top and brighter jacket, or brighter top and dark jacket. In the summer: a dress with a light jacket over top. Because I wore jackets every work day, having a closet-row of them seemed reasonable. Now, I picked a half-dozen to keep and donated the rest. Skinny jeans and other “I’ll get back into that someday” items? Gone. Collared blouses I hadn’t worn in three years? Gone. Most of the high heels? Gone. I reduced my wardroom volume by more than half.

And then, there were the books.

When we got our Stratford place, we had a small storage locker in Toronto whose contents — mostly books — moved to the house. And we had an apartment filled with books, too: Two five-shelf units in the living room; two 3×3 cube shelves in the dining room /kitchen; two metal bookcases in the office; built-in shelving in the office that filled the gap between the closet and an outer wall; and additional stacks of books in the bedroom.

I’ve culled books throughout my life. And I’m a regular library user, a fine way to read books without accumulating more piles of bound paper. But still, the collection inevitably grows, whether through gifts, supporting author friends, or mementoes of travels and occasions.

It was time for Book Cull, 2022 edition.

Both in Toronto and Stratford, we’d go through the shelves and take down the books we could live without. Stack them in piles by the door. Then, when we’d go for walks or on errands, we’d sling a bag or two of books over our shoulders and hunt out Little Free Libraries.

Fortunately, these are abundant both in our Toronto Cabbagetown and nearby Riverdale neighbourhoods, and in the old part of Stratford, where we live now. According to the Little Free Library website, these started in 2009 “when Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model of a one-room schoolhouse. It was a tribute to his mother; she was a teacher who loved to read. He filled it with books and put it on a post in his front yard. His neighbors and friends loved it, so he built several more and gave them away.” From that little beginning grew a huge movement: the site reports that, as of 2022, there were 150,000 registered little libraries in more than 115 countries.

We filled up little libraries, often several times as previous books we put in were cleared out by neighbours on the hunt for their next read. One time we had deposited a pile of books, went on for a walk and, on our return home, saw two young women engrossed in going through the stash and filling up their backpacks.

Once we unpack everything and load up what bookshelf space we have in our renovated space — a cookbook shelf unit in the kitchen, two cases in the dining room, a sturdy built-in and the Toronto metal shelves in the office, two more cases in the upstairs office, and some small shelving in both the guest and main bedrooms — we’ll see if we’ll need to take more Little Library donation strolls. Perhaps, if there are a few bookshelf spaces to spare, to misquote Hamlet’s Polonius, we will both a lender and a borrower be.