There are times when I get the urge to clean up my "Fishing Room" or my "Fly Tying Rooms". I should re-phrase that
just a little to "My Wife" tells me to clean them up..."OR she WILL.." So I go thru maybe 10 percent of it hoping to separate the pure junk...like old magazines, correspondence, certain but not all catalogs, FF and FT Show invitations, old maps, useless pieces of driftwood trimmings from when I make my dioramas for my flies, ..stuff like that. I also try to look at my gear to see if there is any I should sell or donate or give away. If I am lucky I may find a single item that I'm willing to part with. Nine landing nets are 6 or 7 more than any sane person needs. I must have at least a dozen and a half reels that I have never fished and the same goes for the rods... But everything seems to have a memory tied to it...even the stuff I don't use... Books? at least 500. I've stopped counting. I'm committed to buy 4 more over the next two weekends at the shows just because they are written by friends like Whillock and Blair and Fullum and Best, who will sign them for me. So I shuffle stuff around, buy more and bigger storage containers and hope my wife thinks I've done a good job. Half our cellar is a bar I built out of 200 year old barnwood and hand hewn and pegged beams. When I tell you there is only a foot and a half wide path across a short corner back to my tying room I am not exagerating. The rest is filled with cases and racks and shelving and boxes that are piled on top of boxes. I pretty much know where everything is...it's just getting to it. The bar itself is where I mount flies and where I keep driftwood, stream gravel and a few hundred domes and lucite cases. There are also a couple of boxes of hand turned rosewood bases. The two fly tying rooms are just as bad. Bits and pieces are saved in small plastic boxes so the next time I tie a particular fly I have some material already cut or trimmed to working shape. Only trouble is they get shuffled around and I don't find them for a year or two. Worse part is I'm not getting any younger. If you ever hear of something happening to me you best beat feet over here to my wife's garage sale!

How do you deal with winnowing down your gear and supplies? How do you decide what goes and what stays?