Oh my goodness! So glad to hear that you’re doing so much better, Kevbo! And if this thread has helped, even a little, then I’m glad to have piped up a few times here and there.
In fact, when I saw this thread pop up again, I had a little feeling of shame, because my battle with the clutter hasn’t been going well this last year. Not well at all. I need a swift kick in the rear again.
After I worked so hard last year to clear enough space in the garage for the other car to squeeze in, we wound up selling that car. Then, we wound up with some furniture and other stuff that we had no other place to put, so into that empty space it went. Right back where I started. Sigh.
I’m down to two BIIIIG stumbling areas – clothing and fannish/hobby stuff. The first I have all sorts of body image problems compounding everything. As in, lots of good clothes that don’t currently fit (I yo-yo) but experience shows I will shrink into and then grown back out of the range of sized repeatedly over the months so I don’t want to toss them.
The fannish stuff – well, it meant a lot to me at the time. And I can’t bring myself to toss out my own writing. (Damn it, I was pretty good, at least, I won awards in fandom for it.) But I have managed to get rid of four paper grocery sacks full of old ‘collectibles’ from conventions and such over the past month. Fingers crossed I can continue to triage. Maybe I could at least just cut my stories out of the zines and toss the rest, that would at least reduce the mass significantly. Or maybe I should get a scanner and stuff it all into the cloud somewhere.
Congratulations, Kevbo!!!
I am so proud of you. Your story alone makes this thread worth it.
Meanwhile… I haven’t made any progress on my own place since my father’s death at the end of July. Which isn’t really surprising. Dad had already disposed of most of his stuff prior to his death so there wasn’t a great deal left to divide, and what I acquired was mostly practical stuff we’re actually using. Mostly.
Oh, and I learned how to make glass cleaner and did a little work on the vehicles.
The biggest thing is that the home hasn’t gotten worse, I’ve managed to hold the line. I hope to get back to improvements before New Year’s, but with a new position at work, and working in retail during the holidays, that might be a challenge.
Just a few things that parents shouldn’t do if they don’t want their kids to end up like me.
-Don’t use chores as punishment. Your kid will learn that doing any unpleasant task means they are being punished. Also some chores get worse if not done regularly, so if the kid is good for a long time, then the punishment is much worse. Kids should learn that chores need to be done just because they need to be done. Put on some tunes and get-r-done. We are a family, so we all pitch in to get the work done. Also if they are really good, then the chore still needs doing, so now they are being punished for nothing.
-Don’t use chores to get kids “out of your hair” or to keep them busy. The kid will learn that chores mean he is being deprived of love and attention.
-Don’t expect your kid to know how to clean without being shown how in detail…first we put all the trash into the waste basket, then we pick up the toy, etc. etc. NOT: “This room better be clean when I come back in half an hour.”
-Don’t throw away their toys as punishment. Don’t keep throwing away more until they stop screaming. This was actually so traumatic that I suppressed it for a long time. It was only when I started opening up in the hoarding class that it came back.
-Used or hand-me-down toys should be 100% functional when the kid gets them, and best if they have a lot of the shine left too. If all the kid’s toys start out broken to some degree, then the kid never learns not to keep broken stuff around, and never has any nice things, so never learns to keep things nice. If it is fixable, fix it or help the kid fix it before he starts playing with it. Good toys don’t have to cost anything: Big empty boxes are the best toy ever. Toy cars with two wheels missing…not so much.
-Don’t have the kid doing the same chores at 16 that he did at 6. A teenager can be trusted with a lawnmower and a hot stove, let them do some adult chores when they are old enough, and maybe take over their old kid chores if it doesn’t matter.
I was 50 before I figured most of this out. I always knew I had no idea how to raise kids, and didn’t want to fuck them up like me, so I never had any.
Not that I’ve seen - no reason you can’t start one. We have talked about reducing/re-using/recycling in this thread. Some of us find it easier to get rid of stuff if we go that route.
I can now use my master bedroom as a (wait for it…) bedroom. I ordered a bed last week. I’m 6’5" so California King…woo hoo! Amazon head-faked me and I ended up with the wrong size sheets. (November mini-rant thread) Oh well, easy enough to fix that.
I also fixed the oven door (soft latch was broken) and the leaky dishwasher was just a cracked discharge hose, so that is fixed too.
A quasi-hoarding tendency runs in my family, and I have it to some extent. We don’t just accumulate junk; we also accumulate HOUSES.
My parents are planning to vacate and sell their current home, and move into another one that my mother owns. But there’s so much stuff in their house, I wonder if they’ll ever get out. Mom is slowly working on the clutter, but she still insists on personally vetting every object to determine what should be done with it. No one else is trusted to make these decisions, which effectively means no one else can help.
I contribute to the problem in my own way: I’ve got all my old childhood stuff in my old bedroom there. I live nearby, so I could go and sort it, except that sorting and cleaning tasks frighten me, so I just leave the stuff in the bedroom and never go in there.
Well we’re finally mucking out the unfinished storage room under the family room. Last time we touched it was after Hurricane Sandy, when the sump pump failed and we had 3 inches of water in there. The incentive this time was that we were having some backyard drainage issues addressed and part of the solution involved having the sump pump exit the house at a different spot.
We have metal shelves running the length of both long walls and had stuff piled up in the middle - a friend is renting the main part of the basement and we just shoved stuff in there in a hurry to get rid of it. And the shelves along the back wall had to be moved out of the way for the work.
So far, we’ve gotten rid of:
A large coffee table that we hadn’t needed in a while (plus one ratty old blanket that we used to protect the table when loading it into the recipient’s car)
A huge Christmas tree storage bin that never quite held our too-large artificial tree (the tree itself is in a fabric bag now)
Easter baskets (my kids are 18 and 21 and we haven’t used them in years) and related supplies
A 22-quart stockpot that I bought for turkey brining, then discovered using plastic roasting bags instead before I even used the pot once
Several bags full of travel games
A boxful of office “toys” from a job my husband left 6 years ago
Numerous empty cardboard boxes that had been simply flattened and stored (why???)
6 large boxes of stuff we were storing for friends; they took that home the other day. I think we’d been keeping it for most of a decade. Tonight, we found another box.
One sleeping bag that needed to have the zipper repaired / replaced. My husband wanted to send it out to be fixed (as I don’t sew unless threatened). I pointed out that would cost as much as the bag did. He shut up (we have at least 4 others, all of which have been washed and will be re-stored, in plastic bags this time to keep out dust).
I found a bag full of yarn from an afghan kit I started in college. Yeah, 35 years ago. Periodically I’ll work on the afghan. A couple years ago I really started working on it, got it about 1/3 done, and couldn’t find the rest of the yarn. I thought it must have gotten lost in the move 13 years ago and I just had the few skeins that were with the worked piece. Nope, it was there all along. Maybe I’ll finish it before one of my kids graduates college.
One thing we’re doing that’ll help with any future work down there: we’re buying wheel kits for the shelves. That also elevates the bottom shelves a bit in case of another sump failure!!
So basically we’re taking everything off one shelf, going through it, and putting what we are keeping on an empty unit. Some effort to organize as we go but I think once we’ve gotten rid of stuff we truly do not need, it’ll be easier to finally organize stuff.
The room may actually be usable for storage - we literally couldn’t get to most of the stuff for much of the past year.
Our house has been embarrassing at best for some time. Last weekend, we invited people to a party on Thanksgiving weekend, partially to force ourselves to clean up. And it’s working! We got the office (that I share with the kids) from goat-trails-through-half-finished-artworks up to moderately cluttered. It is at the point now where I won’t be embarrassed to let the kids in here to play Minecraft during the party, although I would still like to clean it a little more before people arrive. But first we have to unearth the table in the kitchen so we have a place to put food. (The party is potluck of sorts - I will make Costco soup and bread to be sure there’s something to eat for dinner, but we’ve told everyone to bring their Thanksgiving leftovers and eat someone else’s. So I expect a lot of food to arrive.)
Because good, sturdy cardboard boxes are expensive, or you didn’t have curbside recycling at the time, or you never got to tearing them into sections small enough (2’ x2’ in my municipality) to recycle.
Cardboard is horrible for mildew; use plastic totes or “space bags”.
That is perfectly normal, as far as I know. Two dishes in the sink and it’s like… I’d like to have the sink clean and shiny, but do I wanna get my ass off the chair and my hands wet? If I do the two dishes it takes a few seconds and they fit just fine in the drying closet; if I let them star reproducing it takes longer and I end up having to do strange things in order to set them down to dry. And yes, I picked the stupidest little task I could think of.
Several years of commbining a permanent home and temporary on-location rentals have left me with duplicates of a bunch of small appliances. I don’t want to throw any out: they work fine and if I do keep working on location I’ll need them again, so I’ve put them all in a small plastic box. It’s my “for the next time I move” box. If I do get a local job I’ve been aiming for, it’s being offered next time my town has a “solidarity market”, which are a sort of colective yard sale.
And last week I got the new bedbox. The old bedframe had been damaged by abusive handling; I was scared one day the foot would just decide to join the great splinter pile in the sky. Since the new one is a box, I’ve moved there the relatively few comic books I’m still keeping and that’s released Great-grandfather’s trunk for off-season clothing. Right now it has summer clothes and a lot of space, I expect it will be a lot tighter in the summer.
I think that’s why. My husband was the culprit there.
Among the other stuff, we’ve found numerous plastic bins that were empty. Yes, we were taking up precious storage space, with unused storage bins. Egad. I’m hoping to get all the cardboard-boxed stuff into bins. The sleeping bags will go into clear plastic bags - though the suggestion of space bags is a good one - that would really flatten them down and save cubic.
We’re putting a half an hour or so a day each day going through / re-shelving stuff; a couple more days and it should all be back in the room, then we can do a semi-final re-org. My goal is to have everything off the floor of the room and onto the shelves except for two chairs which obviously won’t fit on shelves.
I’m debating whether to push for getting rid of the camping supplies, or at least a large chunk of them. I’m too old to tent camp without complaint, my son has aged out of Boy Scouts, and my husband doesn’t have time to volunteer there any more.
Starting to work cleaning out my garage. My goal is to move another bicycle into there and start a workshop.
Problem is years of collecting tools and junk from various projects.
I got so mad at my wife. A friend was moving so she would hand my wife boxes and boxes of paint and other chemicals like stains and lacquer and talk her into taking them. Now I’ve got to dispose of them.
Well, I’ve been working on things over here. Two weeks of extra efforts have my mess confined once again to the garage and laundry rooms. So I’m back to where I was two years ago, yay?
This week’s project: to maintain, and get caught up on laundry.
So I expect a lot of food to arrive.)