I am now out of the downstais/living area of The Old Place. It’s done. Over.
Any before anyone says “isn’t that a relief?” no… it actually wasn’t. It was sad. Like I was burying something I cared about. It felt like a loss, like I have somehow failed all the items I couldn’t save.
Still have a bit to go on the upstairs/husband’s work area, but I’ve got a strategy and help now. And conditions aren’t as bad up there as they were getting in the first floor.
Good on you, @Broomstick
I am in the process of packing up my life to move out of my condo. A couple of friends have pitched in to help me because I can’t lift more than 10 lbs. per my doctor. Every bit of junk, or even the usable stuff I get rid of is a reason to cheer. Several items have walked out the door with these friends on to a new life, such as 24 quart-size canning jars, a couple of bottles of wine, a slew of pairs of shoes that I either never work or only wore once and 4 kitchen garbage bags of clothes. Kitchen items, too. Given the time and amount of help I actually have, it won’t all get done. But. So much is already gone or stacked to go or be put on FB Marketplace that I am thrilled.
Only one problem, I don’t know where I will land yet. This decision is still on the to-do list, but I can stay with a friend for a couple of weeks to figure it out.
Reviving this old thread because, like that one box of cords & miscellaneous junk, it occasionally needs to be looked at again.
Seeing how long it’s been since anyone posted made me realize how long it’s been since I did anything useful. But the other day, a happy combination of caffeine, a day off, and the lovely feeling of having recovered from a minor bout of under-the-weatherness led to me getting a bit of a wild hair about searching for something amidst the basement clutter.
I found the item, found a couple of other minor things I’d been wanting, finished unpacking a half-done box, tossed a few unnecessary things, set a few more aside for my growing donation heap, and eyeballed some shelves for my bedroom. (I just need to decide where to hang them so they’re easily reachable from bed without having to get up. This is best accomplished by lying around, a task at which I excel.)
It felt good to get at least a bit of momentum again. I also have a better sense of what’s in the basement as “might could need again” vs. “hanging onto due to inertia” and it looks like my trusty drill is gonna get some usage again soon.
Good. I like hanging shelves.
Oh, and I also bought a hanging earring organizer thingie so I’m not digging through the same box I used during the cross-country drive up here with a few jumbled pairs. Now each pair has its own separate spot. Very nice. Plus it hangs on a simple hook so if I don’t like where it is now, I can move it easily.
Even better, I bought two sets of inexpensive shelves to fit over the toilet. The first was essentially a test subject, since the space in my tiny bathroom has an extremely tight tolerance.
I learned: it’ll fit (barely!) and that it has to be assembled in situ as the crossbar to brace it goes behind the toilet plumbing.
So it went to my bedroom, where the “toilet” space nearly accommodates my hamper. The shelves above have my sheets.
Second set of shelves was assembled around the toilet - yeah, that sucker is staying when I move - and now I can store T.P. neatly.
Toilet has a top-button flush, which is maybe a centimeter under the lowest shelf. Good thing the shelves are wire bars (not solid) so you reach through the shelf to flush. (Clearly designed for side-lever flush toilets.) But the whole assembly works!
I’d post a pic, but who wants to see a cramped bathroom?
Anyway, someone else must’ve done something worth bragging about, since we last convened!
I went through some ancient accordion folders of mine yesterday and recycled 80% of the papers and the accordion folder in bad shape. Minor, but something.
I’m getting most of my windows replaced so I’ve been de-cluttering a lot around the windows. Next Tuesday is installation day, so this weekend is removing the last blinds and cleaning up the embarrassing areas as much as I can
Unfortunately March was the start of my Summer Medical Oddessy, The only progress I’ve made is using up some of my yarn stash to keep my hands occupied - a hat, three scarves and an afghan. I’m keeping the afghan but giving away the rest, along with one of my old afghans I’ve never really used much. So… progress?
Really need to tidy up the filing system again.
We’ve been on a year-long cleaning/decluttering odyssey. Very, very much has been given away, donated, recycled, or taken to the excellent waste management center (mostly for reclamation). We joke that we’ve removed enough to fully furnish two graduate student apartments right down to the flatware and shampoo. I’ve decreased my paper by half, excluding the HIPAA/FERPA records I need to maintain until no later than the end of 2031. I’ll be scanning a lot of documents soon. We’ve removed at least 80 boxes of books, with more to go. We’re replacing some of the furniture with things that actually work in the space, as opposed to odds and ends that we love but can’t work with well. For example, instead of a sofa bed with queen mattress and two recliners, we now have a loveseat and a chair. Toiletries are sorted and donated. Next is another clothing round, with the goal of reducing that’s left by 30-50%. Soon we’ll address chachkas, mementos, and correspondence. The winter plan is to set up the sewing machine and blast out at least 1 lap quilt/baby quilt a week with fabric we love but haven’t used in the last decade.
This. This has been my approach since I moved. Something minor every day. Today I moved some now-empty plastic storage boxes into my storage space, thus freeing up space to open my dresser. I also hauled a couple of boxes to be sorted in from my car. I’ve sorted one so it’s ready for recycling. I may go through the other tonight. Now I’m taking a break and spending time here before accomplishing the every-week task of vacuuming and the every day task of kitchen work and figuring out what to have for dinner.
For some reason my wife forces us to keep a huge number of old plastic and paper bags in our crowded cluttered apartment. Yes, they do have utility as use as trash bags or disposable bags when the kids need them as lunch bags for a class trip or something. But we don’t need several cubic meters of bags. I mean it doesn’t even make sense since every time we order takeout, that’s another bag we can use for the week.
She’s on a business trip so I just went and tossed 90% of them away. To get a sense for how many bags there were, I kept a couple dozen plastic bags with handles from our local Ruths Chris steakhouse. We only eat there once every couple of months. How long have those bags have needed to be there to accumulate dozens of them?!! And that’s only a fraction of the bags!
I did a full organize the utility closet. Funny how it looks more cluttered now that it is organized. There were lots of little bits that don’t go with anything now, and 4 or 5 of the same thing because I didn’t know I had one of it.
Every thing is in categories and easy to get to for the often used items.
I used to do this but a couple years ago I purchased a few hundred standardized plastic bags at eBay (they are surprisingly cheap), so just use those and throw away the random bags I get with purchases.
Glad you did, and glad you’ve reminded me! I have reams of lesson plans and assignment sheets from thirty years of teaching. I was hoping to go back and teach part time, but that isn’t happening, so it might just be time to recycle a few tons of paper…
.
I think I have trouble distinguishing between those two.
Once again, my imagination is getting me in trouble: it’s way too easy for me to picture a scenario where I’ll need those rusty Zorro lunch boxes, that cheap old guitar, that Underdog Playset, those probably-dried-up paints and inks, or my childhood globe featuring the Belgian Congo, the Soviet Union and The Malay States…
Time to get tough with my brain!
I understand how this can happen. Especially once I was without cats, bags just seemed to accumulate like crazy because I would forget to put them in my car to bring to the supermarket that takes them back for recycling. Now I mostly use reusable bags, some of which were made with recycled bags. So now I have those bags everywhere. But I do have fewer of them than I ever did the disposable bags. Unless you need the bags for cat litter or dog poop retrieval, one bag full of bags is plenty enough for most needs.
When going through some old boxes (the de-cluttering never ends, does it?) I found an old LL Bean gift certificate. From 1995.
Rather than just tossing it I called LL Bean. It’s still good!
So my efforts have been rewarded and I now feel more motivated to look for other lost “treasure” by going through old stuff. The downside is that I now have to obey my rule of new clothes requiring a closet purge to avoid excessive build up there.
Wow, what a blast from the past!
I’ve heard L.L. Besn has primo customer service, but that’s above and beyond.
Sadly, I’m sure $X amount of 1995 dollars don’t wield the same purchasing power anymore.
A couple of days ago, I got rid of the Fortune magazines.
You need a little background to appreciate the significance of the event. You see, some time before 1975, my grandfather was having a garage/yard sale and my father saw the stack and asked if he could have them. They were placed far in the back, behind the sale.
This was a stack of Fortune magazines from 1929 to 1931, safe in their original cardboard mailing boxes. Fortune was considered to be a premium magazine and they were sent packed flat.
There was a guy who came to the sale and rooted out the stack. He asked about the February volume and Dad told him that they weren’t for sale. At the end of the sale, the February volume was missing. Dad never got over it. It was one of his recurring complaints about the degradation of humanity.
The Fortune magazines (incomplete as the sequence was) were going to be worth something some day. I inherited them when my mother died in 2012. (Dad died before she did.) As her executor, I was supposed to sell things and apportion funds between me and two sisters.
There were places online showing them on sale for between $40 and $60, but on sale is not the same as sellable. Over the last ten or so years I’ve occasionally tried to find a home for them first for sale and then for free. I also learned that keeping things made of paper in cardboard containers is not proper archival procedure. The cardboard oxidizes and stains the paper. Not badly, but if you’re worrying about protecting value, that’s not a good thing. Which I found funny.
So I finally took the whole stack to the Friends of the Library Book Store a couple of days ago. The Friends took them. May they find peace.
I feel lighter.
In Minnesota, we have a law that all gift certificates/cards cannot expire unless the store goes out of business. I don’t know how many other states do that. I would expect L.L.Bean to honor a gift certificate just because that is the kind of company they are. Still a nice surprise.
Years ago we bought shelving for DVD/Blu-rays, and we also have a TV stand with two large drawers for DVD/Blu-rays.
Yesterday we went through our DVD/Blu-ray collection. We had been running out of room and thought that we would have to start putting DVDs/Blu-rays on the top of the shelving. We disposed of 3 shelves worth of DVDs and one drawer is now empty.
A lot of what we have is not available on streaming, so there’s a limit to how much we could get rid of, but having 3 empty shelves is quite nice.
Today there will be some dusting of the remainder.
Congratulations to you.
Last Saturday, I finally emptied the rental storage locker I had. Mind you, that means that I have lots of boxes and a small storage space here at the apartment to go through but Habitat for Humanity, Goodwill, and some bills I had to pay benefitted from all the sale and donation of goods. So did the disposal service, getting rid of that which I couldn’t sell or donate.
I still have much work to do, but I feel lighter now without so much stuff to look after. And now I can sort through boxes all winter without having to brave an outdoor storage locker.
That’s a big step. And you don’t have to pay rent anymore.
I have a pair of boots that I bought pre-COVID and never wore. I wore them yesterday and got a blister. They are going in the donation sack. I don’t need to buy other boots at this time, as I have other boots to wear, and this means I have an empty spot in the shoe organizer. It’ll stay empty.