Ah, my pretty, I haven't forgotten you... and I haven't been slackin' neither! I've been busy! For real! I finally decided that instead of complaining about my lack of storage space, I will use this wretched time of year to audit everything. Forthwith, my progress.
I'm sick of winter, sick of cold. Sick of dark at 6 and freezy-cold mornings! I want blooming! Sunshine! Life! Birds I don't feel sorry for! Spring, folks, I wants it. But Phil saw his shadow, so 6 more weeks of this crap, says he. I can sulk, or I can get doing stuff so that when my precious warm spring days arrive I'm not stuck dicking around in the attic getting rid of old crap, or reorganizing our closets, dressers and cupboards to make my house more tidy. I can be out digging in the soil, showing Boogie how the plants and flowers grow!
To that end I've been sorting through things. Perhaps it's just the result of having been a big slacker in my younger years, but I've accumulated a lot of garbage that I've been hauling from house to house. Instead of going through boxes and bags before we'd move, we'd wait until the very last minute and then, in a mad frenzy, lop everything into every vehicle we could wrangle to help transport things and hump it over to the new place, promptly depositing it into the basement, attic or spare room with every intention of going through it "someday." Then we'd run out of room, get pissed and start hating our current place, and start looking for someplace new, and the whole bloody cycle would repeat itself again.
Well, we own a house now. And we're far from being able to afford to move, pretty much for at least the next decade. Which is fine, since I love my house. So I gotta start getting rid of this crap. We have plans for many of the rooms in which we've stowed things we don't feel like dealing with, and we can't move forward until all the shit is dealt with. And I find my current self becoming extremely mad at my former lazy self.
I spent some time in the attic the other day. DH and I hope to eventually make this into our master bedroom with a full bath, but were you to see it right now, you would laugh at our obviously unattainable goal. We started ripping it up when we first moved in, and DH was able to pull off all the old lath-and-plaster walls, run proper electrical wiring, insulate and drywall. He even did the mud, which I then sanded--
A note here, a DIY FYI, if you will. When you are sanding a rather large room in your house on a warm sunny summer Saturday, it is never a good idea to keep the windows closed but leave the door to the room open. Rather, try for the reverse. Otherwise all the flying dust will coat everything in your house that it can reach. That is all.
So you get the drift- we are about 75% done with the room, but decided to move on to more important and immediately necessary projects. As it stands, though, the room is done enough that it makes wonderful storage for all our stuff. And lawd, do we have stuff, which is why I am going through it all, and why I find myself so extremely peeved at my former self. One particulary aggravating afternoon was spent as follows: See box. Open box. Find box filled with old celebrity and fashion magazines, old junk mail, stuff with pieces broken off of it, pieces broken off of stuff (not the same stuff, mind you, but entirely different stuff), cassette mix tapes (we do not own a cassette player anymore), cat toys, one stretchy glove covered in hair and lint, pipe cleaners, one partial skein of embroidery floss, blank paper, some pictures that are stuck together so you can't see who's in them, and some old bills from two apartments ago. Really? REALLY?? I needed to drag an entire box of absolutely useless junk from not one apartment, but two? To this house, where six years later I am finally going through it only to find that not one thing in it is of any use to anyone? And even if it at some time was important, it sure isn't now after it's been sitting in a box in my attic for at least the last 4 years since we bought the house! Really, old self, you were too damned lazy to just put the shit into a Hefty bag and throw it the hell away? Seriously. Post-diatribe, see another box. Open box. Repeat above.
I actually found four contractor-size garbage bags filled with Goodwill clothes. Stuff from my younger years, stuff that doesn't fit, some stuff that I'm not even sure why we own it. Clothes from my husband's various style phases. Things I actually took the time to remove from whatever receptacle it was in and put into a bag for Goodwill. Which I then left in the attic for four years. All that stuff has got to go- I'll be taking a trip over to Goodwill to drop off my discarded bounty this weekend. I've also found some new ways to deal with my junk-- they might work for you, too!
1. Underbed storage bags. I don't keep clothes in them because I tend to forget about them when I can't see them. However, I can never forget about yarn, so all my yarn is stashed under the bed in those cheap storage bags from Wallyworld. They're clear on top so I can see what's in there, and because they're soft-sided, I can smoosh them under the bed when I'm done using them. Also? When you buy bedding or curtains, a lot of times they come in those plastic zippered bags. I store my bedding in a spare dresser and my hope chest, so I use the zipper bags to sort out yarn for projects. They're big enough to hold both the yarn and the magazine or pattern book. Evidently I am not the only one who does this, as you can now buy these things from craft purveyors, with a handy-dandy pocket to hold your pattern in it. Or, you could just use the ones you have from the last time you bought a shower curtain or sheet set.
2. Our paper shredder is right next to where we read the mail. When the mail comes in I sort it out and all the junk gets shredded right away. Tax stuff has its own bin on my desk, and bills go next to the printer/computer setup. I keep thinking I should use the shredded paper as cat litter or something, but I think it would freak out the kitties because it was different and they'd end up peeing all over my laundry or something.
3. Speaking of laundry, everyone in my house gets a laundry basket of their own. When I fold clothes, they go in their specific basket so that I know where my stuff is if I don't get a chance to put it away right away. Or if I just don't feel like it. That way when DH is hunting for socks, he doesn't mess up my stuff, and when I am getting dressed for work I don't have to dig through 50 million band t-shirts to find one good pair of undies.
4. This one's a work in progress. As I go through my stuff, I create a container for it if I don't want to throw it out immediately. Like, when I went through the bookshelf to try and organize it, I got an old diaper box and as I came across a book I didn't want anymore, I put it right in the box. When I'm putting away Boogie's clothes I have another empty diaper box and started filling it with the clothes she's too big for now. When the box is full, it goes in the attic with the other castoff baby stuff for the next time we have a kid, and the box of books has already been shopped through by my mom and my best friend. Most of them came from my MIL, but I think I'll let her rifle through the box to see if she wants anything before I take it to work to unload at our lending library (it's not that fancy- it's just a bookshelf in the ladies' room where people take/leave old novels). When I find broken things, if I want to try and salvage it, it goes in the box of broken things and every once in a while I take the box and my Super Glue and play puzzle pieces for an evening.
I'm working on more ways to keep myself organized- these are just the things that have started to work. Maybe tomorrow- kitchen time? We haven't had kitchen time in a while.
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