Basement: It is done. Sort of.
Thank you, everyone who took a minute to offer advice for the Great Basement/Attic Cleanout. Your voices were in my head as we worked last week. ("Resist the urge to move piles around!" "Only keep items for people if you have someone specific in mind." "Take this chance to model letting-go for your father." "Don't just throw everything away.") After six 12- to 14-hour days in NY, a day at the office, a holiday, another day at the office, and a day to recover, I'm feeling together enough to tell you that it went well and to share some pictures.
Before and afters
A couple of people I talked to before I left for NY assumed that "volume" equates to "mess." Not so; our family is nothing if not organized! Here is some demonstration of how you can keep too much stuff, neatly:
(Click on thumbnails for bigger)
Or not so neatly, but at least labeled: the crawlspace. Hopefully these couple of snapshots give you a sense of how packed, and how big (the length of the house and half as wide), the space is.
Our task was to go through "our stuff"-mine and my sister's. At a really generous estimate, that took up 1/6th of the space down there. So there were times during the week when, weary physically and emotionally, I felt like we were still barely making a dent. Spreadsheets and pictures like this reassure me that we made progress, though.
To sort through everything, we made a mess everywhere. Schoolwork, art supplies and projects, toys, games, books, puzzles, stuffed animals, Barbies, Legos, electronics, rocks and fossils, posters, etc. etc. Hardly any clothes, though, except a bunch of random old single socks; our family was always good at doing periodic clothing donations. Grossest thing my sister found: a baby tooth.
Example of one batch: games and puzzles:
But gradually, the mess returned to order:
After the basement, we needed to go through the boxes in the spare bedroom crawlspace. We stopped to tackle the closet you have to walk through to get to it. Gems there included 22 denim hats and 30+ adult XL Looney Tunes t-shirts that my dad had gotten for free from a previous job, and three or four sets of encyclopedias.
Spare bedroom crawlspace, left and right, before and after. I forgot to take the first "before" pic right away, so imagine that those first two stacks of boxes are as high as the third.
When we cleared the last boxes, we found a crib and some old guitars and some other stuff that wasn't identifiable at a glance. I could not deal with them by then.
And in the end, tidy piles. Just the way we like it. To donate:
To sell:
To keep, for now:
And multiple garbage cans' worth of recycling and actual trash. Not as much trash as I'd expected, but then, we were smarter back in the day than to pack up garbage for storage.
We logged and photographed 950+ items between the donations, the to-be-sold items, and the stuff we want to ask friends about. Stay tuned on that last; when I figure out when I'm going back up there for Round Two: Return of the Basement (selling some of the to-sell stuff and working with my dad on a couple of his areas), I'll post a list for you all to peruse. Books, arts & crafts supplies, Harry Potter memorabilia, etc. We also photographed hundreds of other items we either tossed or kept for nostalgic reasons. Whew.
It was tough in several ways. It was exhausting and filthy, and decision fatigue set in each day before I was done. There are some things I'm remorseful about, including the way I treated my dad a few times.* Bringing my notebook was an excellent idea, although I didn't leave much time for thinking; it's a defense mechanism, keeping busy. I was also reminded in more than one way why I don't live there anymore. And there is so much more to be done. But I'm glad we tackled our portion, I'm glad my sister was there most days to join me-we hadn't spent that much time together at once in years-and I think we accomplished what we set out to.
*He was up and down in his handling of the mess, the dust, the hubbub, the idea of letting us let things go. Sometimes he'd hover or pick through our piles, then sometimes he'd volunteer to shed some of his own stuff. Sometimes I'd ask him a question about what to do with a particular item and he'd freeze up. E. had to take him out of the house at least once.
I enjoyed two breaks: dinner Saturday night with my dad and E., and brunch Sunday with ignazwisdom, who braved two trains to come visit from Brooklyn. Hadn't seen Iggy in ages and that was great. As was brunch, mm. We are going to try to re-watch some TOS eps long distance, so don't be surprised if you start seeing posts about them around here.
Some fun stuff we uncovered, including fannish and baby items
Wanted to share a small percentage of the photos we took on account of them being adorable, personal, and/or fannish. :) Once again, click any thumbnail for bigger.
The corrective shoes I had to wear as a baby. Or, as I've been putting it in my head and as deelaundry said out loud while browsing our picture collection the other day, "baby's first spreader bar."
I guess that makes this "baby's first medical play kit."
(It totally was.)
I was so happy to find these among the bags of stuffed animals in the basement crawlspace. In the middle of the pile are the ones that were/are dearest to me: Dolly (which my dad sewed for me and I couldn't sleep without for years and years), Bronty, Steggy, and the rainbow bear, all of which saw me through childhood and preadolescence, including lining up on the edge of the bed to protect me from E.T. at night.
Man, I had completely forgotten this game, but memories struggled up to the surface as soon as we unpacked it. That happened many times in the oldest boxes, including several of our earliest children's books. Who recalled that my internal image (like the personal Platonic ideal) of lollipops and apples and milk bottles came from The Little Engine That Could? Not me, until I happened to flip to that page.
My first microscope slides. :)
The first plaster figure I painted, I think. Plaster-painting parties were all the rage when we were kids. That and McDonald's parties. Ours had a big hamburger you could climb on. Well, that you'd get yelled at for climbing on.
I got better at painting plaster figures when I was in college.
Some little animals I sculpted that I still think are cute.
And some word art we made in Hebrew High School that I'd forgotten about until that box surfaced.
Fannish stuff
I remembered a lot of these, but was happy to see them again. Thought you might enjoy them too? Included below: the college psych paper where we got to take personality tests as fictional characters, and I did mine as Spike/William the Bloody; high school class notes where I used to write quotations from the Vampire Chronicles and names of characters from the Vampire Diaries/L.J. Smith books; a page from my first-year French notebook where I apparently practiced our earliest lessons using DS9 actors; a book report I wrote in the sixth grade on a DS9 paperback (my English teacher was a Trekkie too); and the Jurassic Park logo I made in tech class for our "learning to use a router" project.
I also found a piece of paper on which I'd drawn a cruise ship cabin where my first long Mary Sue fic took place (Marius/OFC), hee. It was Armand's cruise ship, of course:
My bat mitzvah centerpieces. I was joking around with my sister that my tastes have remained remarkably consistent over the years; if I had to do it all again now, I'd probably choose the same theme and color scheme.
Snape's classroom and dungeon in Legos:
And the TNG uniform my mom made me with magic marker when I was 10 years old, for Halloween:
Thanks for reading. ♥
.
Did manage to sign up for a Kink Bingo card, which I started brainstorming for when I had a chance to breathe on Thursday. There should be a picspam soon. Watch this space.
Before and afters
A couple of people I talked to before I left for NY assumed that "volume" equates to "mess." Not so; our family is nothing if not organized! Here is some demonstration of how you can keep too much stuff, neatly:
(Click on thumbnails for bigger)
Or not so neatly, but at least labeled: the crawlspace. Hopefully these couple of snapshots give you a sense of how packed, and how big (the length of the house and half as wide), the space is.
Our task was to go through "our stuff"-mine and my sister's. At a really generous estimate, that took up 1/6th of the space down there. So there were times during the week when, weary physically and emotionally, I felt like we were still barely making a dent. Spreadsheets and pictures like this reassure me that we made progress, though.
To sort through everything, we made a mess everywhere. Schoolwork, art supplies and projects, toys, games, books, puzzles, stuffed animals, Barbies, Legos, electronics, rocks and fossils, posters, etc. etc. Hardly any clothes, though, except a bunch of random old single socks; our family was always good at doing periodic clothing donations. Grossest thing my sister found: a baby tooth.
Example of one batch: games and puzzles:
But gradually, the mess returned to order:
After the basement, we needed to go through the boxes in the spare bedroom crawlspace. We stopped to tackle the closet you have to walk through to get to it. Gems there included 22 denim hats and 30+ adult XL Looney Tunes t-shirts that my dad had gotten for free from a previous job, and three or four sets of encyclopedias.
Spare bedroom crawlspace, left and right, before and after. I forgot to take the first "before" pic right away, so imagine that those first two stacks of boxes are as high as the third.
When we cleared the last boxes, we found a crib and some old guitars and some other stuff that wasn't identifiable at a glance. I could not deal with them by then.
And in the end, tidy piles. Just the way we like it. To donate:
To sell:
To keep, for now:
And multiple garbage cans' worth of recycling and actual trash. Not as much trash as I'd expected, but then, we were smarter back in the day than to pack up garbage for storage.
We logged and photographed 950+ items between the donations, the to-be-sold items, and the stuff we want to ask friends about. Stay tuned on that last; when I figure out when I'm going back up there for Round Two: Return of the Basement (selling some of the to-sell stuff and working with my dad on a couple of his areas), I'll post a list for you all to peruse. Books, arts & crafts supplies, Harry Potter memorabilia, etc. We also photographed hundreds of other items we either tossed or kept for nostalgic reasons. Whew.
It was tough in several ways. It was exhausting and filthy, and decision fatigue set in each day before I was done. There are some things I'm remorseful about, including the way I treated my dad a few times.* Bringing my notebook was an excellent idea, although I didn't leave much time for thinking; it's a defense mechanism, keeping busy. I was also reminded in more than one way why I don't live there anymore. And there is so much more to be done. But I'm glad we tackled our portion, I'm glad my sister was there most days to join me-we hadn't spent that much time together at once in years-and I think we accomplished what we set out to.
*He was up and down in his handling of the mess, the dust, the hubbub, the idea of letting us let things go. Sometimes he'd hover or pick through our piles, then sometimes he'd volunteer to shed some of his own stuff. Sometimes I'd ask him a question about what to do with a particular item and he'd freeze up. E. had to take him out of the house at least once.
I enjoyed two breaks: dinner Saturday night with my dad and E., and brunch Sunday with ignazwisdom, who braved two trains to come visit from Brooklyn. Hadn't seen Iggy in ages and that was great. As was brunch, mm. We are going to try to re-watch some TOS eps long distance, so don't be surprised if you start seeing posts about them around here.
Some fun stuff we uncovered, including fannish and baby items
Wanted to share a small percentage of the photos we took on account of them being adorable, personal, and/or fannish. :) Once again, click any thumbnail for bigger.
The corrective shoes I had to wear as a baby. Or, as I've been putting it in my head and as deelaundry said out loud while browsing our picture collection the other day, "baby's first spreader bar."
I guess that makes this "baby's first medical play kit."
(It totally was.)
I was so happy to find these among the bags of stuffed animals in the basement crawlspace. In the middle of the pile are the ones that were/are dearest to me: Dolly (which my dad sewed for me and I couldn't sleep without for years and years), Bronty, Steggy, and the rainbow bear, all of which saw me through childhood and preadolescence, including lining up on the edge of the bed to protect me from E.T. at night.
Man, I had completely forgotten this game, but memories struggled up to the surface as soon as we unpacked it. That happened many times in the oldest boxes, including several of our earliest children's books. Who recalled that my internal image (like the personal Platonic ideal) of lollipops and apples and milk bottles came from The Little Engine That Could? Not me, until I happened to flip to that page.
My first microscope slides. :)
The first plaster figure I painted, I think. Plaster-painting parties were all the rage when we were kids. That and McDonald's parties. Ours had a big hamburger you could climb on. Well, that you'd get yelled at for climbing on.
I got better at painting plaster figures when I was in college.
Some little animals I sculpted that I still think are cute.
And some word art we made in Hebrew High School that I'd forgotten about until that box surfaced.
Fannish stuff
I remembered a lot of these, but was happy to see them again. Thought you might enjoy them too? Included below: the college psych paper where we got to take personality tests as fictional characters, and I did mine as Spike/William the Bloody; high school class notes where I used to write quotations from the Vampire Chronicles and names of characters from the Vampire Diaries/L.J. Smith books; a page from my first-year French notebook where I apparently practiced our earliest lessons using DS9 actors; a book report I wrote in the sixth grade on a DS9 paperback (my English teacher was a Trekkie too); and the Jurassic Park logo I made in tech class for our "learning to use a router" project.
I also found a piece of paper on which I'd drawn a cruise ship cabin where my first long Mary Sue fic took place (Marius/OFC), hee. It was Armand's cruise ship, of course:
My bat mitzvah centerpieces. I was joking around with my sister that my tastes have remained remarkably consistent over the years; if I had to do it all again now, I'd probably choose the same theme and color scheme.
Snape's classroom and dungeon in Legos:
And the TNG uniform my mom made me with magic marker when I was 10 years old, for Halloween:
Thanks for reading. ♥
.
Did manage to sign up for a Kink Bingo card, which I started brainstorming for when I had a chance to breathe on Thursday. There should be a picspam soon. Watch this space.