A (minor middle-class male) Dillema
I have too much stuff.
Since we've been in the apartment for a year they apartment manager offered us either a free re-painting or a free carpet cleaning. The carpet cleaning seemed like the most useful and the easiest to deal with for us, so that's what we went with.
We moved the kitchen table and chairs, but pretty much everything else is staying where it is. However i had noticed a spot of mold on the carpet near the bookshelves by the TV. So after cleaning everything else up i decided to try dragging the left set of bookshelves away from that spot so they could get at it to clean it. I carefully dragged the overloaded shelves a few inches away from the wall, and then before i got any further saw that the mold had actually gotten under the sides of the shelves (the only part that actually rests on the ground.) I dragged the right side away as well and saw it too had mold under it, and it looked like there was possible mold under the next shelf as well, which meant i would also have to move those shelves. (At first glance at least none of the other shelves seem to have this problem. Maybe it's cause these ones are right next to the window?)
That meant that just dragging them a little way to the side was totally out of the question. So i began unloading all the games and DVDs from the shelves and pilling them in the "Office" area (which is clean enough we had figured it didn't need to be dealt with, ie we weren't willing to clear out that much clutter =) and as the stacks grew and grew i realized that i had a lot of stuff. Originally i had everything organized by category and then alphabet (well, except for the games, which were strictly sorted by system and then vaguely sorted by how much i like them.) But over time as i got more and more stuff it got more and more disorganized. Now a lot of stuff is/was out of order and was double-stacked.
So since i've already moved all the stuff off the shelves this seems like a good time to reorganize. However the only way that's going to happen is if i de-box a lot of stuff and put it in some kind of disk folder. This is something i've been avoiding for a long time because i like being able to see my stuff on shelves. However the way everything was double-stacked it was hard to see much anyways, and the only other way to resolve it would be to get some more shelves, which we really don't have room for.
So what should i put in folders? I want the stuff on the shelves to be the stuff that, well, i want to have on the shelves. I suppose that means things that i like and/or things that are aesthetically pleasing. But should i also put any preference towards stuff that's current?
The hardest decision is going to be what to do about things like Babylon 5. The boxes are pretty, and i love the series, but they take up almost half a shelf by themselves =/ Stargate already got moved off of the shelves for the same reason (since it takes up even more space and i don't like it anywhere near as much as B5 =) So do i devote half a shelf of space to B5 because i like it so much, or do i put it in folders so i can have a more varied set of stuff on the shelves?
And what should i do with the de-disked boxes? My choices are either pack them away somewhere, or throw them away. The whole reason i'm doing this is because of a lack of space, so packing them away would be difficult. I'd probably have to box them up and put them in the carport storage thing, but i'm not sure how protected from the elements they would be in there and what kind of shape they would be in after a year or so. And trashing them would be really hard in the case of things i really like, like B5 :(
Since we've been in the apartment for a year they apartment manager offered us either a free re-painting or a free carpet cleaning. The carpet cleaning seemed like the most useful and the easiest to deal with for us, so that's what we went with.
We moved the kitchen table and chairs, but pretty much everything else is staying where it is. However i had noticed a spot of mold on the carpet near the bookshelves by the TV. So after cleaning everything else up i decided to try dragging the left set of bookshelves away from that spot so they could get at it to clean it. I carefully dragged the overloaded shelves a few inches away from the wall, and then before i got any further saw that the mold had actually gotten under the sides of the shelves (the only part that actually rests on the ground.) I dragged the right side away as well and saw it too had mold under it, and it looked like there was possible mold under the next shelf as well, which meant i would also have to move those shelves. (At first glance at least none of the other shelves seem to have this problem. Maybe it's cause these ones are right next to the window?)
That meant that just dragging them a little way to the side was totally out of the question. So i began unloading all the games and DVDs from the shelves and pilling them in the "Office" area (which is clean enough we had figured it didn't need to be dealt with, ie we weren't willing to clear out that much clutter =) and as the stacks grew and grew i realized that i had a lot of stuff. Originally i had everything organized by category and then alphabet (well, except for the games, which were strictly sorted by system and then vaguely sorted by how much i like them.) But over time as i got more and more stuff it got more and more disorganized. Now a lot of stuff is/was out of order and was double-stacked.
So since i've already moved all the stuff off the shelves this seems like a good time to reorganize. However the only way that's going to happen is if i de-box a lot of stuff and put it in some kind of disk folder. This is something i've been avoiding for a long time because i like being able to see my stuff on shelves. However the way everything was double-stacked it was hard to see much anyways, and the only other way to resolve it would be to get some more shelves, which we really don't have room for.
So what should i put in folders? I want the stuff on the shelves to be the stuff that, well, i want to have on the shelves. I suppose that means things that i like and/or things that are aesthetically pleasing. But should i also put any preference towards stuff that's current?
The hardest decision is going to be what to do about things like Babylon 5. The boxes are pretty, and i love the series, but they take up almost half a shelf by themselves =/ Stargate already got moved off of the shelves for the same reason (since it takes up even more space and i don't like it anywhere near as much as B5 =) So do i devote half a shelf of space to B5 because i like it so much, or do i put it in folders so i can have a more varied set of stuff on the shelves?
And what should i do with the de-disked boxes? My choices are either pack them away somewhere, or throw them away. The whole reason i'm doing this is because of a lack of space, so packing them away would be difficult. I'd probably have to box them up and put them in the carport storage thing, but i'm not sure how protected from the elements they would be in there and what kind of shape they would be in after a year or so. And trashing them would be really hard in the case of things i really like, like B5 :(