Decluttering...necessary, painful, and long overdue
I've been thinking about moving sometime soon, which is a whole different frame of mind from, "Call the realtor by April 15th." For many months I've been in the "sometime soon" mode. However, when I got my hand out of the splint, I had no more excuses for not operating in the "Call the realtor" mode. My daughter-in-law, Pam, was the major motivation for this shift in thinking. She has taken me in hand in the nicest possible way.
Sometime around the middle of February, she asked me if I'd like some help decluttering and getting the house ready for sale. It took me about three seconds to say YES! Pam got out her calendar and said she could give me Saturday, March 10th, and Sunday, March 18th, if we needed it. I planned to take Before and After pictures as we went along. Had I done so, this would be quite the interesting record of our efforts. I managed to take a few Befores of my office, but none of, say, the utility room on the ground floor where we started.
I didn't even know for sure what the heck was in the utility room where my HVAC lives and the adjacent laundry room. We (mostly Pam) pulled everything out of utility room and divided it up into keep (a very small pile), donate (the cat carrier belonging to a deceased cat, a duffel bag that hasn't been used in ten years, etc.), and trash (empty paint cans). The keeps were mostly books from the bookcase in the laundry room: the keepers found homes on other bookcases. Even the bookcase they were on was labeled 'trash:' it was an old IKEA special, probably 40-years-old and not built for the ages. It was falling apart. It joined the trash pile. The donations went into recycle bags, and the trash went into regular trash bags. Pam volunteered John to stop by on Wednesday night to put the trash out and load the donations into their SUV for delivery to a Thrift store by them. How wonderful is that?
The bags of donations waiting to be taken to a thrift shop.
So often I do well at the sorting and deciding but then bog down at the donating. For the amount of donations we generated, I would have had load up my shopping cart four or five times, then push/pull it seven blocks to the thrift shop. I hate pushing/pulling that damn shopping cart!
Just about the time we finished up in the utility room/laundry area, John arrived.
He is a personal trainer, and he had clients from 8:00 until 1:00, but his afternoon was free. My granddaughter, Samantha, showed up long enough to help him carry my living room recliner and its hassock up to the third floor.
Samantha in San Diego in September.
The third floor has been empty since Sam moved out six months ago, and that room is one on the house's selling points. I'm staging it because, empty, it would be easy to mistake its size. It is a really large room and one of the most attractive features of this house.
I had a queen-sized bed in there already -- Sam left her very old mattress behind and I bought a cheap platform bed to put it on -- along with her TV stand and a 32" TV. Besides the recliner and hassock, I had John and Sam move one of the three bookcases in my bedroom up there. Pam and I moved some of the books upstairs and jammed the rest into the two remaining bookcases. The third floor now looks good...and roomy...and my bedroom looks a bit less cramped.
Sam took off at this point, and John, Pam, and I had some lunch, after which they also left and I collapsed. Pam did all the heavy lifting, but I was up and down stairs more times than I could count. Plus, all those keep/toss/donate decisions are exhausting.
I spent this week working on my office...right now it looks messy...but underneath the very temporary mess, it's organized.
I also pulled out all the boxes, etc., that were under my bed and made some surprising discoveries (old paper records in accordian files and briefcases), and made more keep/toss decisions. Perhaps I should move my bed more often and dust under it: I had to deal with more dust than I have ever seen in one place before.
Pam came back last Sunday morning, and the two of us -- no John, no Sam -- went through all the closets on the third floor. When Sam moved out, she only took what she was going to use which left a whole lot of stuff to deal with. This past Wednesday I had another half a dozen bags of trash to put out and more bags are waiting for John to pick them up and take to the Thrift store. There's still clean up/fix up things to do, which entail hired help, but I feel like I'm over the hump. FanSee
Sometime around the middle of February, she asked me if I'd like some help decluttering and getting the house ready for sale. It took me about three seconds to say YES! Pam got out her calendar and said she could give me Saturday, March 10th, and Sunday, March 18th, if we needed it. I planned to take Before and After pictures as we went along. Had I done so, this would be quite the interesting record of our efforts. I managed to take a few Befores of my office, but none of, say, the utility room on the ground floor where we started.
I didn't even know for sure what the heck was in the utility room where my HVAC lives and the adjacent laundry room. We (mostly Pam) pulled everything out of utility room and divided it up into keep (a very small pile), donate (the cat carrier belonging to a deceased cat, a duffel bag that hasn't been used in ten years, etc.), and trash (empty paint cans). The keeps were mostly books from the bookcase in the laundry room: the keepers found homes on other bookcases. Even the bookcase they were on was labeled 'trash:' it was an old IKEA special, probably 40-years-old and not built for the ages. It was falling apart. It joined the trash pile. The donations went into recycle bags, and the trash went into regular trash bags. Pam volunteered John to stop by on Wednesday night to put the trash out and load the donations into their SUV for delivery to a Thrift store by them. How wonderful is that?
The bags of donations waiting to be taken to a thrift shop.
So often I do well at the sorting and deciding but then bog down at the donating. For the amount of donations we generated, I would have had load up my shopping cart four or five times, then push/pull it seven blocks to the thrift shop. I hate pushing/pulling that damn shopping cart!
Just about the time we finished up in the utility room/laundry area, John arrived.
He is a personal trainer, and he had clients from 8:00 until 1:00, but his afternoon was free. My granddaughter, Samantha, showed up long enough to help him carry my living room recliner and its hassock up to the third floor.
Samantha in San Diego in September.
The third floor has been empty since Sam moved out six months ago, and that room is one on the house's selling points. I'm staging it because, empty, it would be easy to mistake its size. It is a really large room and one of the most attractive features of this house.
I had a queen-sized bed in there already -- Sam left her very old mattress behind and I bought a cheap platform bed to put it on -- along with her TV stand and a 32" TV. Besides the recliner and hassock, I had John and Sam move one of the three bookcases in my bedroom up there. Pam and I moved some of the books upstairs and jammed the rest into the two remaining bookcases. The third floor now looks good...and roomy...and my bedroom looks a bit less cramped.
Sam took off at this point, and John, Pam, and I had some lunch, after which they also left and I collapsed. Pam did all the heavy lifting, but I was up and down stairs more times than I could count. Plus, all those keep/toss/donate decisions are exhausting.
I spent this week working on my office...right now it looks messy...but underneath the very temporary mess, it's organized.
I also pulled out all the boxes, etc., that were under my bed and made some surprising discoveries (old paper records in accordian files and briefcases), and made more keep/toss decisions. Perhaps I should move my bed more often and dust under it: I had to deal with more dust than I have ever seen in one place before.
Pam came back last Sunday morning, and the two of us -- no John, no Sam -- went through all the closets on the third floor. When Sam moved out, she only took what she was going to use which left a whole lot of stuff to deal with. This past Wednesday I had another half a dozen bags of trash to put out and more bags are waiting for John to pick them up and take to the Thrift store. There's still clean up/fix up things to do, which entail hired help, but I feel like I'm over the hump. FanSee