Sunday, March 20, 2011

The opposite of procrastination

A terrible thing has been creeping up on me the past few weeks. Not spring cleaning, though it is the time of year when you don't wait for all the snow to melt to start raking up last fall's leavings


And when green things start to look even better than usual next to the hibernating ones


And my stone bunny emerges again from under its pile of winter shovelings.


All that cleaning and reorganizing I've been getting up to... well, it got me doing some serious math.  Like, what it would cost me, per additional room, to move to a bigger house.  Which is sort of inflated because I could get the same effect for less investment by adding on to the current house, if I didn't put a value on my sanity mid-renovation, but I do.  And my conservative estimate on the value of the 8x12' room I use for storage works out to about $30,000.  Is there $30,000 worth of junk in there?  No way. 

You can see where the creeping terribleness is coming in.  I would like more space.  I would not like to go through all that junk and figure out what can go to a thrift store and then package it up to go there.  But I would like more space.

And yesterday afternoon, I thought - ENOUGH.  and instead of going through boxes and shedding stuff like I have for the past 15ish years in there, I moved every single box and bag out of it, turning the next room over into something out of that show about people who hoard stuff. 

It took 5 hours, and I am a fast mover. 

Then I dismantled the biggest storage shelf and moved it out for donation purposes so I couldn't put more stuff back in there. 

Then I realized I need to say goodbye to another big shelf if I want to be able to use that room for anything functional so I got rid of it too.

Then I realized I need to get rid of at least 60% of what I was hanging on to because I've lost about that much storage and my workbench was still completely covered in boxes.

(that's okay though.  I don't need the first communion certificate of my dad's childless cousin who died 35 years ago, or six French-English dictionaries.)

It will be a miracle if I get everything out the door or back into the room by bedtime tonight, but hey!


you can see the floor now.

2 comments:

TexNan said...

How brave you are! (Have I made that comment before? Seems as if I'm often saying that to you.)

It's beautifully warm here, and we've been working in our garden for a couple of weeks, getting it ready for spring. Yesterday, I planted in the kitchen garden but I still have to work on the front beds, once I've killed that damnable Johnson grass that refuses to die. All the while I'm ignoring closets and cabinets that need purging.

One of these days....

Mary Keenan said...

It's so easy to ignore closets and cabinets till you help somebody downsize in a big big way... then everything at home that isn't in daily use is such a horror!