Beginning in the Basement
So instead of buying a bigger house or adding an addition to our humble abode we’ve decided to try and make our stuff fit the home we actually own and not some fantasy version that we imagine in our wildest dreams. To do this we have to get rid of stuff. This is very difficult. We’re pack rats of the highest order and parting with stuff is such ’sweet sweet sorrow’. Actually it’s probably closer to ripping our innards out without the help of anesthetic.
Anyway, the show is on the road and we began in the basement. It was a mess. We have an unfinshed basement and for a couple of years we’ve just been dumping stuff down there without much serious thought to longevity.
After much hard work and numerous trips to the dump,as well as mounds of recycling, we radically overhauled the state of the basement. You can find things down there now! There are still items that need to be disposed of, like the original house windows, but otherwise it is done.
Current temperature 21F/-6C
January 19th, 2006 at 7:09 am
She’s being far too generous when she says “We’re pack rats of the highest order” - the problem is arguably much more me then her. She can be wonderfully clear headed about these things (absolutely no sarcasm intended), where I’m terrible about throwing anything away. While part of the problem is that I always think “That might be useful someday.” (which I’ve conveniently rationalized into “WeatherGirl might be able to make art with that someday” so it’s not really my problem.), it’s much more this weird and misguided inner archivist. Surely someday in the future (maybe when Sub-Evil Boy is a famous actor) archivists and librarians will want to know every possible detail of our lives, so we can’t really throw away this important window in our remarkable lives! “I know I’ve never read that book, and probably never will, but isn’t it important that we own it?!?” Or not.
And she has to live with this bizarre behavior, as our lives and house continue to fill up with minutia and “history”. She’s slowly rehabilitating me, though, and I’m actually letting go of some things, including bags of books we donated to the UMM library in the fall. Oh, did that hurt, even though I’ll probably never actually miss a single one of them.
Now I need to take a bulldozer to my office (or burn it to the ground and start over)…
January 21st, 2006 at 11:44 am
Letting go of books is one of the hardest tasks we’ve had to face. Books are very important to whole family and the idea of getting rid of them is counter-intuitive for us. But faced with boxes of books that have been in the back of a cupboard for close to twelve years, it’s a little difficult to justify holding on to them on the off chance we might need them. Who knew what was in those boxes anyway. So we passed many on to a good home and are working towards having every book on a shelf and accessible.
Of course none of this has stopped us acquiring more books.