Tag Archives: Getting Organized

Life Review

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This week my life flashed before my eyes. Generally when one says that, people respond with “Oh No! Did you have a bad accident? Did you get a terminal diagnosis? Did you have a clairvoyant episode outlining the details of your own death, and if so, do you know the date? (And by the way, can I have that painting I’ve always admired?)” I assure you, hopeful reader, that none of these things is true because none of these things is necessary for me to have my life flash quickly and alarmingly before my very eyes. All that is required is a trip to my attic.

See those dark recesses toward the back? You have no idea how much stuff is there. But I do. This is only one side. The other side is worse, and goes back further.

Long time readers will know that part of our cunning plan is to get rid of most of our stuff and move aboard a sailboat. They will know, as well, that we have been married for 31 years. That we have two adult children, that our home is large and has large grounds. What they might not know is that cloistered in our attic is the considerable remains of that 31 year history. Our house has about 3000 square feet. Our attic covers the entire house. Easily 2/3 of that attic is crammed with boxes big and small. Oy vey. I have spent many hours since this blog’s inception going through ‘things’ in my house and toting them to Goodwill. We have the tax deductions to prove it, thanks be to God. But I have not yet touched the attic. Until now.

Over the years as children have outgrown special toys, graduated to new grades in school, or decided they wanted a room ‘remodel’, things got stuffed into the attic for storage because I’ve lived with kids long enough to know that the minute I get rid of something they intuitively know it and look for it. Likewise when my own mother downsized dramatically, I was the recipient of special things that were hers or my father’s. They currently reside in the attic. Then there are things from my own childhood that I have kept for decades. All in the attic. Mike’s home burned to the ground twice when he was growing up, so he has very little from his childhood. He knows what it’s like to lose everything and then be okay.

Just imagine this, times 2 million.

In our attic is a gazillion dollars worth of Legos, Playmobil, action figures, American Girl dolls and their accouterments, Christmas ornaments, old LP’s, Nancy Drew books, a huge collection of rubber animals (anatomically correct, don’t you know), wedding and baby momentos, dressup clothes… Seems like our kids’ entire childhoods are in that attic, safely tucked away for the grandchildren we may never have. If there were any young children in our lives just now, they would be having an amazing time in our attic if we could get them to put down the Nintendo DS.

Some of you more thrifty and organized readers may be echoing my own superego just about now, giving voice to the general tongue lashing that goes on in my head. You know the words, so sing right along with me:  I am reaping what I sowed because I should have been getting rid of stuff all along and shouldn’t have collected so much stuff to begin with. Sure, you would have a good point because there is a lot of ‘sunk costs’ sitting up there in that space. But, by way of ‘walking a mile in my orthotics’, consider this: I grew up a military child. We moved a couple of times in early childhood, then in kindergarten; then again in grades 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 9. We then had three years where I had a stable high school experience, more or less. I’m not complaining, as there are many blessings that come from this kind of upbringing. But I am making the point that the only things that remained stable in our lives were our immediate family, and our stuff. I do not easily get attached to people, but I do get attached to things; the dirty little secret of this vagabond kind of childhood, at least for me.

Home may be where the heart is, but in my upbringing it was defined as where mom hung the portrait of me and my sister over the piano. When the big book cases (which currently grace my family room) were placed, and all the decorator items were in place in the living room, we were ‘home’, for however long it lasted. When the movers brought our stuff to our new digs, it was like Christmas. My brain and my body, and mostly my heart, developed around ‘stuff’ defining our space, and thus defining my feelings of ‘home’. So I guess part of my karmic learning is how to let go of things and still feel whole. I’m getting there but it’s a slow thing.

I’m not quite ready to let go of Andrew’s Playmobil collection. It’s just so cool! And he was so completely adorable with it.

Anyway, this attic has been literally hanging over my head for years. It has been the huge elephant in the middle of the living room of my mind. I knew it was there, but I preferred to walk around it rather than try to tame it.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, I have been wondering if this task of ridding ourselves of the stuff would ever end. And if it never ended, surely we would never get to go sailing down the coast to Mexico and beyond. We would never sail around the U.K. We toyed with the idea of renting out our house furnished, locking up the attic as our continued storage space. But on some level, that just felt like a cop out, like not really making a decision.

So this week Claire and I began with the attic. I pulled down as much stuff as I had space on the garage floor. We threw out a huge bag of trash, sent some stuff to Goodwill, put aside a few things for a friend’s garage sale, and packed up a box of treasures for Kitty down in Texas. Then I stared in horror at the collection of dolls, baby clothes, dress-up costumes and other assorted things that I just don’t have the heart to deal with. All I could think was “there are only about 200 more boxes upstairs”.  The word ‘discouraged’ doesn’t even touch my feelings. Just thinking about it makes me want to go lie down in a dark room with a whiskey and soda. Large, please. This took an entire day, and I was not finished yet because it was only the easy part that we had accomplished. Only about 200 more boxes to go, and countless decisions to make. I walked away from it to prepare dinner.

Goodbye cute little paper giraffe Claire made in the first grade. Goodbye hand decorated photo frame with starfish picture that she won a prize for.

I decided that this was just too much work, both physically and emotionally. There had to be another way. So I waited for the epiphany, and then it came:   What if, instead of having to touch each thing and make the decision to keep or get rid of it, I touched only the things that were most important to me? What if I began to look at things in terms of what I would choose to take to a new house in the future? If I were building my dream home today, what would I take with me? What things give me that comfortable feeling of ‘home’? What things tell me that it is I who live here? If I could choose those things, I would hire an estate agent to come in and have a big estate sale and let go of the rest.

I cannot avoid going through the things in the attic forever. But I can let someone else do all the unpacking; laying things out on tables in an orderly way, then giving me the final say about what I will pull out to keep.  Dear Lord, what a concept! I am almost breathless from the freedom of it. The thought of someone else coming in and doing all that work makes me positively giddy. The sale itself would probably feel about like chopping off an arm, but at least it would be fast and then I could get over it and get on with other things. This idea fills me with a sense of relief that is palpable and that makes me know that it’s the right direction to go. If the feeling is of relief, then the soul has spoken.

This display in our living room is filled with family history from both sides of our family. There is just no way I am getting rid of all of these things. Some, but not all.  We will find a way to store them while we are gone.

As the idea began to take shape, I found that removing the emotional and physical burden of the continual exercise in mourning that is stored in our attic allowed other ideas to take root. Selling the house and buying land we could leave to our children, for instance. I have always wanted to leave land for my children.  Perhaps designing and building a small house on that land in the future, a house that would be easy to keep and that would take us safely into our old age when we are finished with the sailing. Removing the burden of the attic gives me room to dream again.

As I began thinking more about it, I discovered that aside from a select few pieces of furniture,  most of the things that bring me comfort in my home are the decorator items that can easily be packed away. My mother’s Cottage Ware teapot, the piece of art pottery Claire brought me from the Scottish Highlands, the small paintings of our boats, the Native American fetishes I collected in the southwest, my father’s lithograph of the seven mortal sins. Specific stones. The cement maple leaf I made. The block print of Skimmers that Mike and I got when we were first married. These are things that will be put away, waiting to be placed in my next house so I can quickly call it ‘home’.

With the burden of constant purging removed I will be able to enjoy the time I have left in our house, this home we’ve created together, with all of the creative energy of our family’s youth still held firmly in its very bones.  I will be able to focus now on what we will take with us from this place into the bold future, turning my face from what we are leaving behind.

I will likely never make another one of these. It took me a year to perfect the formula to make the cement strong yet thin. The casting is of a maple leaf from the tree in our backyard.

 

Ho Ho……Holy Crap!

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Tis the season, as they say. Sleighbells ring, jingle bells, deck the halls, Santa Claus, and all of that stuff. And the long, dark nights of the year. I’m excited because soon the winter solstice will be upon us and we can celebrate the return of the sun. I’m slighly pagan at this time of year, in spite of my traditional Christian upbringing.

The downside to all this festivity is the decorating. Yes, I certainly DO enjoy beautiful holiday decor, and I enjoy all the pretty lights this time of year. I even smile at the pitiful rooftop santas. But it’s hard to bring a smile to my lips as I’m faced with the sheer number of boxes of Christmas crap that are stored in my attic. I took down 15 boxes of Christmas stuff, collected over the 30 or so years of marriage and two children who loved crafts. I felt like the beast of burden who carried Mary, heavy with child, as I carried each heavy box down the attic stairs and deposited it on the family room floor. At least the donkey could deposit Mary and then rest. At least Mary had Jesus to look forward to after her labors. All I had at the end of my labor was a big mess. And a determination to get rid of half of this stuff.

“Are you getting rid of all your cute little Christmas Village houses?” my neighbor asked. “I don’t know.”, I said. I say this when I am afraid to commit myself to dumping things that I can still visualize being ‘cute’ when set up a certain way. But the ancient and frightening stuffed vintage Santa? Out! The victorian house cookie jar? Gone. I’ve never used a cookie jar in my life. Cookies don’t last long enough in my house to warrant a jar. Any cookie that is going to last that long has to be stuffed into the back of the freezer in a ziploc bag.  Also gone is an entire box of ornaments that I’ve always kept because I bought them when the kids were small, along with a box of ornaments I used when Andrew was too little to be trusted close to a tree with breakable ornaments. I haven’t used them in years, but I always felt like I had to keep them. I’ve decided that rule is silly.

Instead I’ve created a small box for each child to store the precious things they made over the years. Claire’s box will have her little stuffed santa, and the pinecone wise men and wizards. Andrew’s box will have his little clay candle holder, his styrofoam heart with smelly potpourri glued to the outside, and his salt dough dinosaurs in fancy colors.

Those boxes will also contain all of the ornaments I’ve bought the kids over the years so that they would have a box to take with them when they have their own homes. We’ve had a tradition in our family that on Christmas eve each child receives an ornament and a new pair of pajamas. We allowed them to open these two gifts by way of bribing them to sleep late on Christmas morning. Now that they are 19 and 26, I feel sure I can forgo the buying of more ornaments that will mean more to me than to them. I might still consider pajamas, though.

Among the things I’m keeping is my collection of miniature ornaments. I always look forward to these each year. They are made by Hallmark, and I used to buy them every year. I think I can find a place on a sailboat for these little ornaments so that we can have an actual Christmas tree, no matter where we are in the world. I didn’t even consider getting rid of any of them.

The results of my labors are such that I will have maybe 3 or 4 boxes of actual ornaments to go into the attic at the end of the season. Half of my Victorian village made the cut, so I get to have my cake and eat it, too, on that subject. If it’s too much of a pain to set them up and pack them away this year, then they’ll go after the holidays. In all, a fairly rewarding purge, and almost painless.

Update on the furniture situation: thank God for sisters! Between my two sisters, over the Thanksgiving weekend I parted with two chairs, a cabinet, a rug, a desk, a set of china, a silver tea service, and various other bits and pieces, enabling me to move even more stuff into the garage staging area. The great purge continues!

Organizing My Kitchen: Getting Rid of Clutter!

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Just because I’ve posted about the concepts of living in a ‘tiny house‘ and ‘visualizing your life‘ doesn’t mean I’m not doing the work! This plan is all about the work of organizing my house so we can live on board a sailboat. I’ve started in the kitchen and I’d like to share with you the ‘before’ photos of my cabinets. Mothers and grandmothers everywhere are shuddering bleakly as I open the dark recesses of my kitchen cabinets to the curious public. But, hey, whatever it takes to keep me focused and on-task. I ask only that you be kind in your comments. I’ve been living this way for years and have only now understood how I’ve created my own stress. It’s a significant blow to the ego and I need time to recover.

getting rid of clutter

It looks like I need help organizing my house!

Looking at the first photo, on the left, you will see a cabinet that is being used as a bookcase, a medicine cabinet, and I don’t know what else is on the top shelf.  Down below there is a basket of miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t have another home, some jars of home made jam and salsa, and way in the back, my box of cookie cutters, which I use approximately every decade.

Now lets turn around to get a load of the glassware cabinet, which is supposed to ‘add’ to the decor of the kitchen. Martha Steward I am not. (Although I could be if I had her staff.) On the top shelf are champagne glasses we use on Christmas day only. They are too tall for the shelf so you can see only their red bottoms.  Then there is the lovely teapot given to me by my daughter several Christmases ago and our good glassware.  On the bottom is more of our glassware, some cups (hanging) that I never use but like anyhow, and our tea boxes. There is also a tea canister with the word ‘Paris’ on it. Very chic, to be sure.

Organizing the kitchen

Organizing the kitchen will make me happy!

The cabinets below the glassware were equally ill-used. Heavy corning ware was stored with the waffle iron, crock pot, hand blender, and rice cooker, among other miscellaneous kitchen-related ‘stuff”. The snap-ware was jumbled in a basket. Suffice to say that whoever did the dishes on any given day used this cabinet as a catch-all for things that had no other place.

Clearly the only solution was to dump everything on the floor and start over.

I was ruthless when clearing these cabinets out. I completely emptied them, tossing things in the garbage or Goodwill box as I went. Peter Walsh was right. The garbage can IS my friend.  Out-of-date medicine? Gone! Broken binder with recipes printed out on computer paper with the little perforations on each side? Trashed! (For those of you too young to remember, computer paper used to come in one long sheet, with perforations on each side and at top and bottom. This kind of paper came along right after mimeograph sheets, which also no longer exist.) Stacks of dishes I found on the top shelf? Half in the staging area in the garage, half stored neatly in an appropriate cabinet. I tell you, I was without ruth!

Astute readers caught the illogical use of this cabinet for medicines. What you didn’t know is that the medicine chest in the main bathroom stood literally empty. I know, I know. Don’t hassle me with your logic, okay? I’m baring my soul here.

I got side tracked for a couple of hours while I searched for materials and then constructed another shelf for the medicine cabinet, but in the end, all the medication and first aid stuff fit very nicely, with room to spare. Between the two sets of cabinets I got rid of two large boxes of stuff and filled a huge trashbag. Misson accomplished!

The next question was how to restock the cabinets in a more organized way. This is where The Book comes in.  Because of internet information overload, I’ve chosen to stick with Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff.  There are many books out there, but I’m happy with this one and don’t want to clutter up my mind with extraneous information. So, in the chapter on kitchen organizing, Peter talks about the ‘magic triangle’ concept. I was familiar with the concept, but not in terms of organizing, only in terms of working. So when he said that the things you use most often need to be inside the triangle and the things you use least need to be way outside of it, that helped enormously with decision-making here.

The first set of cabinets is just outside my work triangle, so things I use but not very often can live there. I also needed a place to store all the canned goods I’ve been making this year, and it’s been a handy place for the cookbooks I do use.  At the bottom will go kitchen gadgets that I use rarely but still enough to keep them, like the waffle iron and the heavy casserole dishes.  We’re not living on a boat yet. You can see the results in this ‘after’ photo. I am determined to keep those voids empty! In the end there was plenty of room for the little red toolbox, which we keep handy with basic tools for quick jobs. Potatoes and onions and the like will be stored in the basket.

Clutter free and logical, too!

The second set of cabinets said goodbye to the crystal glassware, which was moved to another space. I had to put the cute teapot in the Goodwill box, with a slight sigh of pain, because we have an electric tea kettle we use all the time, several times per day. The teapot is pretty, but I can’t take it on the boat, and I never use it anymore. Gone, too, is the ‘Paris’ canister. Clearing this cabinet out gave me room to store the large pasta bowl that has lived above the refrigerator for 10 years. I use it infrequently now that we’re gluten-free, but it also serves as a good salad bowl. And I like the way it looks.

organizing kitchen cabinets

The organized cabinet.

This cabinet is not being put to its best use yet, but at least it’s cleared of clutter. I may put a door on one side and store my baking supplies here because this area offers much more counter top workspace than the area I generally use. This would also create more food storage space in the kitchen, a constant irritation. I’m going to save that for phase 2 of the kitchen reorganization.

The lower cabinets are now holding only the things we use frequently and need easy access to. Of course being easily accessible also means they will be easy to put away, a constant challenge in my family. The snap-ware is all organized and on one shelf, although Mike made a valid point that we likely could get rid of some of it. That could happen.

This organized cabinet is with arm's reach of the work triangle.

Mission accomplished in this cabinet.

Mission accomplised! With room for the Vitamix.

So we’re off and running with this whole ‘staying organized at home thing’! The hardest part so far is going to be finishing with one room before I go on to the other. Can you say “Attention Deficit Disorder”? I have a new mantra: “Must finish what I start. Must finish what I start. Must finish what I start”.  I might be losing that battle because I started on the closet in the family room already, and the kitchen organizing is still underway. I’ll do the walk of shame later, I promise.