Cleaning the Basement

One of the challenges of my year in retirement has been using very large blocks of time purposefully.  I have had the good fortune to look ahead a lot, putting money away for retirement, investing in a house, buying insurance, writing a will, doing some estate planning.

At retirement I find myself at the junction of harvesting the efforts and arranging for end of life planning.  Basically my house is cluttered, and for a lot of reasons.  We don't quite make the hoarding shows on TV but fall a notch short.  Our possessions are the artifacts of how we lived, no different than the pottery that excites archaeologists but more of it.  Now that I am home a lot more, the role of my house expands from a dwelling to a place to live and produce.  Eventually what is here goes to my children to dispose of unless I do it first.  As a consequence, my approach to the house has become more purposeful.  The kitchen was made functional and attractive a few years ago.  I now enjoy being there.  Not long after retiring, I needed My Space and made it happen over seven months.  Each day now I sit on either a recaptured recliner with slip cover or a somewhat battered swivel chair with horrid nauseous green upholstery but comfort unsurpassed by any other desk chair I have ever had.  The stereo bought for $80 sits atop the file cabinet to my left and the new 55" TV with more options than I know how to use lies against a main wall.  There is still more to do here but not now.

In order to finish the rest of the house, I need to define storage space, preferably a single storage focus, which will be the basement.  I pay a good deal of money each month for an outside storage space, initially to house excess from my old office.  But I've paid some $18K over ten years to house stuff that mostly I don't want and certainly haven't used.  That doesn't make a lot of sense.  So if I can find an area that size in my basement, the money savings would pay for a lot of things, including a couple of vacations to escape from the house.  No other clutter around the house can be moved either until there is a defined space to move it to.  That makes the basement high priority.

As Tracy McCubbin notes in her book  Making Space, Clutter Free,  most of what we have accumulated stays here based on some psychological impediment to more rational disposal.  I like my past which has been one of achievement.  I don't need my college and medical school texts, though.  There's a certain amount of what might have been or what I aspired to.  I have two sets of yard sale golf clubs, some tennis rackets, in-line skates.  Or somebody could use this some day.  My IKEA bookcase could be quite attractive.  Unfortunately, I could buy another with what I pay for two month's storage.  Stuff is comforting, though rarely rational.  All that baby stuff could be offered to homeless shelters.  I learned this week that they can no longer accept them as safety regulations have changed since my children used them 30+ years ago.

I have a plan of attack, though.  First, create floor space.  My wife's papers fill multiple boxes.  magazines, put the stuff with handwriting into new boxes and line them along a discreet wall.  Move any shelving to another wall once I can get open floor space.  Make a deal with trash hauler for the baby stuff.   If I am going to give something to Goodwill, do it the week of harvest.   My storage unit has about 20 more boxes.  Take three a week home.  Anything electronic goes to electronic recycling at the state landfill, which also takes two boxes of paper a month for shredding.  Old paint has a disposal center, though those cans line our crawl space where they do not take up a lot of useful storage space.  When the kids moved, they created a fee-free storage space for themselves.  They live far away and will not use this stuff again.  Donate.  Stay scheduled.  Stay purposeful.  Stay relentless.