Our electronic library permits four checkouts a month. Use it or lose it for that month. As the New Year transitioned, along with my twelve semiannual projects, I opted to merge book with project. Ebook on decluttering. Lots of options from the library search. I settled on a popular one from Europe, as the incentive to include a purge of my basement lay on minimizing the need for my survivors to rent dumpsters, as the family across the street did.
A few days into reading the book, maybe a third of the way through, I am still reading pages of rationalizations for doing this. Most I could have figured out. How to do it comes in small quanta, but I am hoping the chapters I read in the coming week will be more explicit.
My projects are always based on SMART criteria, as is this book.
- Specific: A workable basement suitable as a storage area
- Measurable: Decided to work by the clock, forty minutes a week in one or two sessions
- Attainable: I don't know how many minutes are really needed or what external resources will need purchasing or hiring. 40 minutes/ wk * 25 weeks = 1000 min = 17 hours. I guess if I hired a pro it would take about two full work days.
- Relevant: What I don't do will default to my survivors
- Time-bound: My initiatives are in six month segments
With the New Year underway, I've done my first weekly allotment. Depending on where I start, either papers dominate or stuff dominates. I found my first need for external help. Old carpeting in rolls has attracted vermin. With another person, I can lift them. Maybe my usual trash carter will take them for an added fee. I found bags of unsorted papers and others of semi-sorted papers. Random sample dates. All more than 14 years old. I found a few keepers like my daughter's college graduation program. Some minor harvesting, others to recycle bin.
Financial statements in bags and boxes are long past their keep dates. Those get shredded. My county offers two days a month when they will accept two boxes per visit of papers for shredding. I need to box as I go and keep my eye on the calendar. Commercial outfits like Staples shred by the pound. What I've captured weighs a lot of pounds.
There is stuff. I bought things for my kitchen that never left the purchase boxes. I found a bread maker that I last used decades ago. There is a printer not quite ancient enough for a museum but too old to function for usual home printing. The state offers self-drop-off electronics recycling. I expect a few trips there. Some old floor lamps too dangerous to revive. Old paint from the pre-Y2K era. There is a collection system for these. I do not know if they have a volume limit, but they collect twice a month.
There are sentimentals. I do not think I need to retain my children's school work. They can have their own kids and start mementos from precious young talent in their own houses.
My children each had apartments in driving range before seeking education and careers at airplane distances. They make enough money to buy themselves better stuff than they dropped off here. New homes for the stuff they dropped off, if possible. Or landfill if that's the better option. Or yard sale. Estate sale as last resort.
In the opposite corner, I have baby furniture. Safety standards have changed considerably since their 1980s acquisition. Landfill for those.
I don't yet have a good sense of how much clearance 17 hours of effort will produce. Nor have I yet established a willingness to dispose of items linked to memories or what I've accomplished over a lifetime. Swedish Method tries to reconcile these. Still have the majority of the book left to read.
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