Cleaning the Basement

 

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.

1. Specific:  A workable basement suitable as a storage area
2. Measurable:  Decided to work by the clock, forty minutes a week in one or two sessions
3. 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.
4. Relevant:  What I don't do will default to my survivors
5. 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.

Vacuuming

Floor surfaces in my house could use some attention.  I mopped the kitchen's synthetic tile floor.  A two person job with furniture repositioning.  Most of my floor surfaces, though, are carpeting.  Sturdy synthetic nylon.  Most installed when we moved into our house in 1981, with a few more recentm additions.  By the advise of most experts on home maintenance, once in book, now online.  The vacuum with rotating brush head should be allowed to clean and restore this flooring weekly.  I use my bedroom and part of the living room and the exposed parts of the family room's Berber carpet daily.  As a reward to myself for passing Endocrinology Boards I treated myself to an elegant round rug for my office, since relocated to My Space with retirement.  I step on it daily.  About once a week I do my various loads of laundry, taking the dried clothing to the living room for folding.  Residue from the carpet finds its way to the surfaces of the clothing I had just laundered.  So I got out the vacuum cleaner to make long overdue amends.

It is not like the carpets never get cleaned.  In anticipation of Passover, we arrange for formal carpet cleaning of the living room, dining room, upstairs landing, and stairs.  In order to do this, the cleaning service has to vacuum all the surfaces first.  The bedroom and My Space have neglect exceeding one year,  I made the vacuum cleaner, a modern Shark Model with YouTube access guiding me in its use, fully functional.  Empty bag.  No suction without an empty bag.  Learned how to put the rolling brush in carpet mode.  Create Zones.  Easy:  upper landing, always kept clear, and my special area rug.  Hard Zones:  my half of the bedroom which needed subzones as I moved stuff covering the floor to expose carpeting, then vacuumed, then moved some selectively back to expose another section of the royal blue velvet pile.  Did this three times.  Slightly winded but done.  Wife's side of bedroom a lost cause, no carpeting exposed beneath clothing, books, and assorted surface priorities that she has.  Still, one-person job.

Living room: two-person job.  Moving and replacing a lot of furniture, creating sub-zones.  The area near the room's entrance had its carpeting tamped down daily with contributions of outside walking ground beneath the carpet's surface to its lower pile.  I vacuumed each zone in two directions.  Between the moving and replacing of furniture, negotiating the vacuum's excessively long cord, and long swaths of surface, each cleaned in two directions, I found this unexpectedly tiring.  But accomplished in a way that I could discern an improvement when this part of the project was completed.

That leaves me with two more sections.  The dining room will be fairly easy.  Mostly chairs to move and replace.  Finally, the stairs, walked upon multiple times daily.  This one needs the tools.   I found most of them.  Family Room judged lost cause.

Those are the carpeted surfaces.  There are other surfaces, including our tiled entry hall.  This might be better cleaned with a Swiffer Kit, which I own but need to make functional.  Laundry Room with kitty litter dragged by Priscilla the Cat into the adjacent powder room and across the living room surface.  Vacuum without the brush beater, followed by mop or Swiffer.

Having done this, and also recognizing some exceeds my capacity for doing more than on rare bursts of determination, I will need to engage a professional cleaning crew.  And sooner rather than later.