Locally, I'm caught up in an email discussion about the struggle to keep one's house in order. I wrote:
I could use a little motivation to keep my house in order. One reason I want to move to a smaller place is to have more order. I love order just enough to appreciate it after I've cleaned up and to think I should keep it that way and then to remember that feeling, later, when disorder has taken over.
And then this:
I'm thinking of ordering a dumpster, just to fill it up. A dumpster's worth of stuff removed from my house would really make me feel better.
The idea of a yard sale was raised. My response:
It's not worth dealing with strangers pawing through my things for a few hundred bucks. You have to sort through things and display them and be pleasant to everyone and face their cheapness. Horrible!
Comments?
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26 comments:
Ronin: Funny! You're right I could blog. That's a plus, as it is for all sorts of things, like crashing my car.
Leland: "Take all of it to the Goodwill. Try to do it all in one trip." That statement so misestimates the size of the problem. Not to mention the size of my car. My problem isn't that I'm clinging to things, just that I am not taking the trouble to rid myself of them. If I had a checklist of all my possessions and could make items disappear by checking them off, I would have no trouble.
Sippican: "Miniturization" is an extreme term when you consider that I want to downsize from a house that is 4000 square feet PLUS attic and basement. I would not make the mistake of just stuffing the old junk in new closets. I hate stuffed closets. Keep in mind that I have two adult sons in the final stage of moving out, so just to have the same space per person, I could do with a much smaller space.
Lindsey: And a blind in another room just broke.
There is no reason to throw in a dumpster what might actually be sold at a yard sale... not because you should have a yard sale, but because there are charitable organizations who will pick stuff like that up and haul it away for you, so they can give it to those who can really use it. You would be surprised what they are willing to take, and how much they're willing to take, too.
At the very least you should find one of those organizations and give them first shot at the stuff you're going to toss.
Mcg: I would give usable stuff to Goodwill or St. Vincent's (which is less picky than Goodwill, in my experience). Maybe Goodwill has a container to drop off that they come back and pick up. That would be helpful.
With three children at home (and not a big home) clutter and disorder are a constant struggle for my wife and I. Even though we have moved twice in the past five years and got rid of a lot, its still too much, especially as older relatives start passing along things. A couple points:
1. If you get to the point that you know what you can get rid of, giving it away is the best route, unless its something of significant value that can be easily sold.
2. Deciding what to get rid of can be very difficult, moving can force the issue. Do I really want to pack and unpack this?
3. I think we have all been in very neat orderly homes that lacked "fun" its not good to get too out of control but we've always tried to err on the side of having a happy home with creative (i.e. kinds messy)kids. I can't say what happens with no kids around.
Good luck, you can always go the FlyLady route, we Americans have too much stuff. When we lived in the Marshall Islands, their slang name for us, roughly translated, was "people with a lot of things."
It wasn't a compliment.
I hate getting rid of stuff. But I love the thought of someone--anyone--making use of it. So after we moved and realized how much we didn't need, we had a big yard sale, with everything priced incredibly cheaply. And if someone thought the price was too high, I probably lowered it. The idea wasn't to make money; it was to find my stuff a home.
Since then I've taken things to the trailers that several organizations maintain nearby or responded to one of the postcards saying "We'll have a truck in your area two weeks from Friday; please call for a pick-up."
SteveR: FlyLady -- I had never heard of that, but then I looked at the site and it kind of scared me. For some reason, though, it motivated me to set a timer at 60 minutes and try to do as much as I could but only for an hour. I got a lot done! If I did that every day or so, I would reach into the deeply troubled recesses of this old house -- like the studio, where a table leg broke, and a whole lot of boxed games fell on the floor. I've been pretending that didn't happen!
Yeah Fly Lady is a bit scary but she makes a lot of sense and as I understand has quite a following. Our biggest downfall is clutter on surfaces, table tops, counters, etc. "hot spots" as she calls them. Yous are not alone..
YOu should submit yourself at once to Mission Organization! It would be fun!
What I've gleaned from them is that you have to apply the same rigorous methodology of orderliness to home as to work.
I tried the garage sale thing, too. Made about 10 bucks. Totally bad experience.
What an odd coincidence. I also wrote a post today about hating housework and fighting disorder and -- Dale -- about entropy. Maybe this is something people (or people named Ann?!) think about on holidays, because on ordinary days your routine tends to push the clutter into the background.
If you don't want to deal with cheapskates coming to your yard sale, how about a "free sale" instead? People will take lots of stuff off your hands, if it's free. No haggling!
Ann--watch one episode of TLC's Clean Sweep. Then give yourself some time to reflect.
After that, let go most everything you haven't worn, touched, used in two years.
Renew yourself.
A lot of people really enjoy having garage sales. You might have a friend like that. If you do, ask her if they'll sell your stuff at their next big sale- offer her half the gross or whatever.
My parents did this and it was a win-win- the bigger the sale looks the more the garage saler sells.
Cheers!
Oh- and i always go back to that Shel Silverstein poem about the girl that ate the whale. how did she do it? one bite at a time
I vote for the dumpster. They're big so if you can't fill it all up yourself, invite your neighbors to toss stuff in. They'll love it. We're moving, getting a dumpster, but what do we do with one grown child's old track tropheys? Another's stuffed animals and college notebooks? They want them, but they don't want them. We don't want them, but we want them.
off topic: one more reason for Ann to be concerned about someone "going all Tom Cruise on us."
Hire a house boy to remove the clutter. Designate a corner of the house for "castaways" and as you go through your day, toss stuff there. When house/cabana boy wakes up at 1 p.m., it is his task to actually get rid of the junk by any means necessary.
Now you might think hiring such a strapping young lad might be expensive, but in the tradition of Kato Kaelin (whose that? oh such short memories), he will just be happy to have a home, and a place to walk around wearing his new European leapard skin swimsuit without getting his butt kicked.
Actually, when I was forced to leave NJ and make my way across country to Phoenix with only what I could carry on the bus (and it consisted mostly of mementos of my deceased father, plus a laptop that ended up getting stolen), I realized how much I could do without, having left most everything else in storage. (I further realized what I could do without when everything in storage got sold off due to may lack of attention).
Oh, and that Fly Lady website is very, very cluttered. She seems to have trouble actually throwing away words on her homepage.
Getting rid of so-called 'junk' is nothing more than a reminder of our own mortality. Good luck!
Goesh: I quite consciously don't want to die and leave a huge houseful of confusing items for my sons to deal with. I have personally gone through that experience and think the older you are the more you need to take responsibility for not imposing such a thing on anyone.
To everyone who keeps promoting charitable donation: there are a lot of household things that aren't really donatable. I regularly give away clothes, and I'd give away large items of furniture in good condition, but I'm not clear on how much Goodwill really wants other sorts of things. You have to consult their rules -- they have a lot of them.
Here are the Goodwill rules actually. I think it's funny that "no wire hangers" is one of their rules. Also, no beanbag chairs and mini-hammocks -- who would guess? But apparently they want small "housewares." And they take old computers and appliances. They take some, but not all cribs.
Lo! That I could'st forever revel in my hoard
t'is true testimony of a life n'er bored
verily fetishes self-esteem keep'th shored atop the pile I reside'th as Lord
Yea! it do'th keep'th my sanity moored
-LDM
I agree with Ann about garage sales. Yes, some people love them. There is an entire segment of the population that dedicates Sat. for this purpose.
I have tried them a couple of times, and regretted wasting the time and, esp., the energy they require. Far better to just give to charity.
Sitting here in Colo., I find I have some 500 sq. ft. of storage in Phoenix, professionally packed to the ceiling. That, of course, doesn't include stuff I have in three locations in Colo.
Do you have people in Madison who will handle a garage sale for you?
Where I live, there is a woman who will set up, price, and run your garage sale for a 35% cut of the earnings. You just show her the massive pile of stuff that you want out, and she does the rest. I think she even calls charities on the last day to come pick up anything that didn't sell. It's a pretty good deal.
Professor Althouse:
One thing I learned from Mary Kay Ash [yes, the one who founded the cosmetics company] is to touch everything ONCE. My mom, a child of the Depression era, cannot throw anything away. So her walls are closing in like the trash compactor in Star Wars because she has all these little piles everywhere. FOCUS is an acronym for "follow one course until successful" and if you focus on the one thing in your hand, it's one less thing from your to-do list. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Ok. I'm done with the positive mental attitude stuff.
Hi Ann, As a lifelong ADD emblematic pile builder I invited a group of teens from a church summer camp who are taking cues from the show "Clean Sweep' for a real life reorganization. Any thoughts you may offer as they set my family's life on the lawn?
Did you ever find success with your efforts?
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