yard sale – pretty much ready

The signs are all strategically placed around the neighborhood. We’ve got the tables set up, and the items out and priced. We’re not too worried about people stealing stuff in the middle of the night; the porch is pretty enclosed and dark so I doubt people will wander up and take stuff. We have 15 lamps for sale. (I’m including some small lights and a light-up sign in the total.) Yep, we like the lighting. I made one last pass through my books and added some more, so there’s lots of fun stuff in there. There are a couple of last minute boxes I want to go through, but it’s not really necessary, since we have a full porch worth of stuff.
But we’re ready for any early birds.
Remaining to-dos:

  • Bags of ice
  • mow lawn
  • get sodas, water cooler set up
  • take small air conditioner out for sale
  • finish pricing stuff
Continue Readingyard sale – pretty much ready

Weekend Update 2007-09-17

We managed to get a lot done on Sunday to the house. We spent the morning sorting through some of the garage sale pile. Our friend Jen came by with baby Sam to help us sort some clothes in the early afternoon. Later we hung a bunch of pictures that we just haven’t gotten to yet, and in the evening I sorted lots of our tools in the basement. We don’t really need to get rid of any of those; they’re all useful items that I bought for my old house or that Stephanie’s dad has given her, and we have plenty of storage for them. We just need them to not all be in a jumbled pile when we need to find them for use.
I think we have plenty of stuff together for the yard sale. That’s not to say we have the house organized; there’s still tons to do. We’re maybe 25% done. But I’m excited by how much stuff we’ve pulled together.

Continue ReadingWeekend Update 2007-09-17

weekend Update: Cleaning, Organizing

We accomplished a lot of sorting and organizing yesterday. In the morning, we cleaned out and reorganized the coat closet in the dining room and identified stuff that either needed to go in the garage sale or needs to be relocated downstairs in the space we liberated last weekend in the basement. At the end it felt like we did Pressure Washing in Roseville CA ! However, the result was satisfying.
Stephanie’s dad came down and helped us get a chunk of the garage cleaned out yesterday, too. There’s lots more to do; we only got about a fourth of it done. But it’s a start. We inherited a lot of “it came with the house” stuff in the garage that we need to discard, but some of it needs to be sold. That will have to happen after the garage sale.  We hired #1 Junk Removal in Staten Island NY | Demolitions Rubbish Cleanouts to help us with the junk removal. Some of it will be freecycle, and some will be craigslist. At the same time, he helped us with another garage problem we had; part of the soffit on the south side of the garage was rotting and falling down. I hadn’t noticed it at all. So we need to hire someone to rebuild some of the trim on the garage. For cleaning services in the garage, Top Stockton, California Junk Removal Service | Debris & Rubbish Removal can be checked out!
In the evening, we ordered Chinese food, opened a bottle of Shiraz, watched part of the first season of Maude from Netflix, and sorted out and organized Stephanie’s cassette tapes. (She still has tape players in both cars.)
We have lots to do today, too. Our friend Jen is coming over to help do some more sorting.

Continue Readingweekend Update: Cleaning, Organizing

Yard Sale – Saturday, Sept. 22nd

Yesterday we settled on a date for a yard sale at our house. 2 weeks from now on Saturday, September 22nd. We sorted out lots of stuff to put into the sale this weekend. It’s a very small dent in the scheme of things, but it’s a dent, and I certainly feel better.
I’m not sure I’ve entirely cured the problem of “maybe there’s something I can do with this…” I sorted through lots of small throw rugs, but kept a couple that I love but just don’t have a good place for. Yet. Yeah. I probably need to go through that sorting again.
We had pulled quite a few things out to sell last week, with the intention of joining a friend’s garage sale, but we got scared off by the threat of rain on Saturday morning. That worked out okay, because we had a lot going on this weekend anyway, and loading up and taking stuff to a sale was cutting things pretty tight.

Continue ReadingYard Sale – Saturday, Sept. 22nd

Budgeting Time

One of the difficulties in our getting organized process is our time management. We both have a tendency to think “we’ll get to this” and we never do. We’re always purchasing space for the objects in our lives with time we don’t actually own. I find myself saying – “I’ll hold on to this because I’m going to do X, Y, or Z someday soon” and that justifies keeping it, because time is ethereal, and we can just lazily spend it because there are unlimited amounts.

And I have to confess, I thought I was way better at time management than Stephanie is, and she has more of a problem with purchasing with borrowed time than I do. That is, of course, not the case at all. Or at least, I may be slightly better about it, but not significantly enough to really make our lives function well. Here’s a graphic example of the problem:

Time Management

I made this in Google docs this morning and shared it with Stephanie, and we were both freaked out by it when we saw it. Of course this is padded all over, but you get the general idea; there are a finite amount of spaces to be filled in with activities, and we have way more things to do than actually fit. So we do things like cut corners on sleep and skip meals and the gym and skating, or have to skip seeing friends. That’s not good at all. Plus I’m looking at this and realizing I spent last year watching something like 10 hours a week watching TV, that all came out of my sleep schedule. No wonder I feel like crap.

Clearly, organizing our things goes hand in hand with budgeting our time better so we spend much less time cleaning and more time eating and drinking wine with our friends and reading good books and making pretty internets.

Continue ReadingBudgeting Time

Our Little Secret

Yeah, there’s a reason why so many of my photos seem to be only shot in one or two rooms, or only show small, focused parts of our house.
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There’s a reason why we never have people over to visit; why I’ve stopped having parties and game nights and overnight guests.
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There’s a reason why I’m awake at 1:00 a.m. writing this because I can’t sleep because I’m so stressed out.
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We have a serious problem. It’s more than just a problem that’s driving me out of my head, although that’s bad enough.
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It’s making me physically sick, too – enough that I’ve had to go to the hospital 5 times in the past three years because I’m so allergic to dust and the house is so full of it.
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We have a problem, and it’s time that problem comes out of the closet.
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We have too much stuff – way more stuff than we can manage, store or enjoy. Way more stuff than we need.
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These photos are just the tip of the iceberg; the garage is equally packed, and the basement is the same way, too. I just haven’t taken pictures there yet because it’s the middle of the night.
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I have always had a serious pack rat problem. I don’t want it to appear that I’m blaming anyone. I’m certainly not. And I know I’m not the only one trying to fix it; Stephanie is working hard at this, too. But I’m getting seriously overwhelmed lately; and I’m worried that we’re not making progress at all. We spend all our time organizing, never have any fun, and the clutter just gets worse, not better. And we fight over it, a lot – and that has to stop because I love Stephanie so much; I don’t want this problem to ruin our relationship.
It’s interfering with living our lives, doing our jobs, enjoying what we have and our families and friends, and enjoying the blessing that is our relationship as well.
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We really need two things:
1) HELP. Help confronting the problem, help accepting that it’s a problem and help fixing it. To some extent, we need to hire someone to work with us on this. But we sure could use some support from our friends, both in the clean up process and the encouraging us not to bring new items into our house as well.
2) For people to back the hell off. Ease up on seizing control of our time. Let us get this figured out without constantly hijacking our schedules. Understand us when we say we can’t do stuff with you, and lay off the guilt trips. Stephanie and I both have a tendency to say yes to everyone and everything, and we need to knock that off, for our own sanity and well being. We don’t want to blow off our friends; we love you, and care about you. But we can’t always do everything you want us to, and lately I just can’t manage to do anything at all.
I took an entire cruise and spent the whole time stressed out because I wasn’t at home organizing and cleaning stuff. I’m up late tonight because we overloaded our weekend again with events and won’t have time to relax or get anything done. We need time to work on this – lots of it.
This run-away freight train needs to stop, and now.
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Continue ReadingOur Little Secret

Scaling Down

I borrowed the book “Scaling Down” (by Judi Culbertson and Marj Decker) from my girlfriend Stephanie, because we’re both attempting to sort through the things we own and uh, scale down. We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to merge households, and for two people who both own two-story, multi-bedroom homes packed with stuff, that ain’t easy.

We also want to be free from the tyranny of stuff – the constant, time-consuming job of organizing/labeling/using/cleaning/repairing and then recycling/donating/discarding things. All that takes up too much of our time, when we could be doing fun stuff instead, like taking the dog for a walk or going on road trips or reading books, or having you over to our house for tea and board games. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? We would.

Scaling Down” is a fantastic book; I wanted to share it immediately with other people as I was going through it. It addresses the key issues about our relationship with things; namely that we have some emotional relationships with stuff that we have to get past before we can accept that we own the stuff, rather than letting the stuff own us.

The first part of the book covers “the Culprits” — the habits that we form that keep our life in clutter, and the pressures from the society we live in that help keep us disorganized. “The Paper Tiger” is a critical chapter on dealing with paperwork that we have stashed all over the house. What do we need to keep, how do we organize that, and what should we be shredding and disposing of? And the tyranny of collections — yep. That’s a lesson I need to learn, myself. Then they cover clothes. That’s an area I desperately need to master.

The second section of the book is about special situations that crop up in life that stir up the chaos of things in our lives — for example the necessity to separate and dispose of the belongings of a parent that has died, or our situation — merging households.

The third section of the book is all about strategies for taming the beast – how to sort and discard things, where to find homes for your stuff, how to keep from bringing more stuff in. When I lived in a tiny apartment, I used to have a rule that worked well — I couldn’t bring anything into the house unless something of equal size and shape left. That rule fell by the wayside when I bought a house, but I think it’s time to bring it back.

There’s a great deal in the book that is really common sense, but there’s also some great ideas that one wouldn’t immediately think of; like their challenge to not go shopping for a month. That’s an interesting idea that I’d love to try. It would be hard when it came to food, and sometimes personal grooming supplies, but I’ll bet other than that I could do it.

The last section of the book is the dessert — the rewards of living small. All the stuff you can do and enjoy when you no longer have to worry about keeping track of all your crap. So buy this book and read it — when you get to the dessert you’ll be glad you did.

Continue ReadingScaling Down

T-shirt Challenge Revisited

A while back I decided, since I have way too many t-shirts (over 100), I would wear all of them without repeating, and photograph each one. I didn’t get too far into the project before photographing all of them became too much to keep up with. I’ve still be cycling through them, and I have 36 left to wear. But it’s obvious I don’t need all of them, and it’s also obvious that many people will be in desperate need of clothes soon. So I’m going to sort out most of them and give them away, as soon as charities start accepting donations of clothes for Katrina victims.

I haven’t located a place yet (most, like the Red Cross are really in need of cash donations, which we did this week) but I’m sure that will come soon.

[edit needed: update photos]

Continue ReadingT-shirt Challenge Revisited