Archives for May 2007

There are many perks to being a home owner. These include an endless number of projects, some of them planned, some of them surprises. Occasionally these surprises are really fun things like exploding toilets or a hiccuping septic system. Kind of like living in cleveland.

One of the best perks of home ownership is having a larger place in which to store your stuff. George Carlin has a great bit about stuff that really touches upon a lot of this.

Anyhoo, today I decided that it was time to tackle the garage. In theory I do this every three months but in practice it is closer to every five months. The idea is that there is a quarterly inventory of the items contained within the garage during which items are marked as needed or disposable.

It sounds great, doesn’t it. The problem is that as I go through things I find too many reasons to hold onto stuff. For example item X is something that hasn’t been used for quite some time, but it has great sentimental value to it so I mark it as needed. Moving along I come across old clothes. Most of the time I am good about just dumping these things. If I don’t wear it then someone else needs it more than I do. It is time to give it away.

But then I take a harder look and consider a few things. It is in good shape. I am no so wealthy as to just get rid of things and the way fashion goes it just might be cool again. Let’s mark it as being needed.

Pretty soon there are two piles. One of them is the pile of items that are being given away or thrown in the trash. The other is the stuff that I want to hold onto. When I am on my game the piles are unequal in size as I try to be brutal about getting rid of the unneeded items. So you may be wondering what throws my game. The answer is complicated or maybe it is just me complicating things.

My kids. They have an uncanny ability to waltz into the garage during the middle of the sorting. It could be the middle of the night and somehow they’ll sense that dad’s working in the garage and they’ll come on down. And once this takes place there is a new battle. They have their own system of sorting that doesn’t correspond at all with mine, not to mention that their position on old toys.

Any toy they see in the disposable pile instantly becomes their most prized possession. Parting with it is something that they beg me not to make them do. Perhaps this is part of the reason why this uncluttering process doesn’t take place more frequently.

But I have a solution to all of this. The best and easiest way to dispose of clutter is to hire a moving company to come and pack up half the garage and all of the items contained within the family room, living room and playroom. The way I see it this saves me the angst of trying to decide what to part with as well as provides me with an enormous amount of free space.

It is almost like adding RAM to the computer. But I must admit that all things being equal I’d rather move into a larger house or add about 2500 SQF for me to fill.

I’d like to flesh this out further but I just noticed the time and if I don’t take the stuff over to the donation center it is going to close and there is no way that this is going to sit in my car any longer.