I took four days off work starting Thursday last week to try and get a handle on the last parts of my mom’s belongings that have been sitting in our garage. I’ve already finished with the garage sale, the thrift store and dump stuff, and now it’s down to boxes of things that we might want to use or keep. Some of it is mine from when I was growing up and then after college. There is a lot of stuff from my first marriage. Whole photo books, dvds and boxes of letters that I need to decide what to do with.
I’ve spent many hours removing photos from photobooks so they can fit in a storage box to be stored later.
I spent a lot on 24 clear totes so I can see what’s inside. I’m tired of having a we all of black plastic crates with no idea what’s inside them.
As part of this, I’ve been rearranging my office. I moved on wall of books and put my 3D printers there, getting them out of the house. Our patio is now full of a black wall of totes that contain books, computer stuff, electronics projects.
Ten years of collecting gadgets from thrift stores when we moved into this house and I went into some weird nesting phase buying every book I could get my hands on to build a library, and collecting al the computers and gadgets I’d ever wanted back when I was too broke to have the latest cool thing.
Now it’s all been possessed and I think I’ve had the max enjoyment out them.
There’s also the problem of vintage computer gear disintegrating with time. All the media needs to be digitized before it can’t be read anymore. The computers should be given away to someone who can repair them before their capacitors all explode and they turn into junk just taking up space.
It’s a lot of work.
I got most of the garage cleaned out and one room of the house organized. I focused on the house because that was better for everybody, to create more usable space. It started raining on Saturday and Sunday so that made it hard to move things out to the storage shed anyway.
All this work has been hanging over my mind for a year, making it hard to write. I did make forward progress on my current book project. I need to edit the older project but it’s been harder to get my mind around that. I know I need to just start making the habit, but it seems insurmountable sometimes, like the wall of stuff.
One box at a time.
