Emptying Bags on the Bedroom Floor

This morning I decided to go after the bags that are in my room. I have a nice collection of reusable bags for the grocery store which sometimes get repurposed for other things. For example, Jake took one of the bags to clean out his locker at school and I went through that. The stuff from the bag is now sitting on my (unmade) bed because I'm not sure where to put it. But at least the bag is off the floor. I had two bags from the MOMA design store. Those went into the garbage. Please understand that throwing out a shopping bag for me is a big deal as my parents saved shopping bags to reuse. At the time those nifty canvas bags were not a staple of every household. And they saved boxes too. That's a whole other post however. So back to the shopping bags, I found another Marshall's canvas bag with some random baseball pants and a trophy and sunscreen. Put that stuff away and one less bag was on the floor. And I am dumping a broken laundry basket. Baby steps!

Delving into the Basement

Yesterday was productive. We went into the basement with the intention of throwing out a lot of things, and were successful. There are two parts to the basement. This was the part that's actually underground and we call it "the rock room" because it was built around some giant boulders. It was here that I found at least 5 plastic tubs of books and school supplies that I last looked at in 1996 when I stopped working in the NYC school system. I'm glad to say that all those boxes were dumped. We also threw away boxes of college textbooks, an old futon frame and an old air conditioner. When my parents moved about 10 years ago they gave me a bunch of boxes from their old house....although at the time I said throw it all out, they wanted me to decide what to keep. Most of that stuff went also. I only found a few things worth saving. Next we have to work in the other part of the basement. We've already thrown out a lot of things like an old desk, strollers, metal cabinet, and I've donated several bins of toys and clothes to Dave's office (they have clients who can use those things, and they were all in good condition.) One little problem is that for years I taught these freelance science classes to kids and so I had boxes of things for topics like music, gravity, fossils, etc. that had to be ready on a moment's notice. I still have those things. There are also a lot of nice things-sets of dishes and glasses for example, that have sat on a shelf and never been used because I never had the room for them in this house or I had small children and didn't want to put out some of the more breakable things. Now that we are renovating, perhaps those things can be put into use. But until then, they have to stay in the basement. Then we have some things like records (we have not listened to a record since we moved here in the early 90's) old Sports Illustrated Magazines (I already dumped every old magazine I ever had but Dave isn't quite there yet.) Still with all that dumping (we're taking advantage of the fact that we have a dumpster) when you go downstairs you cannot really tell. Unless you saw the "before" pic it's hard to tell how much progress we've made. Still, it's motivated us to continue on this journey and have the basement function as a more organized storage space and not "the dungeon" as we have come to think of it.

The Journey Begins

This post may be indicative of my personality. Instead of getting right to the task, I had another idea: I would start a blog instead. I already had some experience with the blogger website from a class I took, but somehow that one never took hold-although I had good intentions to fill it with my journey toward education technology. But the problem there-it fell as most things to for me into the -"I'll do it later" category. So here lies my problem: I am a procrastinator, I have a lot of great ideas but the inability to put them into play, and I tend to get distracted easily. I'm most happy doing creative things, I dislike the mundane. So I'm more excited with the blog idea than the actual task at hand, but maybe this will act as an incentive. I am going to try to clean up my entire house by getting rid of or organizing things. I realized some problems yesterday when I started doing one teeny corner of the small room that my two older kids share. I had an inability to make decisions on some simple things, like whether to throw away a poster. Well the poster was sitting in the closet and bent, but it had all the NBA teams on it....and I remembered when with one of them, they would fall asleep at night naming all the teams, and it was perhaps that memory that made me want to save it. Too much thought went into a poster that cost probably 1.49 at a book fair. Then I came across an electronic dog my middle son (who is 11) got as a present from a preschool classmate. Why did I hold onto it for so long? I thought little guy (7) might play with it but even he has aged out. Why was it still in the closet. So I'm realizing that obviously I am holding onto memories with the things, but they are not bringing my children any joy (they are only cluttering their room) and I keep thinking of the show "Hoarders" when the kids want to throw things out and the mother insists that they keep things they don't want. That show is an inspiration, I'm definitely not in that kind of state, but I see what can happen when one tries to save. I also think the clutter acts as "baggage" as far as keeping me from pursuing other things. I love flylady and have used her system for a few years and she is adamant that clutter cannot be organized and sucks the joy out of your life. I have followed many of her suggestions over the years but there are few things I never kept up on. Check out her website for some great ideas. But for today I want to concentrate on a few things in my room. I will update later.