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Monday, December 29, 2008

I'M READY - GET OUT OF MY WAY!

This past October I spent my fall break in an absolute frenzy of pitching and tossing at my folks house. It was not as bad as the Collyer brothers, two legendary pack rats, but it was getting close. My mom and step-dad only had about 20 years to fill up their house, so they were decades behind the Collyer siblings. Mom, prone to compulsive shopping, married a man who she knew to be a chronic collector. Not a good combination.

Don Aslett was the first to write about de-cluttering and his advice was simple; throw practically everything out, and don't buy anything you don't need. Brilliant? Yes. Easy to do? No. It is easy to do that with other people's stuff, like my mom's and step-dad. After that weekend I was ready to toss and that was where the problem started. I knew I could not do that to my own kids.

In de-cluttering one has to have a plan so that things go back to a logical place in order to retrieve things easily. (The rule of thumb is being able to locate something in under five minutes ... some even say a minute. Yikes!) Place number one to clean was the large hall storage area. Place number two the large walk-in pantry. The third place is the garage and the last, the two-story barn. Admittedly, half the garage and half the barn was old school stuff of mine. I came to the realization that even in these hard economic times most everything was useless. When my dear departed mother-in-law was moving out of her Arizona home, and was (we did not know it at the time but the signs were there) in the early stages of Alzheimer's, could not bear to throw anything out. She would give those things to me to carry to places such as the Goodwill and the old ladies at church. I did not have the time or energy to deliver an old bag of disgusting old shoes or tiny scraps of project materials, for example, to anyone so I threw them out. I did not tell that to my mother-in-law, however.

The next step, and I would think this would be obvious; one has to remove the stuff from whatever place is to be cleaned and go through it. THIS INVOLVES SPREADING IT OUT. The de-cluttering shows on TV do that as standard operating procedure, and I think that for MDH (my dear husband) he probably understood that on some deep level, but his memory is long and my reputation is bad on this account. I would spread it out. That's it. I would get it out and become totally paralyzed, leaving the back porch and an unused bedroom in chaos for years. Yes, years. So when MDH saw stuff from the hall closet spread out in the foyer (and believe me the contents of that hall closet were almost all his famous cleaning up method: putting it in a box and shoving it in a closet. When he saw the contents of the closet spread out he wanted to know (what he felt was a reasonable question) when it would be put away? He even offered to help. (Translate that!) To put it mildly he touched a very raw nerve; a root-canal-ish raw, tender nerve. I did what any reasonable, level-headed person would do; I blew a gasket.

We are on speaking terms again, but I now know that I must find another way to do this cleaning and that is the Neil Armstrong method of one small step for man (or woman) kind. And, taking a page from our president-elect, it must be done in a no-drama way. It must done a little at a time.

So, sadly, I was not able to clean up as planned, but being that angry takes a lot out of a person, and I would like to never have to go there again. (My dear old mother, who has this infuriating way of being wise far beyond wise, says that we only get mad when we are wrong. I don't think that is always true, but it is true often enough.) So, I must accept that the clean-up will take longer than I had hoped. Unlike most people we have the space and that is a problem in itself, but I will keep you posted, and for the time being the hall closet did get cleaned, but the boxes and boxes of photos will still have to be sorted. Those will not be tossed.

In the meantime, the garbage cans are full.

4 comments:

Tina Puntigam said...

Sounds like a traumatic event. I'm glad that some areas got cleaned out. One of the hardest things that I've had to figure out over my short lifetime is how to do things my way and not just assume that the accepted method will work perfectly for me (which it often doesn't). Hope that you can get a little more done before heading back to school!

Liz said...

I love what you said about "... how to do things my way and not just assume that the accepted method will work perfectly." I will have that tattooed somewhere on my body. You know just living with another person is damn difficult.

Now that you have Bear in your family she will, before too long, start to bring home school projects. Oh, brother! I used to say we'd have to build a wing on the house just to house them! (That's why I try not to assign them any more often than is required.!) Thanks for your support.

Neva said...

What???? he was afraid it would stay there for what...a year or so? although I know it was not funny, I am laughing......glad you are on speaking terms again.....but you will find it MUCH easier to come and go through MY stuff and have permission to yell at my husband.....lol.
Happy New Year, Liz.......

Joy said...

I haven't been blogging or reading blogs for awhile. MDH has not worked a full week in about 3 weeks. We have had several clean out projects and rearrange projects etc, etc. Needless to say I am ready for him to work a full week. I have to go to work just to catch up on email. We have gotten a lot done though and we have a beautiful loft that has turned into a wonderful family room. It used to be the catch all area and now because of our hard work its wonderful. We are trying to do the declutter and organize thing too. It is hard, but I can say, with one room done its worth the work. Good luck. I've missed your blog!