62 days later…

I have finally finished Books!! Okay, maybe “finished” isn’t the most accurate word to use. One large stack has flowed into four smaller stacks.  Shlepping the give-aways to their various destinations, figuring out where to store the books I’ve decided to keep — that’s all still to be done. But every book has been sorted! That’s not nothing!

Hoo boy, this has been a month…

I apologize for the radio-silence, but my lord, I’ve been busy! I made rather flippant  mention of getting a new job in my last post. Like it wasn’t going to entail some intense transition time. Silly me.

Books! Yeah, this is going to take awhile…

So… this week’s been crazy. Saturday morning my dad noticed water pouring out of the outside wall of my house. Out of the actual wall. I did not know this was a thing that could occur. It was the wall right outside my shower so I guess it wasn’t that far outside of normal. Still, not something I had planned.

However! I was eager to move onto the second category — books! — and I wasn’t going to let a mere plumbing problem slow me down.

I finished “Clothes” ahead of time! Kind of…

The act of folding is far more than making clothes compact for storage. It is an act of caring, an expression of love and appreciation for the way these clothes support your lifestyle.

— Marie Kondo

I definitely did a whole lot of discarding. (Three huge bags worth — which, considering I did a massive reorganizing and discarding about 6 months ago, is saying something). And I definitely did a whole lot of folding (a lot of folding), but…

I get a bit morbid…

A friend of mine, knowing the tidying adventure I’m embarking on sent me this New Yorker cartoon. Which made me laugh, because funny! And then inspired a morbid thought. (Because me?)

source

The cartoon captures — possibly on purpose — exactly what happens when you die.

Clothes! Or jumping in…

Let me share a secret. Putting your house in order is fun! The process of assessing how you feel about the things you own, […] is really about examining your inner self, a rite of passage to a new life.

–Marie Kondo

Holy crap, I’ve started! In some ways I did it all wrong. I began on a hot, Sunday afternoon when I was already tired out from a full morning. (Kondo recommends you start at the beginning of a fresh, new day.) Plus, I was in the middle of planning a trip to see my mother-in-law next week. But I was so eager to get started and I knew this week was going to be fairly busy and I had this window of time so… I took a deep breath and jumped.

Of hot days and Jedi-mindtricks…

[W]hat is the point of tidying? If it’s not so that our space and the things in it can bring us happiness, than I think there is no point at all.

–Marie Kondo

I’ll admit it. I’ve been procrastinating. I’ve been off-book for the past couple of weeks and I’m kind of nervous about taking that first active step in the great clearing out of non-happy-making, un-joyful, stuff.

Three lessons, painfully learned…

Lesson One: Storage units are evil. Okay, sometimes they’re a necessary evil, but once they slip past that necessity mark and slither into an ignorable “convenience,” they sink into an ever deepening bog of recrimination and regret. And then you have to block out all math-knowledge to avoid figuring out how much you’ve spent keeping things you didn’t really want in the first place.

That first day — the day the storage unit stuff arrived — was not good.

The Storage Unit Saga…

When Lee and I moved to his hometown in Kentucky, we moved into a rambling old house. My parents had taken any and all furniture offered by various and sundry relatives over the years, so they had a lot of stuff to offload. And I was the first of my two sisters to have an actual house to fill. So, shortly after we moved in, my mom arrived with a U-Haul truck packed full of furniture.

Fastforward a handful of years

Picturing the perfect home…

…[T]o start discarding without thinking ahead at all would be like casting yourself into the negative spiral of clutter. Instead, begin by identifying your goal.

–Marie Kondo

First step in the process is thinking? Be still my heart. Thinking about doing something is one of my favorite activities! (A basic skill requirement of any accomplished procrastinator.)