by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
I have junk.
A lot of junk.
I have accumulated it over many years. Since my first credit card (that’s another story all together) I have been buying and keeping stuff. I like my junk. It’s not like the stuff you might see on one of those hording shows (the new hotness), it’s not trash and stuff and it’s not piled to the ceiling in my house. I am a bit of a neat freak. My favorite motto is: ‘a place for everything and everything in it’s place’. The stuff I have ranges from books to nick knacks to collectibles to arcade machines.
I used to get these occasional purge twitches where I felt I needed to dump my stuff and I would wind up EBaying a good deal of my books and some collectibles/toys. I haven’t had that happen in quite some time though. I think since I got married that feeling went away (kind of).
In the last few months I have had to do some moving and that feeling has creeped its way back into my life. As you might have read last month Chris has been taking the whole ‘cleaning out my life’ thing to the extreme. I am not having thoughts on that scale but I am wanting to clean up a bit.
At one point this month I had and apartment with junk in it, a house with junk in it, and a mobile home with junk in it, and a storage building with junk in it. I was feeling spread pretty thin and over junked. We got rid of the apartment (it was just temporary anyway) and moved into Fort Worth. The new place has a garage that’s large enough to keep all my extra junk in but it was pretty old and nasty inside. I spent a good two weeks cleaning it out. It is almost sparkling now and I have begun to move my stuff into it. I moved everything out of storage and probably 3/4 of the stuff from the mobile home there. The mobile home was our main house and it’s up for sale so I moved most of the stuff out of it so it looks nice when shown to prospective buyers. It is still basically furnished (just sparsely).
All of this consolidating of my stuff gives me a better view of the amount of junk I have. The house we moved in to is much smaller than the mobile home so my room is jam packed with stuff (and there isn’t enough room in the rest of the house for my belongings. When I look at all that stuff I think that I need to thin it out a bit. Is there a reason to keep all those books? Well, yes. I like them. I have reread several of them so it’s a bit hard to ditch them. I have a whole shelf of board games too (something like 30 of them). I don’t want to ditch those. It’s too hard!!!!
Breath.
The garage is getting full up. Several of the boxes are my wife’s so I can exclude them from my cleaning thoughts. I will let her deal with those. I am going to focus on my stuff and attempt to at least shrink the excess amount of boxes to help me organize stuff before I get rid of anything. For instance there are 3 paper boxes and 2 tubs of props for the show. I know I can probably shrink that down to 3 tubs (or maybe even 2 tubs if I work on it). I have about four boxes of old paperwork (old bills, receipts, pay stubs, etc) I can keep these or maybe scan them into a computer and eliminate all four of those boxes.
With each hour I spend organizing and repacking boxes I feel a little piece of this puzzle that is my life is coming into place. I have tried to really latch onto that motto I told you about earlier (a place for everything and everything in it’s place) and make it a life statement. When I get rid of one more box or clear out the contents of one more closet it really makes me feel like I have taken a great big step in my life. I have so closely associated this organizing to a life goal that it has stuck and will actually release serotonin when I accomplish something. Now if can just do thins with my weight!