It’s a hard road to try to purge things. Ever since my dad died, it’s become completely obvious that there is way too much stuff in this house. With E and I moving in almost immediately after (our stuff arrived a week after we did), I had to attempt to clean two out of three bedrooms in fairly short order.
The first bedroom had been used by my dad as his studio/music room. I chose to take that bedroom for me and E because it was the biggest, and so I could clear it out for my mom and she wouldn’t have a reason to go in there and stare at it full of his stuff but empty of him. It took about two weeks, but I painted the walls and figured out where to put all of our stuff that we were going to unbox while we live here. The room looks nothing like it ever has before, which is a good thing. Up until the E’s laptop monitor died, it was the number one room in the house that E and I spent the most time in.
Last week, I finally got around to cleaning up E’s room1. Since E has to use his desk now, I thought he should have a place that actually feels like it’s his instead of filled with stuff. I reorganized the bookshelf, took out the old, ugly, broken dresser that took up too much space, and moved the bed and the smaller dresser around. It looks pretty clean in there, but there is still stuff that could be done. Say, like E’s desk area since it’s a mess, but that’s all him. The closet could use some work too, since it’s holding a cache of my boxes and some of my dad’s stuff as well. My next step in there is to rearrange the pictures on the walls so that I can put up some of my dad’s paintings. It will be nice to get them hanging up again and off the floor.
The room was originally filled with random furniture that made no sense. My dad refused to get rid of anything that my siblings or I had left behind, or that my parents had replaced elsewhere in the house, so it had my old twin bed2, a sofa table, a few broken end tables, a child’s desk, and a dresser that had seen better days. There were also reams of paperwork stashed into the many drawers throughout the room. Finding that paperwork was a really important step as most of it was my dad’s and my mom needed it to put all of his affairs in order. Most of the furniture was donated soon after we moved in, in an effort to make space, but it took awhile to work up the nerve to get the old dresser out of the room.
There is one last bedroom to tackle, which is my mom’s “office.” It’s become the current repository of all of the things I’ve removed from the other rooms in the house. I’m trying to slowly condense all of the extraneous items down into one manageable size, because I know my mom isn’t going to live here forever, and I’d like it to be easier for her when she does decide to downsize houses.
I don’t mind doing this work around the house, but I am not the best person to be assigning all these tasks to. The problem is that my family is filled with packrats, and I am not one. I tend to want to throw out everything that isn’t useful or hasn’t been used in a long time.
This leads to problems. Like when I tossed out the 10+ years old rechargeable toothbrush that was taking up space in the linen closet but never used any more. When my mom found out, she was none to happy. Turns out she had been storing it just in case her toothbrush died.
In turn, I’ve pretty well been recused from doing any sort of actual purging job around the house, as I tend to want to get rid of everything. If it’s been sitting buried in a pile for six months, we don’t need it, right? I’m allowed to box it up and move it to the garage, but it’s up to someone else to finally go through it and say “yeah, that’s junk.”
I’m hoping to tackle that last bedroom soon, but it’s hard to work up the motivation, knowing that I can’t really get rid of anything that’s in there. The paperwork alone is daunting.
One day it will get done. And then it will be on to the garage. Sigh. My work will never be done.
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