Moving

Well, I suppose it’s time to use this blog space a bit. The hardest part about splitting up, for me, is that it takes so damn long. Things had been over with my husband a while, I’d realized things about myself and he had realized things about himself.

It’s sad to feel like you’re only keeping a relationship because it’s what you know and safe. To realize that feeling is right is draining. And that’s how I can explain this whole situation: draining. I slept for almost nine hours last night – draining.

Small Apartment Living

My apartment is a mess. I wasn’t really aware I still owned enough stuff to have a mess, but I do. I guess in 500 square feet, it’s pretty easy. There’s the sorted laundry that needs to go downstairs to the laundry room. It wouldn’t kill me to take the trash out, either.

The downside of a tiny apartment is that your chores are always staring you in the face. From my current seat, I can see the laundry, the trash, the mail that’s waiting for me to buy a new shredder.

Sometimes this apartment feels much smaller than 500 square feet. Part of the problem is that it (and all of  our neighbors) were carved out of a single home. This means we ended up with a kitchen that’s quite large, but not large enough to really do anything but cook in, a long, narrow closet that didn’t have any hanging bars at all when we moved in, and my girlfriend’s closet-sized “craft room”. All of these things take up some of the square footage but make it really hard to use that square footage effectively.

Also, just to make things interesting, the stairwell is oddly angled and low ceilinged, so it’d be nearly impossible to get any larger furniture up here. The table was hard enough and it has hinges so it’s barely two feet wide.

I have acquired more books – these things happen! – and more art, which is my real weak spot. Worse than books, I think. I’m okay with getting rid of books. I’m much less okay with parting with art. I’m trying to stick to small pieces, so they’re easier to group on the walls, and paper prints instead of giclee canvas – canvas is nice and all but they’re much harder to move or store if I want to cycle through them. I’m speaking from experience here.

Speaking of canvas, I haven’t painted since the move. I think that’s a combination of factors weighing in – I gave away my art supplies to save space, and I can’t really justify the cost of new ones right now. I also don’t have the space for an easel, or to store finished art.

I also ended up donating a bunch of my paintings with all the other thrift store stuff when we moved. It wasn’t that I thought people would like them, particularly. Just that I didn’t have space for moving them. I didn’t think much of it at the time because I was in a huge, last-minute hurry, and I wasn’t really satisfied with my work anyway, but I think that’s probably at least part of the reason why I haven’t felt like getting back to it.

I should attack my watercolors anyway, though. It might help me feel better. Of course, so would starting on the mess in here. Maybe I’ll go do the laundry.

Small Steps

So yes, I moved. And yes, we’ve picked up a few new things since we’ve been here – a bed, for example, and cookware. And maybe a few more books. But I’m also realizing that I can continually re-evaluate on smaller levels instead of sinking a bunch of energy into major declutters.

Instead of putting together a giant load of books for the user bookstore, one or two books go in the library donation bin. Instead of a massive closet declutter, a shirt that I try on and don’t like goes right into a bag for Goodwill.

It’s not as if things come into the house in massive piles most of the time, after all. In slowly, out slowly, and maybe next time I won’t need to do a massive declutter.

We’ll see how long it lasts, anyway. (Probably until I run across my first $5/bag booksale up here.)

On the Other Side

So, yeah, I stopped posting when we got down to the deadline. Highlights of the last week or so included finding a charity that would show up on short notice and pick up the four or five bins of stuff we were getting rid of, realizing at the last minute that we were going have to ship about eight boxes instead of three, and still panicking to get everything into the car at the last minute. I have never in my life wished we owned an SUV before, but the day we were leaving the apartment, I honestly did.

But we left, that was the important thing. We spent the better part of a week in hotel after hotel as we drove and then waited for an apartment. I watched a lot more TV than I usually do, including my favorite Hoarding Enablers, American Pickers, and not one but two storage unit auction shows.

At that same time, we were using a storage unit for a few days so we didn’t have to drive around with everything we owned packed tightly into the car. The single month of storage payment was worth it to be able to use the rear view mirror while apartment hunting. But every time I punched the gate code in, I couldn’t help but think about those auction shows.

Anyway, we’re now ensconced with all of our belongings in a studio apartment with a craft room. I’m not kidding. It means Amber will have a space for her yarn and spinning supplies, and since that was what took up the most space in the old place, I have no problem with that decision.

In the end, I ended up fitting all my books into a single office file box. However, almost as soon as I was moved in, there were a few I was replacing at Goodwill – my How To Fix Everything guide, for example. I’m still not quite as handy around the house as I’d like to be, but if I’m going to be installing clothes racks and things I need to look like I am!

So, yes, I do have a book problem. But in my opinion, the important thing is that I’ve established that books that come in can go back out again. It’s not what I have, but what I keep, that matters.

Losing It

Ten years ago, when I was getting ready to move out of my first Real Apartment, the receptionist at the office’s front desk gave me the wrong move-out date. My roommates and I made careful plans to stretch the moving out over a week so it wasn’t a huge rush, but the morning after we moved all the large furniture, we returned to the apartment to find “cleaners” throwing all our things into trash bags.

On some level, I don’t think I’ve ever really dealt with that. I lost most of my comic book collection, and it was years before I started following anything regularly again. I’m sure there are photos, art, all kinds of irreplaceable things that went. And yeah, I couldn’t tell you what most of them were, but that’s not the point.

Since then, I declutter as a way to feel like I have control, since I know how easily I could lose it.

Today I took a pretty big leap of faith. Most of the random things in our apartment are going to charity before we move. My girlfriend found a place that’ll come by and pick it all up, and they’re coming today.

While I’m at work.

Yeah, I sorted it all ahead of time and put the things I’m keeping in the other room. She asked me about all sorts of individual things. She’s actually been very, very patient about my anxiety.

But ultimately when the charity truck comes, she’s the one directing it and I’m out here, in the office. I have to trust her. And I have to remember that for all the anxiety and for the comics that I do miss having available, the vast majority of the stuff that disappeared from that apartment, I really haven’t missed.

It’s not the stuff that got to me, it was the loss. And it’s time to get over that too.

My Desktop Computer Is Gone

Does It Count As Decluttering If I Scan Everything?

I dropped my 2004 and 2005 tax returns in the shredder yesterday, and I didn’t scan them in ahead of time.

I don’t need to, I know that. I used to do taxes seasonally, I know perfectly well the IRS only requires you to keep them for three years. I held onto them anyway. You know good ol’ Justin Case, don’t you?

There’s plenty of things that I did scan before I tossed, just because it was easier than trying to figure out if I really needed them: receipts for technology I still have, even if I’m unsure how long the warranty lasts, records of paid-off bills, and so on.

I scanned some of the “comics” I made in middle school, on the grounds that the paper is stained and the pencil drawings have gotten blurred from rubbing against each other. I’ll miss having the originals, but they’re a mess and I don’t pull them out often, so it’s for the best.

The apartment is emptying out, though it’s hard to tell. I think we’re at the point where we need to give up and cart most of the remainder off to a donation center. We have a couple things that are still on Craigslist, and a couple more that have been provisionally sold to friends but they haven’t picked them up yet. It’s time to move on to the next level of packing.

Level up!

All The Things

Huh, it’s been almost two weeks.

I’ve done a couple of things – I put my two weeks notice in at my job. I bought a storage bag for the top of the car.

The reason for the storage bag is that my girlfriend and I decided we’re getting rid of almost everything, not renting a truck, not renting a trailer, nothing. We’re going to ship four boxes media mail, and everything else has to fit in the hatchback.

My boss has decided that I should spend my last two weeks working overtime, so my girlfriend is in charge of getting rid of everything else in the house. She updates me during the day when I’m at work and every night I come home to a slightly more empty apartment.

10 Years of Ashes

I took this picture three years ago. At the time, it was every journal I’d used for the past eleven years. Of course, the pile only grew after that.

Until now.

Very early in the packing process, I got rid of the ones that were empty or almost empty, clipping out any pages I wanted to keep. Anything that was full or nearly so, though, I dutifully repacked for moving.

Today I decided to take another look at them. On my way to work, I grabbed a stack – most of the pocket-sized journals, as well as a larger one – and today I went through them. I realized that most of the stuff between 2000 and 2004 or so is amazingly incoherent and entirely irrelevant to who I am now.

That’s not me anymore, and that hasn’t been me in a long time, and god knows it’s not like I’ve actually pulled these out and reread them in the last fourteen years.

I didn’t actually set them on fire, though if I wasn’t at work, I’d be tempted to. Instead I ripped each of them out of the hard covers, dropped the covers in the trash, and dropped the pages in the shred bin. Not as visceral as burning, but almost as theraputic.

I’ll grab another pile tomorrow, or maybe tuck into them tonight, and when I’m done, maybe I’ll take a new picture.

Decluttering Is Sexy

No, really, let me explain.

Yesterday my girlfriend and I were discussing books, packing, and all the annoying things about moving. She’s gone through her books before but suddenly she was on a mission. As she packed box after box, she explained her new philosophy to me.

Rather than being a completist, she’s decided to keep only the truly emblematic books from each author. She asked herself what she was really saying with each of her collections. What does a bookshelf full of every L.M. Montgomery book say about its owner? I’m still not entirely sure, but I’m pretty sure that whatever it says, it’s not something that’s true of her. She kept her favorite Montgomery, her favorite Stephen King, and so on.

Watching her finish up her books gave me the push to finish going through my comic book boxes. We each put a few things aside for friends we think will appreciate them, but three boxes of comics went out the door as well. The trunk and the back seat of the car were both completely full when we headed out to Half Price Books.

Just before we left, I smiled at her and told her, “You’re so sexy when you’re decluttering.” It was a joke, but there’s a kernel of truth to it as well. When we first talked about this move, my biggest concern was the expense, even moreso than the effort involved. We talked about our goals and what we wanted, though, and it turned out we were surprisingly in sync. I’ve gone out of my way not to push her too far as we pack – possibly too far in the other direction. But every time she demonstrates that she’s just as excited, just as committed as I am, if not moreso, I understand a little more what it means to be in a relationship where you and your partner share common dreams. And that’s exciting.