Kitchen Items Donated

To others it may seem a minor victory, but for me it’s a huge relief.  I had been collecting kitchen items like: plates, mugs, flatware, bowls, spatulas, pots & pans, strainers, can openers, pot holders, and many other bits and pieces.  They were from my old apartment, from my late grandparent’s house, things given to me by people who were moving, and more recently items found while going through my friend’s abandoned tower of boxes.  About three years ago while sorting through the storage unit I began putting kitchen stuff together to try and be “organized”.  It was quite a collection!

Last year I made the decision to donate it to charity.  From the collection I kept only those things that were extremely useful or had unquestionable sentimental value.  I got the keepers down to one box of dishware and one box of kitchen gadgets. It was hard to decide what to keep, and several items were in a gray zone between must-keep and get-rid.  I’m between kitchens right now and much of these things would definitely be used again in the future when I set up my next kitchen.  However, it’s all just sitting in boxes taking up space, so it fits the definition of “clutter” just because of my living situation.

My aspirations of becoming a minimalist drove me to put almost all the gray zone stuff in with the donations.  Some were unbelievably hard to deal with.  Limiting the keepers to one box of gadgets helped me decide when a couple things just would not fit in the box.  I got that idea from Peter Walsh – setting space limits and using the available space to force a decision.

Last week I finally called a local charity that distributes furnishings to persons in need.  It took a few days to arrange for a pickup time, but in one day I was able to give away the whole pile.  It almost didn’t seem real for a couple days.  I kept looking where the boxes used to be stacked, expecting them to be there.  I’ve been the caretaker of that collection for such a long time, and now it’s out of my hands, and off my back!

The items I was unsure about giving away are gone now, and I couldn’t get them back if I tried.  And that feels okay now.  When I do set up my next kitchen I’ll be able to buy new stuff and customize the space to my needs.

Looking in other people’s boxes

Went to the storage unit yesterday to tackle my friend’s boxes, pictured in the previous post.  My main goal for the day was to do an inventory.  I want to at least know what I am dealing with, so that information can settle in my subconscious before next weekend, when I’ll go back and make decisions.  Each box was opened, and quickly evaluated to see what’s in there.  I took a digital photo of each opened box.  Here’s what I found:

• 7 boxes of “merchandise”.  Things that I can sell or give away.
• 2 boxes of tools and hardware.
• 9 boxes of paper files.
• 33 boxes of books, magazines, VHS tapes, audio tapes.

More than 50 boxes in all.  As I feared, most of them are books.  I still haven’t been able to deal with my own overwhelming collection of books, and now this!  The merchandise I can reduce down to one box or less by using ebay and freecycle.  The papers I can reduce to one box just by looking for important looking stuff and tossing the rest.  Tools, (not sure) maybe combine them with the merchandise items.

So that leaves the big obstacle of the books/media.  Sadly much of it was damaged by the humid conditions in the garage, even though the boxes were in plastic bags.  I did not do any detailed sorting, but did see obvious green patches on the edges of some books.  And all of it smelled musty.  My fingertips were black with dust, mold, and dirt when I was done.

I know that my friend spent decades putting together his “library of knowledge”. It would be so sad to just dump them all in the trash.  But at the same time he has basically abandoned it all.  I thought of maybe listing the titles so that the collection can be rebuilt in the future if he wishes.  Actually I may have seen an index in his paper files, so I’ll find and save that.  When I go through the books I should use the criteria of tossing anything that can be replaced.

Wall of Boxes

boxwall

This is one of the walls of my storage unit, what I face when I walk in there.  I don’t know what’s inside these boxes.  Seeing this turns my mind to white noise -  all thoughts turn into a whooshing noise.  Can’t deal with more than a couple of these boxes at a time (in a quiet place away from the storage unit), and that takes weeks.  How can I empty this before the winter weather hits and forces me to rent the space for another season?