Our Fall Clean-Up Is Complete

[MineralMan]

I haven't been posting on DU as much for about a week. My wife and I have been cleaning up our house, after 11 years of accumulation of junk and debris. It all went in here:



10 Cubic Yards of trash came out of our house, mostly from the basement. Amazing. We have pledged to not allow this to happen again. Wish us luck with that! The dumpster is being picked up today, and I can see the whole floor in the basement again.

Taking the trash out is good. Now, bring on the election discussons!

[femmocrat]

1. We did the same last spring when we had our basement waterproofed.

I don't mind going down there now! Purging junk is good for the soul.

[MineralMan]

3. I really need to remove all the carpeting in ours.

It's stained and there has been water damage in the past. I'm planning to do that in stages over the winter, when outside work isn't possible due to snow cover. It will involve moving furniture from an area, taking up the carpet, then shifting things in stages until it's all removed. I've done that before, and it's a big job. The worst thing is the foam padding under the carpet, which usually has to be scraped up and bagged. Ick!

Once it's gone, I won't be re-carpeting down there. I'm going to find some other finish for the floor. We don't really use most of the basement regularly, but I have my office downstairs at one end. There's even a bedroom down here, but that's never used, except for storage of seasonal stuff, much of which went in the dumpster.

For now, it's time for a rest.

[KatyaR]

2. I did that this summer.

Feels good, doesnt it?

I took probably 6 carfuls of stuff to Goodwill and threw away at least 3 or 4 dumpsters worth from a 2-bed apartment. The Goodwill stuff was mainly clothes that I can't wear after losing 70 pounds. I'm so happy I did it, it feels like I have a new place to live! I'm determined to never let it happen again....

[MineralMan]

4. Good for you! Yes, it's satisfying!

[SheilaT]

5. The first ten years of our marriage,

we moved every other year or so. Kept us from accumulating too much stuff. Then we stayed put for 18 years, and while we weren't as bad as some people, stuff did accumulate.

The down side of having a basement, or even a spare room to store stuff in, is that most people just keep junk. Where I currently live, Santa Fe, NM, I am the only person in my little neighborhood (about 35 small homes) who actually uses her garage for the car. Everyone else has their garage filled with stuff. It's my opinion, that other than temporarily, if you have so much stuff in the garage you can't park your car there, then you have too much stuff.

[MineralMan]

6. I've always managed to keep the garage

clean enough to get a car in there, and it's just a one-car garage. It appears that the basement suffered in that competition.

I'm beginning to think that junk breeds and reproduces over time. I don't remember having three defunct microwave ovens, but there they were. Those, along with other assorted appliances, will be going to a city clean-up event next weekend. The dumpster company charges too much for them if you put them in the dumpster.

[SheilaT]

7. You know the problem with socks disappearing,

supposedly in driers, and wire hangers proliferating? My astrophysicist son assures me that in reality socks are the larval form of hangers.

But I have observed enough instances of things I never owned or bought showing up mysteriously. Best example was, when I had a small business going and rented an office, which I sometimes sub-let to others. I'd bought a pencil sharpener. One. When I closed the office after two years, there were three pencil sharpeners there. I had no idea those little things could reproduce!

[Mariana]

8. You know how in stories

all the time travel machine builders and the teleporter inventors first test their devices with inanimate objects? And sometimes, before they get it quite right, those objects vanish into oblivion? They have to end up somewhere, don't they? I think something like that is going on. In addition to the breeding problem.

[cwydro]

9. I love this!

"Socks are the larval form of hangers."

[SheilaT]

10. Isn't that great!

The amazing thing, is that socks only become wire hangars. If you have too many plastic hangars, something like over 50%, socks can no longer transform, and people with plastic hangars don't lose socks, either.