Contained Chaos

We're out of the house now, and in my parents' house.  I thought I was doing so well.  Boxes were labelled, I kept an inventory of everything, I had stuff separated according to whether or not we were going to take it with us on our trip.  Ah, the devolution of my organization.  Blah.  

 

The storage room.  When we first started this venture, I felt like our stuff would fit the space just fine.  Perhaps we left a bit much empty space (to make it easier to look at our boxes on the shelves), perhaps we don't have nearly enough shelves.  Perhaps we just have too much stuff still.  Who can say?  But the junk just keeps going....              

My parents have an in-law suite in their basement, which is what we're using.  We're using the kitchenette as storage.  A lot of it is our camping stuff, plus the chairs to our table until our table is set up and ready to use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The living room is actually not so bad.  Very crowded, especially considering we have their couch and our couch sharing the space that just held their couch.  Plus we added my desk, another couch over by the kitchenette, and our tv stand.  Their poor house is groaning with the all the added junk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The boys' sleeping quarters.  We brought all our Sterilite dressers in the house, but we've still got clothes strewn all over the place.  Oish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other side of the room, where K sleeps.  Still a disaster zone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, and the largest mess of all.  So sad.  Must work on this.  According to Bill, I have 10 days to lazily organize it all.  Hmm.....

Educational Waste

Our kids go to a once a week charter school.  They finished up this past week, so I get the joy of going through their backpacks to fish out broken plastic spoons (ugh--when did he even use that????), unopened fruit snacks, multiple office supplies that may possibly not belong to us....  My touchpoint, every year, are those darn composition notebooks.  They're never used.  Not to such a degree that they're necessary.  Out of six composition notebooks this year, only one got used more than halfway.  The other five?  Two weren't used at all, one had two lines used, and the other two had no more than four pages used.  Combine that waste with the pencils, and we've got a serious tree destruction habit.

I want so bad to quit this habit.  I'm a paper and pencil kinda gal.  I'll look up directions from Google maps and then take out an index card to write the directions down.  I'm fine with that.  I use a paper grocery list.  But the amount of compostion notebook waste is mind boggling.  Teachers request these things.  I put my children's names on these things.  And these things don't get used in the classroom.  Isn't it about time we asked more of ourselves?  Why do class supply lists come out before class even begins?  Teachers have some notion in the summer of what they want, and then change their minds when they're actually in the nitty gritty of it all.  Totally understandable, I don't have a year's worth of stuff figured out at a time.

And I can hear the arguments from teachers already.  If we don't ask before school, we don't get it.  It's such a battle to get those supplies from kids, we overask so we can share.  I don't buy either of these.  I understand them, I know them to be true, but I don't see them as blockades to doing things better.  We are so used to being a gluttonous society, just go out and get new.  Replace that broken thing.  Throw out that old thing.  Get more, do less.  Oh how it all hurts.....

Reduce Redux

Second moving sale down.  Yeah!!!!!  We've managed to get rid of tons of stuff, thanks to the two moving sales, and advertising on our neighborhood site and Craigslist.  Whew!  We've got a ways left to go, so we'll continue to use Craigslist, and then we'll donate or keep (or toss) the rest.

This has been an amazing journey that has challenged me in so many ways.  Just to lay hands on EVERY last thing in our possession.  And then to make decisions about all of it.  Things that I've had since college, or earlier.  Do I keep the silver duckie that my godfather gave me for baptism?  Turns out yes, yes I do.  How about the armoire I got for my room senior year in college?  Nope, that one's out (buyer dependent).  It really brought up important ideas that I haven't really worked on in such a long time.  How much do I really need?  How do I keep things neat and tidy and controlled?  Do I really need very much?  And if I don't need very much, what do I need?  Such a great exercise, but I don't think I want to do this too very often.

Reduce, Reduce, Reduce

You know that guy from The Lorax?  The one who figgers on biggerin' and biggerin' and biggerin'?  Yeah, I think that was us for a while.  We held our first moving sale to try and reduce.  Our goal is to not need a storage unit.  We're very fortunate that our parents will let us store some of our stuff at their houses while we're making our way around the country, but we don't want to impose too much.  So we're looking hard at all our stuff and trying to figure out what's really important.  As time goes on, fewer things are really important!

That's a lot of stuff.  And we had a bunch of other stuff that didn't fit into this room that I just forgot to photograph.  I had a friend over a couple days before the sale to go through stuff since she's going back to a classroom and got rid of all her stuff when she left the classroom years back.  Blessedly, she could use a lot of what I had.  That rescued a lot of things from either the trash bin or the recycle bin.  Thanks Lisa!!!  We also posted a bunch of things online that garnered some attention, so the table saw was sold before the official sale as well.  And then we spent 5 hours on a very sunny, beautifully sweet spring day, and sold a lot of things.  While we still have a lot to get rid of, I'm pleased with how much we've done.

Now to figure out where to store all this until our neighborhood sale in another month or so.  This house needs to hit the market, preferably without all the clutter!