Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Packing up the kitchen
I am still in awe not only of the amount of crap we had stuffed into the kitchen and outlying kitchen-adjacent area to begin with, but also in the fact that we got rid of something like a dozen large hefty bags full of crap and we still have more crap than I'd have ever thought possible. I've discovered that Wife and I have developed some pretty bad habits together over the years. (In fact we're just two weeks shy of 14-years of cohabitation.) Anyway, let's say that we have a frying pan but the non-stick surface has gotten old and scratched, rendering the pan useless. We then go out and buy a new pan and voila, problem solved, right? Well, no, because the old pan is still in the cabinet, totally forgotten yet still cumbersome. That pan will then sit atop the previous retired pan, and in time would be covered by the newly purchased pan when that one has worn out it's usefulness. I believe we threw away at least seven frying pans of various sizes and levels of non-stick surface effectiveness.
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We lived in SI for 3 months shy of 25 years. Dad died 12/98 and we didn't move until 11/00. It took ALL THAT TIME to clean up and pack all the shit in the house. I'm talking bags upon bags upon bags upon dumpsters upon Salvation Army calls of crap. Mom is a thrower-outer but Dad was a MAJOR keeper. The man had (literally) about 2 dozen Philipshead screwdrivers beause there were his, his father's, his uncle's and Grandpa's in his collection. He used 3 of them on a regular basis. So yep, I know how much stuff can accumulate.
The way I see it, unless you want to live in a house that's worthy of a visit by the "Clean Sweep" people (I have BEEN in those houses...multiple patients, Hubby's paternal grandmother's house and, to a lesser extent, my in-laws' previous house. It's not pretty.), you gotta get rid of stuff in order to get more stuff. We're cleaning out our 2 double hallway closets this weekend so I have someplace to put my new, big-ass, for-Christmas-baking-only Kitchen Aid Pro.
BTW, totally off topic but we had snow flurries here last night. It didn't stick but it doesn't happen down here very often.
Well, we've instituted similar rules about getting rid of something to make room for new stuff with the kids and their play room but they never seemed to stick. Now once a year, prior to Son's birthday, we just go through everything and get rid of all the stuff they no longer play with. I mentioned earlier in the blog about cleaning out our garage and it's pretty much the same there, though what we really do is move stuff into the garage with the hopes that someday we'd clean it out and eventually have a garage sale. We've lived in our place for just under nine years now but have had only one garage sale. We will try again once the kitchen is done, since we've now got combined kitchen and garage stuff we can sell.
And I remember when my mother died. She'd actually moved into the hotel where she'd been working and much of her stuff was in a huge storage container that the sibs and I then had to go through. We each kept whe we wanted, had a garage sale for anything left of value that none of us wanted and donated or trashed the rest. That was very difficult.
No snow for my area today, though the valley gets actual snow about once every other decade or so. But the storms we're going to get are supposed to be horrendous. All of the fire-damaged areas are now in danger of floods because all the vegetation has been burnt away and there's little left to absorb the rainwater.
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