Getting Older – THE ORGANIZED WAY

Tags

ageing, cleaning, hoarding, Ikea, organizing, tidying, turning 30

Well, if you have to turn 30, this weekend was definitely the way to do it.

I got to sleep in, and then PH fed me breakfast. He then produced two awesome gifts – A 9 bin shelving set for organizing the toys in Owl’s room (because the pile-everything-in-a-heap method wasn’t really working) and METAMAUS, which is a book ALL ABOUT THE WRITING OF MAUS.

Is that nerdtacular or what??

So I read Metamaus until Owl’s nap time, and then we started cleaning.

Expired/Unused product from my bathroom filled HALF A GARBAGE BAG

In the afternoon my friends arrived and they helped me go through my coat closet, my shoe rack, and (most dauntingly) Owl’s bedroom closet.

You could say that Owl helped, too... if by "helped" you meant "picked things out of the garbage and placed them on the Farm Fairy's baby's head".

I packed away stuff he has outgrown, agreed to donate certain things that I don’t mind re-obtaining for my next child, and clapped with glee as his impossible-to-open closet became a tidy, well-sorted space that my child could enter safely without, oh, say, a COFFEE TABLE falling on his head.

You think I'm joking about the coffee table, but I'm not. Trust me, this is much better.

THANK YOU, PERFECT HUSBAND. This works so much better than the jumbled floor heap.

Oh, and the red chair

Which we offered up for free on Craigslist TWICE

Moby

Still enormous

and the awkwardly large coffee table

Though it did match the floors beautifully

were removed from my living room, which now actually has several contiguous feet of open space for the first time in years.

We can even fit people into the living room, now!

Then we went out for a steak dinner.

SO GOOD.

So, in the last week we have removed 18 garbage bags’ worth of stuff from our house, destined for either the dump or Value Village.

A small sampling of our refuse

Owl’s room is so tidy it looks almost barren, but the walls are not – the cross stitches that I have been storing for a shamefully long time are finally in their rightful places.

and while there is still work to be done in the bedroom and general organization needs to happen on our bookshelves, I feel quite pleased with the results.

On Sunday we went to Ikea to use the gift cards that my friends happened to give me (which I’m sure was an excellent coincidence has nothing to do with PH winking and nodding at my friends when I exclaimed in glee over their good choices).

Now we have small, moveable tables for the living room (much better for a small space) and Owl finally has his own chair.

I feel almost like a grownup.

Almost.

Farewell, Moby.

Tags

hoarding, life, tv

I have said that I am a bit of a hoarder.

Part of this is anxiety related. The mental answer to “should I throw out this piece of paper with an unidentified phone number scribbled in the corner” tends to be “but what if, at some point in the future, I remember whose number that is and decide that I DESPERATELY NEED IT?”

The other part is from my tendency to anthropomorphize things. The Ikea guy would totally yell at me. I just don’t like to get rid of my old things.

When I moved out here, though, we brought next to nothing with us. Only what we could fit in my Toyota Echo. I left most of my things behind. My papasan chair. My 70s retro mirror cube side tables. My cookware. My glass kitchen table.

It was very hard.

including one stuffed animal

On the other side, PH picked up a sofa and chair at value village, and we shelled out 100 bucks for the cheapest TV we could find.

Cable costs extra. We don't pay extra.

We didn’t even have a bed for the first year. As it is, our bed consists of a dented hand-me-down frame and a headboard which isn’t even attached to the bed, because of the aforementioned dent.

So when someone offered us her 32″ HDTV for $200 bucks, we jumped at the chance to own something that didn’t suck.

Slight problem:

It was enormous.

You see, this TV wasn’t LCD or even Plasma. It was still a tube television.

SCALED UP.

I can’t even tell you how difficult it was to get this thing into the car. It wouldn’t fit in the trunk OR the back seat. It would only go into the passenger seat, with the seat pushed and leaned back as far as it could possibly go, and that was with a LOT of squeezing.

The two of us together couldn’t even lift the damn thing more than a foot off of the ground, but somehow we had to get it up three flights of stairs.

Success smells sweet

We named him for the same reason you name a mountain – it’s so BIG that it demands a title.

By the time we hauled Moby’s heavy ass into our apartment, with new scratches on his casing because we had literally DRAGGED him up step by frigging step, he seemed like an extremely real entity.

(Since then we have lugged him through two moves, and I think our selection of places to live that were NOT up three flights of stairs was largely due to our desire to NEVER TAKE MOBY UP STAIRS EVER EVER AGAIN.)

He was totally worth it, though. The transition to a 32″ HDTV was amazing for us to behold.

THIS IS HIGH TECH, MAN

That was in 2007.

Four years later, we have begun to be aware that Moby is nearing the end of his natural life.

First one of his component video ports crapped out on us.

Then we began to notice a slight change in colour around his edges. Sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t, but it appeared more and more.

Also, as time has passed we have become less impressed by Moby’s size. Most of our friends have bigger tvs – or should I say, WIDER tvs that weighed a 75% less.

But while PH’s testosterone levels resulted in some minor drooling in stores when we passed those big, glittering screens, we never seriously entertained buying one. We had Moby. We would make do as long as he lasted, and when he died… we might have to live without a television for a while. Not the end of the world.

But then PH found a really good sale, and pointed out that by combining some Christmas cash with gift cards, we could get ourselves a big new TV without biting into our savings.

A lot of hemming and hawing ensued. I wanted the new TV as well, so I could try out my new Xbox Kinect (a gift from PH, who gets free stuff through his workplace points, of which he has many, because he keeps ranking first in the province for Best Something at Doing Whatever) on a proper screen.

But we’re not overflowing with money right now. Shouldn’t we use our remaining bonus cash on practical, boring things, and split my gift card into batteries or Colin Firth films, and wait for our 10 year old television to flicker and die?

After nearly an hour of waffling in the store, we decided to bite the bullet. We knew that Moby could crap out on us at any time, and right now we had the very rare wherewithall to actually pick up a new TV.

So we did.

It’s a difficult transition for me. I’m not a fan of spending money on things that aren’t food, diet pepsi, baby stuff, or books.

Plus I feel bad for Moby, looming in the corner until we can figure out how to get him out of the house.

But DAMN.

before

after

That’s an upgrade.

We’ve come a long way. 

Instead of scrounging for things, we’re trying to get rid of them.

I’m childishly excited by the new TV… BUT…

I still feel bad for poor Moby so I can’t help but question our decision. Besides, HOW DO WE GET RID OF HIM?

I hate change.