SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Any time our living situations change, there's a need to sort and store stuff, at least that has always been true in my life.

Just now, I'd appreciate any humorous stories or how-to's y'all would like to share. Advice like "Don't load the diapers at the back of the unit." 😆

Don’t know if it’s funny or not but this is my experience with storage...

I have stuff on the shelves and floor of my man-den/fly-tying area/home office...
Maybe 1-2 a year my wife will tell me it’s too cluttered and I will tidy up. That usually leaves me with 1-2 boxes of really important, can’t be without "stuff" that I don’t really know what to do with.
Those boxes will be carried to my storage area in the cellar. Only that’s full... I wade into that storage and try to find a couple of boxes of "important" stuff that I think might be useful soon and move that to my storage at the rear of my garage.
Only... that storage is also full, so I have to find 2-3 boxes there that I can take to the dump or recycling.

I usually realize on my drive to the dump that those boxes were the boxes I moved from my office to the cellar, and from there to the garage maybe 2-3 years ago... Boxes that were never opened again containing really important, cant be without "stuff" that never was used and I had long-forgotten I had. A really small and quiet voice in my head keeps whispering "Bigger – none of that really important stuff will EVER be used again...".

My lesson? I skip the middle-man and throw really important, can’t be without "stuff" directly into recycling or the dump.

Funny thing is though... I have been following this decluttering and getting rid of stuff for about a year now. Just last weekend I needed my old Bose bookshelf speakers that had been in storage for a decade to test some equipment, and after a search in both the cellar and the garage... recalled they went to recycling about a month ago...

Bigger, LOL!!!

At least you have a system! 😮

I know that the geological layers of our stuff stashed in boxes or dresser drawers has everything to do with the 12 year construction project we lived in, where one room would be the most finished, so stuff would get put in a drawer in a china buffet, for example...that later on should have been relocated, but the destination room was then currently being gutted....

I have to hope I can get to the bottom of this stuff, before I become like my Aunt who when my Uncle died, chose to walk away from the home she had "shared" their whole married life. After he retired he became a compulsive garage sale shopper and hoarder.

And how to prioritize what moves out, in case of D, a whole 'nother layer of planning needed.

If I need to get rid of something, but feel guilty about tossing it, I give it a little kiss, thank it (or the person who gave it to me) and then I release it. It eases my guilt. I've had a brown leaf on my kitchen windowsill for about two years now. My grandson gave it to me, but it was dried up and covered in cobwebs, so it was time to release it. I gave it a little kiss and sent it on its way.

Our house burned down in 2017. Lost all the stuff we "had to keep". There are maybe a dozen items that I have actually even thought about since then. We need a lot less than we think. (And yeah, my garage is starting to get cluttered again, so spring cleaning is in order!)

The cardinal law of storage lockers states that anything you need (or are looking for) is in the back corner under the heavy stuff. No acceptions.

To alleviate the pain of pulling everything out and then putting it all back in i thought i would be smart and leave 'paths' to walk over my 'stuff'. The penalty for trying that shortcut cost me dropping my phone (acting as a flashlight) to the bottom of said storage unit on the way out.