Clean Sweep: Too Much Stuff, Part 2

One of my first projects after retirement has been to do a clean sweep of my house, that is, to get rid of all the junk and then reorganize everything to be neat and accessible. It is a daunting task.

I spent a couple of days stuffing several garbage bags full of shredded bank statements, paid bills, cancelled checks, and old receipts, all dating back to the late 1990’s. That left enough room in the top drawer of the file cabinet to put away all the papers that were piling up on the coffee table. I could do even more with the file cabinet, but have moved on for now. Shredding is hard work.

I also managed to organize the entertainment center in the living room by trashing piles of old magazines and cassette tapes. I haven’t played any of the cassettes in years, and considering that I now have a large library of CDs and an iPod, I never will. The cassettes took up a lot of needed space and will not be missed. The magazines were a little more difficult to part with, however. I often hold onto a magazine if I particularly liked an article or photo in that issue. But then, I never go back and look at it again, and the “favorite” issues continue to pile up over the years. I now have room for more books because the magazines are gone.

The mystery junk in the bedroom was the next to go. Mystery junk is all that stuff you didn’t know what to do with when you got it, but couldn’t quite bring yourself to throw away at the time. It also includes stuff that was useful once upon a time, but you can’t figure out why you still keep it around now. I had mystery junk in boxes on top of the dresser, as well as in one dresser drawer. It’s not too difficult to identify mystery junk, and even less difficult to part with it. My dresser top looks amazingly neat now. Even my husband managed to part with some of his mystery junk when one of his dresser drawers got so full that a piece of junk fell out the back, lodged into the runners, and caused the drawer to become stuck. After forcing the drawer open, he filled a trash bag full of mystery junk. The drawer now opens easily and he admits that it felt good to get rid of the stuff.

Finally, as a symbol of my departure from the corporate world, I gathered up all of the award certificates, pins, company publications, plaques, manuals, personnel files, and commemorative toys that seemed to be everywhere in the house and packed them away in a special box that now sits in the storage shed, a large chunk of my life now neatly packed away and part of “the Past.”

The clean sweep isn’t finished yet, but it’s on hold. I need a long break before tacking that kitchen. . . .