Needles, pins and boxes

They come into your house looking harmless. They multiply when you´re not looking. They play hide-and-seek with you.
I´m not talking about white mice or guinea pigs, even though these fit the description, too.
What I´m talking about is those omnipresent wooden boxes with drawers in them. They come cheap, and they promise to bring order into the chaos of small parts that somehow seems to keep re-erupting in spite of any attempt at taming it.
I, too, have fallen into the trap of believing those boxes would finally bring order back into my possessions. What they did instead was allow me to avoid any decisions about the things I owned and did not use. Thus, I did, after several box purchases, end up with a whole battery of them taking up space in my bedroom. The little drawers on them are filled to the point of almost refusing to close with those diminutive items that I was afraid could get lost if I put them into a bigger container.
The problem is, once a piece has entered them, there it stays. Most of the time, I don´t even remember what is in there.
And the other problem is that these boxes, as well as the chests of drawers they sit on, would not find a place in our new bedroom if we were to do the exchange of rooms we´re planning.
That´s why I have started to eliminate them one by one. Yesterday´s candidate for eviction was fairly small, actually, just six little drawers. What I discovered in there- one drawer shock full of pinboard pins and paper clips. Now the pinboard those went with has left our household several years ago, so all they were good for was pricking the fingers of anyone opening that drawer unawares. As a matter of precaution, I dumped them on a tray first before tossing them, and lo and behold- there were also several padlock keys the locks to which were languishing in the next drawer. So, I reunited locks and keys, and dumped the rest into the trashcan. Next drawer- a bag of guest soaps that went into the bathroom to join our soap stack. Next one- bottles upon bottles of nail lacquer, which I put in the cosmetics drawer where they might even be used. Also in there, filling up two of the little drawers, were about a hundred ballpoint pens and colored pencils, plus, as if in testimony to where the boxes came from, a load of those little pencils that you get for free at a certain Swedish furniture store. After ditching the ones that were definitely broken, I corraled the rest into the pencil cases that were lying unused in another drawer, awaiting the great stationery purge I intend to do once I get all of my writing materials into one place. Result? One less box of drawers and the realization that a lot of what I had in there might have been tossed or used up long ago if I had not had that box to stash and hide it in.
Actually, that is the danger with every storage container. From the outside, it looks tidy no matter what you put in there. Whenever some small piece turns up, it is all too easy not to decide if you need it and dump it into a container instead.
The contents of most such containers are nothing but postponed decisions. And the decision doesn´t even get easier to make if you finally open that box or drawer, sift through the contents and find yourself wondering just what appliance or piece of furniture that oddly-shaped piece of plastic used to belong to.
So, I made two resolutions concerning those containers: I won´t buy new ones again, no matter how pretty or practical-looking. And the next time I am tempted to put something into such a container, I will first check whether the item in question needs to be kept at all, or if the better receptacle for it isn´t the trash can at once.

There are still four of the boxes left, plus all in all twelve big drawers that need sorting through, before I can decide what alternative storage to get to replace those with, if at all. After all, I´ve promised myself to eliminate everything I don´t need any more before I pick out any new furniture to store things in.

To be continued...


Julia