Out of commission

Doing the furniture shuffle can be downright dangerous. That´s what DH found out the real hard way. Two days after rearranging our furniture, he got pain in his left shoulder so bad he fainted in the living room. As that kind of pain might also have meant a cardiac event, I called a doctor. We then spent the greater part of the night at the emergency room, him getting examined and treated and me sitting in a draughty waiting room awaiting news about what was up. Luckily, it wasn´t anything to do with his heart, so he could come home with me. Turned out he had an inflammation of his shoulder joint and may need to be operated on in the future. 

As if that weren´t bad enough, I caught a serious cold that kept me awake for about two weeks every night coughing. It got bad enough for me to spend part of each night sitting in my new easy chair trying to find at least some sleep in the upright position. 

Of course, that cold meant I could not drive to see MIL, as I didn´t want to pass it on to her.

So DH had to drive there on his own (luckily his shoulder wasn´t  hurting as badly any more), and I thought I had several days´ time to recuperate. I had intended to catch up on the work that had been backing up because I was so fricking tired over the weekend, but decided to go in on Monday (which I had intended to take off work) instead. And, just in time (argh) I lost a dental filling which meant that the second day off I had counted on was spent at the dentist´s. Who replaced the filling, but now I keep getting little electrical shocks from the new filling acting like a little battery combined with what I already had in my mouth. 

At least the cold seems to be abating. Keeping my mouth open long enough to get that filling in would have been impossible last week. And I have been able to sleep through the last nights, mostly. I still am coughing a bit, but no comparison to what I had. 

And being caught up with work again is a good feeling. 

Weight-wise, I have been paying the price for two weeks on less than three hours of sleep a night in the guise of a two-pound gain that is, right now, slowly coming off. 

I wonder if that cold was so tenacious because my body was taking the occasion of getting rid of some of the poisons I must have inhaled in my old office, too. I have never had a cold that stuck on for well over two weeks before, and apart the indoor pollution problem at the office I don´t think there was anything that would have reduced my immune defenses like that. 

The expert for indoor pollution was in last Tuesday, by the way. He took a shelf out of my office furniture for further testing. Somehow I am not convinced that smell was just the furniture gassing out. After all, I had no problems before the high humidity after the flooding last year. But I have been promised a copy of the expert´s report. 

The decluttering project, of course, has come to a screeching halt. Still, I have noticed feeling calmer in my living room with the new arrangement. The only hitch is that we will have to develop new habits when it comes to bringing mail or other stuff home.I still catch myself wanting to drop the mail on the living room table behind the door- which isn´t there any more and which is also not intended to be the drop-all any more. Having less surface to drop things on forces me to think about where things go at once. I haven´t yet developed a functioning system for that. 

And, before we can finally move our sleeping quarters into what used to be DH´s den/the guestroom, we will have to repaint the walls there. In the living room, too, because now that this room is optically calmer the sad state of the walls is that much more noticeable. But having more free space in the rooms also means that repainting them won´t be the giant horror project it used to be any more. 

Which means that I am eagerly waiting for warmer weather so I can go about painting the walls while keeping the windows wide open to air out any fumes. The experience I had at the office taught me quite a bit about what those may do. For the ceilings, I will have to enlist DH as soon as his shoulder is back to normal. 

As for the books I removed- I had budgeted to replace them all with their respective e-book counterparts. But when I had to decide which ones to buy as e-books, I discovered that I didn´t even want to replace most of them any more. I had read them once, and kept them just in case I should want to read them again. And now I realize that that would be a highly improbable event. So what were these books doing taking up space in my life any more?

Perhaps I will even go for another round at the leftover pocket books. Keeping them just for the sake of having them around is not a good use of the valuable closet space in our living room. 

As it is, there are five shelves´ worth of hardcover editions that are temporarily shelved in the guestroom which I still have to cull and then transfer to the living room. The open shelving there happens to be filled with my cookbooks and some self-help stuff that may, if kept at all, as well be kept somewhere less obvious. So, I will have to do some decluttering there, too. 

But- with every bit of clutter I remove the goal of having only things I like or use gets a bit closer. 

And with every knicknack I remove it gets easier to keep the place reasonably clean and dust-free. 

More isn´t better. Most of the time, it´s worse. Unless it´s more space, more time, and more peace. 

Julia

Obsolete

I am rapidly approaching the big five-oh. 

While it is obvious that I won´t get below morbid obesity by then, what I can do for myself is getting rid of those possessions of mine that no longer fit in with my lifestyle. 

Of course, I don´t have fifty years´worth of stuff around any more, as I have been decluttering with every move and several times in the last years, too. But I do have stuff I kept for almost forty of my fifty years that has strictly no relevance for my daily life today. 

So does DH.

Yesterday, we went for the vinyl rack. You know, every vinyl record ever acquired by both of us. Given that we were both voracious consumers of all things music, it was quite a sizable collection.

The kicker was that the last functioning record player in our household had broken down and was discarded.... six years ago. Well, it had actually broken more than ten years ago (ahem). 

We don´t intend to buy another record player, as we have our favourite music on CD (with few exceptions). 

So, the records were just taking up space. 

We don´t need them to remember the music we liked before the arrival of the CD. And after that, we both bought just CDs and no more vinyl records. We could both date the point when we got the first CD player from the dates of publication of our records. And, while these records had been well-loved when we first got them, there were plenty we would never buy again or even listen to today, even if we had a player available. 

So, we parted ways. 

And there´s another empty shelf in the living room.

If I were ever to replace my IKEA shelves with something else, that means three feet less of necessary shelf length to account for. 

And those feet add up. 

Removing all the things that are obsolete removes a lot of the clutter we have. 

Which reminds me that I should take a look at my tape collection, too, even if I still own a cassette deck.  The ones I would not listen to any more, and the self-recorded ones (does anyone remember sitting in front of the radio with one finger on the "rec" button to catch your favorite songs?) where I have no idea what is on them are natural candidates for eviction. Which means one or two drawers are going to be liberated soon. 

I don´t need the actual tapes and records for the memories to remain. And the space is something I can always use. 

Julia

Making room for living

As our new easy chairs have arrived today, the weekend turned into one big decluttering and furniture-shuffling exercise. Part of my IKEA shelves were scrapped, instead we put DH´s massive bookcase in that place. The closed parts of the shelves that had to go fit exactly into what were the still exposed shelves of the other ones, which means that we have now a closed cupboard instead of open shelving mixed with closed parts. 

The most important result is that there are barely any horizontal spaces left that would allow to put things upon them. Of course, a lot of what I thought was visual interest in the room has gone, too. 

But, what visual interest really meant was tchotchkes , bric-a-brac and family pictures. 

What is really amazing is how much calmer the room looks without all that stuff. A few choice pieces have gone on the still-open shelves on the third wall, and the rest is either inside the closed cupboards or in the trash can. 

In order to make room for the new arrivals, we also tossed the remaining IKEA easy chair and DH´s big dark couch, which means that we now have mostly uniformly colored wood and, after all is said and done, seating for a maximum of six people (we kept the danish design chair and my Grandfather´s easy chair). Which is quite a step forward from the ten sitting places we used to have and leaves plenty of open space between the seating arrangements, especially since we picked modern chairs that are looking a lot lighter and less massive than the old couch. 

Once again, taking things away has been the way to creating a better feeling for that room. 

In retrospect, we should have arranged things differently from the start when DH moved in with me. The big furniture pieces he brought plus the ones I already had were just too much stuff in too little space. 

And we used to make things worse by adding stuff instead of subtracting it. 

Case in point: the old VCR I still kept, plus about three feet of videotapes on a shelf. We haven´t watched any video tapes for many years- the device wasn´t even plugged in any more. The DVD player on top of it was what we used if we wanted more movie entertainment than 50 cable channels could offer at all. 

So, we decided that we didn´t need the VCR and tapes any more. If we ever wanted to own one of the movies again, they are all available on disc. Somehow, I am rather certain these discs will never enter our flat. 

And I cleared out all and sundry of my pocketbooks that I could reacquire on my e-book-reader if I wanted to. 

Having to pull out the complete stuff in the closed shelf compartments anyway, I still found plenty of things I decided not to put back, which meant freeing up several of those compartments completely. 

The chests of drawers had been the target of a decluttering session several days ago already, which included plenty of cables and chargers for gizmos I don´t even own any more. 

Lo and behold, even DH decided, when he saw the purge taking effect on the look of the room, to go through his own stuff and let go of his old "lava lamp" and a cheap imitation "petroleum" lamp whose wiring was faulty and which we had kept on top of one of the shelves for decoration. 

The astonishing part, for me, is that there was still so much stuff around even though I had been decluttering fiercely two years ago, finishing with the conviction that this was the lowest I would go with my stuff.

Looks like I was wrong.

And the side of the room where we didn´t yet change anything looks decidedly cluttered now compared to the other half. The culprits are mainly the decorations. Perhaps we´ll get around to repainting the room this summer. I know already that not all of the pictures and wallhangers will be replaced afterwards. 

There still is plenty of work to do, but right now, I just enjoy my "new" living room. 

Julia