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Four square meters. That is the open space in my living room that was liberated by ditching the last of the IKEA armchairs plus the guest bed. As they only pick up big pieces of trash once a month, they had been languishing in the cellar awaiting pickup day. Yesterday, very carefully of course not to put too much of a strain on my knee, we put them out in front of the house. I actually expected them to be gone before the pickup truck arrived. Well, that didn´t happen. They were obviously not looking attractive enough for anybody to carry them home. Which is sobering when I consider that I had actually been hesitant at first to throw them out. Anyway, the trash collection took them this morning. 

Watching from the kitchen window how they were compacted into the trash lorry made me a bit sad. Then again, I am glad that I have reclaimed the space they occupied in our flat. 

Come to think of it, I spent the twentieth part of our rent every month on making room for something that others wouldn´t even pick up for free.

And there are more such white elephants still around taking up space and making the apartment look crowded and small. 

The couch, which has been temporariliy relegated to the guestroom in place of the bed, is a prime such candidate  Two more square meters beckoning to be liberated. We are actually only waiting for our respective injuries to heal before dragging it downstairs. 

The living room minus the old easy chair and the couch appears twice as roomy as when they were still in there, even with the new easy chairs in place. 

One step after the other, we are improving on the way we live. And I keep being surprised at how small a step may sometimes translate into a dramatic improvement. 

On the weight front, unfortunately, no such luck. I have been supplementing with gelatin and resistant starch for several days, hoping to get my digestion and my joints back to working properly. What that brought me was a three-pound gain. I just hope that it´s a matter of the body adapting to being refed and will go away again. Meanwhile, it´s sheer frustration. Pants growing tight again ( yup, the bigger ones I hesitated so long to buy), shortness of breath, and of course that bum knee. 

Looks like it´s one more time my body shows me that it won´t do what I want it to do. 

If only that would stop. 

Before I get back to where I never wanted to be again for good. 

Julia

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

Getting my mojo back

Sometimes, you only realize how rotten you were feeling after you feel better. That is certainly what I have experienced during the last week. 

After moving my stuff to my new office I noticed an immediate improvement in how I was feeling. The only thing I had to move back into my old room were my flower pots- looks like the dirt in them has soaked up a good deal of what´s in the air in my old room, and they were smelling of it. So, I´ll probably have to replant my sanseverias in clean earth before I can put them back. But apart that- everything roses, and I don´t mean just the smell! Of course, I threw out everything in terms of food and everything made of plastic. My coffee cups went home for a good soak in desinfectant to get rid of the smell that still clung to them. And my books are luckily inside a closed cupboard, so I guess they either didn´t get too contaminated or they are sealed off from the room enough to keep them from spreading the smell to the new room (they are legal casebooks I need for my job and would be outrageously expensive to replace, so they have to stay). 

The most striking thing is that my energy and concentration are back. No more dozing off in front of the TV at night or, even worse, in front of my desk at noon. So, I am catching up with the stuff that didn´t get done during the last weeks due to my concentration being absolutely shot. 

And I have, over the weekend, gone on another decluttering stint. 

This time, it´s the living room once again. We will be getting new easy chairs for the both of us next week, which means a big rearranging session coming up over the weekend as DH is not ready to toss his old sofa, which will be moved to the den, and I want to keep my Grandfather´s easy chair, too. 

So, it´s goodbye to the old IKEA easy chair and footstool I had, and the guest bed in the den, too, because that´s where the sofa will go. 

And DH wants to transfer his big antique bookcase he got from his parents to the living room. I´m not too happy about that, as the thing isn´t exactly my style, being way too heavy and dark. Actually, the thing is rather high on my all-time-list of things I wish DH would get rid of. I guess DH will have to see what that thing does to the style of our living room before he´ll admit putting it there isn´t such a grand idea.  As it is, DH can be pretty stubborn, and parting him from that thing would be a major effort. 

Putting a four-door bookcase into our living room means having to make room for it, which in turn means that three of our IKEA shelves will have to go. 

Of course, the stuff that is stored in that bookcase won´t disappear just because it is moved. Nor will the stuff inside the IKEA shelves, which won´t all fit into the space the bookcase was in, either. 

So, the only chance I have  to keep the whole operation from turning into a desaster is minimizing the stuff inside our living room shelves even more. 

This time, the chosen victims are my favorite books. 

Say that again?

Throwing out my favorite books? 

The ones that did survive every attempt at decluttering? The ones that were read and re-read?

Might I not just go and kick some cute furry things instead to prove I am a barbarian? 

Actually, it´s not as crazy as it sounds. The books in question are paperback editions of several prolific authors whose works I like to read. They are also, after many readings, rather dingy-looking and dog-eared. And I found out that the big-internet-bookstore-whose-name-I-won´t-name has every single one of those books available for my e-book reader. When I added up what they would cost me, I came up with a figure so ridiculously low in comparison to what owning the paperbacks costs me in terms of space that the decision became an instant no-brainer. Throwing the paperbacks out will liberate at least half an IKEA shelf which is also what would be the space lost by the rearrangements. 

I am even thinking of cutting down the paperback department even further, by checking which of my paperbacks would be available in e-book format and getting rid of all those I could, if ever I wished to read them again, download to my e-book-reader. Which would also mean I´d have to decide if those books were even worth downloading at all. As paperbacks, they are already there and take up space. I might even find that most of those other books won´t be downloaded after all. 

The whole scheme will, of course, only be applied to paperbacks. The hardcover part of my library will stay for the time being, as those are, for the most part, the irreplaceable ones. They are also decorative enough to put into open shelves.

As it is, DH´s idea of a proper living room for decent citizens includes shelves and shelves of coffee-table books, gilt-backed classics and encyclopedias. The whole impress-your-visitors array. 

For my part, I feel about being visited by anyone the same way I feel about getting a tooth pulled. No visitors at all if I can help it. It was bad enough when DH brought DMIL here several years in a row for her b-day. While I wish her health and wellness, the fact that she does by now not travel any more came as quite a relief to me. And apart from her, if DH ever wanted to invite guests we would be in for a discussion of the state of the union. Meeting people can be done outside our flat. There´s no need to drag anybody into it. 

Which means that the whole impressive library won´t ever be seen by anyone unless we had to have the repair guys in. 

Oh well. But then again, I´m conservative enough to like the feeling of a library, too. Maybe I´m not too happy about this library  because DH has so many books on art, which definitely is not an interest of mine. Or it´s because my parents, too, have so many artsy books, sometimes even the same ones as DH. Which may also be why I am not that happy about the medium brown bookcase, because it´s almost the same color as my parents´ shelves at their place. 

Then again, DH is very attached to the furniture his parents gave him. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, doesn´t it? 

And I will have to work on fitting those things into our living room without cramping either the living room or our style...

The bad news is that the weight gain hasn´t stopped yet. Perhaps my body needs some convincing still that I am out of that gas chamber of an office for good...

Julia

Almost normal

Except for cable TV, all amenities of life have by now been restored to us. The experience of having been a whole week off the grid is beginning to recede in the background among the usual business of the day. 

Still, there are things that have changed. 

Just this morning, DH and I both stated that we are glad to be rid of the junk in the cellar. 

Mind you, with almost every piece that went down there, there had been an argument, either between the item's owner and the other person in the household, or between the owner and himself or herself. 

The argument went like- we don't use this any more-but it's still good for using- it clutters up our flat-but in another flat we might use it again- it's not worth keeping. - but if we ever wanted to use one again we'd have to pay for a new one - I ought to toss this in the trash -but if you did you might regret it-   and so on. 

Deliberations, in all of those cases, regularly resulted in a hung jury and the defendant in question being confined to the cellar. Which meant that decluttering our flat turned into cluttering up our cellar.

When the flood hit us, that cellar was actually so full of stuff that most of it was, for all practical purposes, inaccessible unless one were to climb over other things and dig down to the crate in question, if one knew at all which one it was. 

Apart that, it always had high moisture, and very poor lighting, which perhaps made it even easier to bury our junk there, sometimes half hoping for humidity to make it tossable, as in "this is too far damaged to save it, now we may throw it away". 

The Greek have that tale of Hercules being required to unmuck the stables of King Augias that had not been cleaned in ages. He did it by making the waters of a river flow through there. Our personal Augias stable also has had a river run through it, and now that the clutter has gone for good I am still stuck wondering why the heck I did keep most of it. As I mentioned, a lot of the things we tossed might have been cleaned and dried, but when thinking of the work that would have meant, and the fact that we would have to find a home for every single piece we rescued from the debris upstairs in our flat, there was suddenly no discussion at all about tossing things which we had almost quarreled about when it came to taking them out of our flat. Not even the fact that some of those things cannot be replaced did stop us from throwing them out. Actually, it was the realization that we might go to the pain of cleaning those things, only to box them up again and put them into the cellar, never to be thought of again until the next inundation. 

If I neither love nor use it, it is clutter. 

The very fact that I did not want these things around any more and banished them to the cellar amply proved that I neither loved nor used them, in spite of what I made myself believe about how valuable they were. The things I really value have never been inside that cellar. 

The knowledge that it is no longer feasible to stash stuff that is too much for our flat in the cellar actually helps declutter in even another way. I know now that bringing any new item into our flat means having to make room for it, and that any item that was in the way would have to be tossed at once, so, even before bringing in the new item I must realize that it will probably cost me, not only what the price tag says, but perhaps also another piece of my possessions that would have to be thrown away to make room for it. 

Considering that, it suddenly becomes easy to leave things at the store. 

There may even be a second round of decluttering coming on at our flat, because there are still plenty of candidates for inspection which, in the past, escaped being banished to the cellar only because there was still closet or cupboard space they could be put away in. 

Even if I have a space to keep it in, it may be clutter. 

And I do not forcibly have to hang on to every piece of crockery or flatware I ever bought. 

It has taken me many years to arrive at that conclusion. 

But the feeling of peace and accomplishment after getting rid of all that stuff in the cellar tells me it might be very much worth my while to put it in practice. 

Julia

Tallying the damages

Up four pounds and back above that pesky limit of obesity. 

That's what one week of being unable to cook and having to eat crap has been doing to me. 

Actually, I had feared worse.

Yesterday, the first errand after work took me grocery-shopping. Yoghurt, eggs, bacon, cheese. 

For the frozen veggies, a trip to the local Costco equivalent is planned tomorrow. 

The experience of being flooded with no chance of saving any of the contents of my freezer has actually made me a bit apprehensive about what to put in storage. Stockpiling enough meat to last us through a whole month is something I'm not likely to repeat anytime soon. As long as I can get over two or three days' worth of cooking before the next occasion to grocery shop, I ought to be okay. 

Once again, the damages were worse than necessary because I had too much of something. Too much stuff in the flooded cellar, which necessitated several times the work we would have needed to do clearing out everything than if we had been more choosy about what to keep, and too much food in the freezer. 

And the experience of being in the middle of a natural desaster instead of watching it on TV has been humbling, to say the least. Maybe people who live in areas that are regularly hit by floods or storms are more sanguine about such things, but we had been operating under the assumption of being well out of harm's way. Things like the possibility of having to evacuate on short notice just weren't on our radar.

When desaster struck, we were helpless and unprovided.

My new pantry will hold some things I had not bought before due to relying completely on cold storage. I know now that I must keep some things on hand that can be prepared without cooking and don't need cooling. 

And I will have to prepare a bug-out bag. We were lucky not to be cut off from water, too. Had we been, we, too, would have joined the ranks of the evacuees at local school gyms. If ever something like this flood were to happen again, I want to know just what to grab and take along. Hint: it won't be most of the stuff we still own. 

As it is, digging through all of that waterlogged stuff from the cellar, tossing most of it and having to clean the rest was exhausting. But if I were to apply the same standards that the emergency forced on us to the stuff we still have high and dry in our flat, I am certain there would be even more things that are, mostly, clutter and need tossing. 

Even after believing I had already got rid of most clutter. Some of it, instead of leaving our household for good, had ended up in that basement and came back to haunt me last week. 

Of all of the china, glassware, stainless steel stuff, and cooking accessories from the cellar, just one box the size of a beer crate is left. These will have to find a home upstairs. Perhaps even at the cost of removing other things. And this time, those other things will feed the trashcan instead of cluttering the basement. 

They say that what you keep in your basement is symbolic of your relationship to the past. If that is true, we have just been presented with a golden opportunity to bring new experiences into our lives. 

Julia

Regrets and what-did-I-thinks

Yesterday night's cellar cleanup operation made quite a not-so-clean sweep of the contents of the boxes of kitchenware and china I had decluttered from my kitchen only to carry them to the basement and keep them there. And most of what turned up belonged either in the "what, you're still there?" or in the "why did I ever bring you here?" category. 

A set of brand new teflon coated pans- I had been able to buy those at a steep discount once and bought two of each size because I wanted to have one in reserve if the coating on the other got worn. By now, I avoid using teflon-coated anything, so they were not likely to ever be used anyway. When I put them out with the trash, it took less than five minutes for someone to pick them up. 

About a dozen stainless steel lidded jars that I had relegated to the cellar after realizing that they were not airtight enough to store loose tea leaves without them losing their aroma. Unusable for the purpose I bought them for. Kept purely because they might someday be usable for storing something in. As the occasion to do that has not arisen in several years, it's not likely to ever come. Not worth the work of cleaning them. Ditched. 

A ceramic tea warmer for a single cup. Never used, because not stable. Ditched.

Another for a teapot. Was given to me as a present, which is why I hadn't tossed it yet. I own several other tea warmers that are more stable and prettier. Ditched.

Plastic containers for carrying apples and bananas to work. I'm not much of a fruit eater, so these wandered from the kitchen to the cellar instead of to the trash. As they were impossible to sanitize, ditched, along with the case of bad conscience for not using them and eating fruit. 

The two sets of colored glassware I had been agonizing over two years ago. They had, of course, not been used since. Ditched. The sanitizer necessary for cleaning them would have been more expensive than replacing them if ever the need should arise. 

A piece of juniper wood my parents brought as a holiday souvenir forty years ago. I had imagined crafting something from it. Ditched.

About half a dozen sets of paint rollers. I must have bought new ones every time I wanted to paint something, even though I had painstakingly cleaned the old ones after use and kept them. Buying new ones was obviously easier than locating the old ones every time. Ditched. And for the next time I paint anything, I'm resolved to just toss the rollers afterwards and save myself the mess. 

Several buckets of paint. As the water had been standing more than five feet higher than where they stood, there was, even if they were closed, no way of telling if it had been contaminated. .No way I would risk spreading that stuff onto our walls. Ditched.

When we finished working yesterday, there was just one set of china in a sturdy plastic box left, still dirty but minus the wet paper it had been wrapped in, two empty boxes, one metal stand for hanging files that I'll try to clean, one very dirty bicycle (dito), a yellow watering can, two empty buckets, our tires, the flower pots and boxes, and two ladders. 

That cellar has not been as empty since before I moved in. 

I was, actually, rather taken aback at what having to empty out all of the boxes and removing the loose stuff, too, turned up. We'd had it all set up tidy-looking, or put away in boxes. But still, even in the boxes, it was clutter. As were most of the boxes themselves. I had kept dozens of plastic boxes from my last removal, and so had DH, just in case we would move again. 

If ever we should move, it would be no problem at all to find other boxes. In the meantime, the important thing is that the cellar dries out fast so we don't get a mildew problem in the upper storeys, too. And that the layer of mud mixed with whatever gets removed. 

At least now we can do that easily because the cellar is almost empty.

Julia

Goodbyes made easy

While we are still off the grid with no hope of getting back electricity soon, one of the neighbors had organized for a portable generator to give us at least the chance of emptying out our cellar. Which meant that DH and I spent the better part of last evening down there.

Of course, everything was still wet and smelling like a big sewer. In the weak light of the jury-rigged lamps, we found a scene of utter and complete chaos and destruction. Pieces of wood mingled with soggy paper, plastic boxes filled up to the brim with water that had been carried several feet away from their former place and deposited on top of overturned furniture. The car wheels with tires on we keep down there must have acted like a mixer in the enclosed space when the air in the tires set them afloat. 

What used to be a wise precaution, namely, putting everything into waterproof plastic boxes, has come back to haunt us with a vengeance because these boxes, once filled up to the brim, won't empty on their own, which means having to drain them manually of the stinking liquid. As some of the boxes contained things that were salvageable, such as several complete sets of china (I mentioned these before), ditching them wholesale was out of the question.

Anything wood, cloth, paper and electronics, such as our battery loader, and the pieces of Ikea shelving I had kept down there were, of course, only fit for tossing. So toss them we did. The surprising thing, for me, was that many things that would, theoretically, have been cleanable turned out to be, to us, not worth the hassle. Pots, pans, the remains of my cheap glassware. Flower pots. Most of the plastic boxes. 

What I kept, at least for now, is my bicycles, the car wheels, both of which need to be inspected for damages, the best of the china sets, about half of the flower pots, our balcony boxes which we hadn't planted and hung yet, and about half a dozen especially sturdy plastic boxes. 

The rest of the stuff is mostly gone. I still have about five waterlogged boxes down there which I did not get around to emptying before the generator ran out of gasoline, so I'll have to return down there tonight. 

Of course, everyone on our street was decluttering their soaked stuff from the cellars. What was incredible was that some of the stuff obviously was picked up by someone else less squeamish than we were. Well, good luck with that. 

Decluttering our cellar was something we had planned to do for quite a while, except that the attempts we made were regularly cut short by the sheer amount of things to be moved. Having a bad case of might need that someday syndrome didn't exactly help, either. So the stuff stayed and multiplied.

Being forced to get rid of most of it is an incredible feeling. Everything in that cellar that was clutter is gone, just like that. It was not even hard. Tossing a piece of junk that drips with brownish, stinky liquid, or is caked with a layer of sediment, is easier than deciding to keep and clean it. 

That sounds good as long as I do not remind myself that I might have saved myself hours of slaving away in that sewage hole if I had only kept those things that are, today, valuable enough to me to go to the pain of cleaning them. 

Just because I have a space to put something in does not mean I have to keep it.

Going through that kind of experience drives that home pretty hard.I don't think I'll ever fill that cellar up again. 

Tonight, if the generator is running again, I'll do the rest of the boxes. And then there's nothing left but to wait for electricity and heating to be turned back on so I'll have hot water to clean what I want to keep. 

Julia

Hell or high water

As suddenly as it had arrived, the flooding has drained away. Yesterday, coming home meant wading through about three feet of muddy water, with a backpack that held bread and two thermos bottles of boiling water so we would at least have some hot coffee. This morning, the street was almost dry except for a layer of smelly sediment covering everything. Only the cellar is still half full of water.

I shudder to think of what to expect down there when the water has gone. Most likely, I'll curse myself over every single postponed decision I stacked down there. As it is, the muck and water will probably make a lot of those decisions easier. And I might berate myself for procrastinating about painting our bedroom and rearranging some of the shelves in my living room, as both the paint and brushes I bought for the former and the wooden shelf parts I wanted to use for doing the latter are certain goners. 

Apart those, the cellar holds several boxes of china currently not in use. These should be salvageable after tossing the newspapers I wrapped the stuff in, unless the incoming water broke something. 

What also is unlikely to have survived are my christmas decorations. The box they are in is supposed to be waterproof, but I don't think they meant proof to being submerged for several days. 

Then again, nothing of all that is especially valuable. So, I should not be too upset.

And we were lucky on another front, too. 

As it had been raining cats and dogs on Saturday, we did not drive for our usual start-of-the-month grocery shopping. Which means the freezer is half empty, and we did not fill it up on Saturday. As everything in there has spoiled after two days with no power, any money we might have spent on refilling it would have fed the trashcan. 

The stuff in the refrigerator has been keeping until now, to the exception of some steaks I bought on Saturday as a special treat and decided to save for today instead of cooking them on Sunday. Oh well. 

Yesterday, I picked up some burgers and fries for dinner- not what we usually eat- and I will have to pick up something else tonight, or eat out with DH. Not what I budgeted for, nor were the stainless steel thermos bottles I bought for carrying the hot water. 

And the weight loss project has to be suspended for the duration. Not being able to cook anything is a real obstacle there. 

At least, from what I can see from my office window, the tram is operating again.

Keep calm and carry on.

Julia

Inundation

The valves were not closed. For another two days it has been raining without pause. We've been watching the weather and flood reports all day. This morning, looking out of the third-storey windows of our flat... the ground had disappeared under three feet of muddy brown water. Electricity has been turned off, the basement has completely filled up with the stinky brownish gunk, and I have no idea when we will get power back. The contents of our deep-freezer probably will not survive until then. 

As the colleague who would have to do my job were I to call in as being unable to come has been even harder hit, I have been braving the flood in a pair of old running shoes and my jogging dress, with my pants in a knapsack on my back. Goodness knows what is floating in that muck, and I just hope I did not catch anything from being immersed in it up to my waist. 

The forecast says even more rain, plus they will have to release even more water from an artificial lake upstream. So, the worst has not arrived yet. 

Of the cleanup that will have to follow in our cellar I don't want to think. 

Looks like Fate just gave me some big help with the decluttering I procrastinated on...

One doesn't usually think of how many things in our lives depend on electricity running smoothly. Or how dependent one is on clean water coming out of the wall. I am loading my phones and ipad at the office, as we still have electricity there. Our landline phones are dead, so we need the cell phones, especially since we need to stay in touch with MIL. 

And that fridge won't hold the temperature more than 24 hours. After that, goodbye to the contents of my pantry...

I only hope they will not have to turn off the water, too, even if we can only use it for washing right now.

And I hope the water won't rise much further...I don't even know if I will be able to return home tonight. 

Julia

Pesky beasties, snow and the usual snafus

First, I caught a cold that kept me coughing and sniffling for the better part of two weeks. I had a holiday planned for already around my b-day, part of which we intended to spend at MIL's, and the remainder at home, recuperating. What happened instead was the return of snow and cold, so bad that all airports were closed down, and the road forecast was so bad we decided to wait the worst out before driving home. The cold bugs, in the meantime, seem to have migrated to the colleague I work together with, and he's home sick for the whole week, after which- you guessed it- it's his turn to go on holiday for another two weeks. Saying I'm pissed doesn't quite describe it.
On the bright side of things, my parents are giving me a brand-new refrigerator for my birthday. I picked a model that has an especially big drawer for storing vegetables, and optimum energy use levels. Quite expensive, but from the reduction in energy use alone, it will probably pay for itself within seven to eight years. Besides, the old one has been making funny noises for awhile, so it's probably as well I'll be rid of it, before it starts a fire or something. The new one will probably be delivered next week.
What with the weekend being spent at home, I have started to make room in the kitchen for removing the old one and setting up the new one in its place.
Which, once again, led to several items being evicted from the premises. A fruit basket that had its feet so close together that it kept toppling over when I tried to use it, and a plastic microwave dish I had originally thought I'd use at the office went to the trash, as well as some bottles I had kept for their decorative value. The magnetic pinboard, i.e. the fridge door, was cleared of the magnets and paper attached to it. Part of it went to the freezer door, and several freezer magnets have gone into a drawer, pending a decision on whether I will use them again or not. One five-liter stockpot has gone to the cellar, as well as several empty flower pots.
What keeps surprising me is that at virtually every occasion where I have to do some rearranging I come up with a bunch of stuff to declutter, too. Then again, we still own plenty of stuff so it should be a given that not all of it is a necessity.
I'm actually looking forward to having that new fridge. That crisper drawer means I can, perhaps, buy more non-frozen veggies, which I mostly avoided because the old fridge had little room for them and our kitchen is too warm to store them outside of the fridge. So, any fresh veggies I bought have been for immediate consumption only. As we grocery-shop biweekly at most, that probably was not optimal for getting my nutritients in.
On quite another vein, that fridge replaces something I already own which I need daily, and which is on the point of breaking down. It reduces my energy bill and my carbon footprint, and the old one will be taken away and recycled, too.
So, it is the perfect minimalist gift. No extra clutter and good for the environment and my wallet.

Now if the fresh veggies that go into it were helping me to get back on the weight loss track again...


Julia

The freedom of losses

Sometimes, losing something one felt attached to turns out to open doorways one would never have thought of opening otherwise.
As I mentioned before, I grew up at my grandparents' house. My parents moved in there, too, up to the year when I finished school and went to study at a university several hundred kilometers away. The same year, my parents bought a house of their own and moved in there, along with grandma who at the time couldn't live on her own anymore.
But she did keep ownership of the old house, which after her death passed on to my mother.
I had always taken it for granted that one day, that house would pass to me.
I was also certain that I would spend my retirement there. I actually had that fantasy of putting everything that my grandparents had owned back in the places where they had kept it, every piece of furniture, every knicknack, every picture.
So, I hung on for dear life to every single piece of my grandparents' inheritance. I even kept my grandmother's aprons.
Then, one day, I learned that my mother had sold the old house.
I was devastated.
For a while, I toyed with the idea of buying it back, or recreating it. After all, I still had a copy of the blueprints.
It took me a long time to realize that my needs for a place to spend my retirement might be dramatically different from what my grandparents needed.
And I also realized that many of my grandparents' things I had kept, or that I had expected to someday come into my possession, did not fit in with my lifestyle at all.
Preserving one's inheritance was something that was very important for my grandparents. Great-grandma's watch, or Uncle Edward's books, were, just by virtue of who had owned them before, treasures to be kept and passed on to the next generation along with the stories of their former owners. For almost every piece in that household, there was a story.As a child, I sucked up those stories like a sponge, certain that I was the keeper of my family's history.
I also imagined that I would someday pass on the stories along with the items to my own children, who of course would be brought up to value them as much as I did.

What I had not thought of was that there might be no one coming after me to pass those things on to.

But that is exactly what happened. I am, at close to fifty years of age, childless. There is nobody left who will memorize the tales of my family after I am gone. And it's almost certain that one day, my household will be dismanteled by someone who is not even a relative.

Knowing this, I have been forced to take a long hard look at the reasons I had for keeping certain things.
What I found was that I had kept a lot of things that I would never even use so I could pass them to my children- who quite probably wouldn't use or need them, either. There were even things that had been worn-out and tattered when I had first come into their possession. Most importantly, there were also plenty of things that might have been at the height of style and fashion when my grandparents acquired them. By today, they were painfully outdated and old-fashioned.
If there is no one I can pass those things on to - apart the fact that imposing last century stuff on my offspring would have meant passing on my grandparents' unhealthy attitude towards such things, too, and would most likely only have annoyed them- that means I am free to decide which items I want to keep to remind me of my childhood home. The old house having been sold means I am free to decide where and how I want to spend my retirement.

It has taken me awhile to come to this point. In a way, it is a scary place to be. Moving away from a path I thought was preordained for me, to a place where everything is possible.
But those very possibilities demand that I release my grip on the things of the past. Spending a sizeable part of my income on maintaining a museum of my family history is not a wise use of my money.
Today, I have better uses for my time, space and resources. Perhaps I will write down some of the family stories someday. But I do not need to keep all of the attendant stuff for that.

And I know that the former owners would not want me to spend my life in a cluttered mess, either.


Julia

Thick and tired

Maybe it's the darkness and cold of deep winter. Maybe it's the lack of rest that comes with having too much on one's plate.
Whichever it is, for weeks I have been suffering from permanent fatigue. Not a good thing if I want to continue recondensing. And not a good place to contemplate starting an exercise program, either. If all I want to do after work is plunk down in my recliner and doze off in front of the TV set (which is turned on for the benefit of DH, not mine-I didn't even have one before DH moved in), exercise of any kind is an even more daunting proposition than usual.
Intellectually, I know that not moving my body beyond what is unavoidable might be contributing to that feeling of general weakness and malaise, and also to the persistent aches and pains that have been plaguing me ever since the onset of the cold weather.
As several of the women in my family have been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis that started around menopause, I am, of course, worrying that my genes might have caught up with me there.
The condensable matter, under these circumstances, is of course not budging. I just barely manage not to regain. And with every day on that plateau my chances of getting to goal before the big five-oh are shrinking.
I'd rather be shrinking myself...

Perhaps the lengthening of daylight time and better weather will help. I am not giving up. Not after how far I had come.

The weather forecast says temperatures will be back above freezing next week, but it also says there'll be a lot of rain. If they were wrong about the rain part, I could, perhaps, start on the nordic walking again. If not, I'll have to wait for my usual route through the park to turn back from ankle deep slush to a walkable pathway.

I have also been looking into the purchase of a cross training machine that would free me from weather constraints. Apart the fact that they are quite expensive, those things take up a lot of space, which in our flat is at a premium anyway.
Perhaps I should throw out the guest bed in the office to make room. Putting DH's small desk that right now sits in the living room over into the office would mean enough room for a cross training machine where that desk lives now.
Then again, what I definitely don't want is another white elephant sitting around. I used to own a stationary cycle that ended up as a rather impractical clothes rack for several years before I threw it out. So, if I were to buy me that cross trainer, I'd better use it.
I know that there are specimens of that machine which are a lot cheaper than the one I have been ogling, but whichever machine I bought would have to bear the weight of either DH or me, and those cheap ones probably wouldn't hold up.

Perhaps I should look for one on ebay...


Julia

Snowy autumn

Last weekend had the coldest weather on record hereabouts for October, with snow and ice galore. Nothing as bad as hurricane Sandy, of course, but enough to keep us from attempting the journey to visit MIL on Saturday as planned- we didn´t have our winter tyres on yet as we weren´t counting on snow before November. Which means DH has driven down there on Sunday alone so he could take care of the appointments this week he was going down there for, while I am staying here on my own.
Which means I have plenty of time for catching up with the things that need doing in the household. Add to that the fact that Wednesday is a legal holiday hereabouts, and thus not an office bound day, and what you get is one big decluttering action. The first thing I did today was deal with the mess on the balcony. The geraniums, which had until Friday been blooming beautifully, didn´t take too kindly to being frozen stiff and snowed in. So I emptied out the balcony flower boxes today, and then took everything down to the cellar including some empty flower pots I had kept under the balcony table. The rosmary and lavender bushes now reside in the bathroom, as that is the only window sill that doesn´t have a radiator underneath.
Taking that stuff down, plus putting the recycling stuff down into the bins, too, actually meant several trips up and down four flights of stairs, so I got my exercise, too.
The balcony looks tidy now, but also quite empty. It´s always a strange feeling to take down the remnants of summer, knowing it will be six months at least before I´ll be able to replant my balcony. The trees, too, have been dropping their leaves after the frost, so, it´s definitely autumn going on winter.
Time to break out the hot tea and some cookies. I think after running up and down stairs all afternoon I can afford to.



Julia

The fruits of uncluttering

This weekend was, once more, wardrobe rollover time, meaning that my summer clothes went into storage until next spring, and the warm sweaters and fake fur hats and the other cold-season stuff went to take their places in the readily accessible part of my wardrobe.
In years past, before my weight loss, that used to mean wrestling with at least four of those zippered things I use to store my out-of-season clothes in, digging through them, and spending at least two hours doing so.
Not so this year. Having gotten rid of every piece that had become too big for me when I packed the winter stuff away last spring, I just took out the remaining stash, replaced the summer t-shirts and such where the sweaters had been, and put the (one) zippered box needed for that back on top of my closet. Total time spent- ten minutes. Then I took my warm jackets out and the thin ones back in (five minutes) and I was done. There wasn´t any garment I needed to toss, and the fact that my formerly overcrowded closet rods hold, by now, only the clothes that right now fit me also means that the things I store on hangers don´t have to go into storage any more- I just push the out-of-season stuff to the less accessible side of the closet.
What used to be an endeavour taking up the better part of an afternoon has thus become a fifteen-minute project.
What´s more, having gotten through one winter already on what I have in my wardrobe right now, I know that I won´t have to buy anything new this winter. Which suits me just fine.
There must be some "up" side to that weight plateau and slight regain, mustn´t there?


Julia

Diminishing surfaces

The decluttering of our apartment has, by now, progressed to a point where all of our existing possessions do have a place to put them away. Which, in turn, means that we are now officially progressing to the next stage of minimalization: finding out which items are, even if they have a home, superfluous, or even attracting clutter accumulations.
The fastest way to pick out those is doing a complete tidy-up and then just wait and see which places are the first to become untidy again.
As it is, anything that has a horizontal surface is a possible clutter magnet. It is too easy sometimes to just drop something off, and leave it there.
One of the usual suspects for that was right in our entrance area. We have had two big chests there, with flat lids that seem to attract bags, newpapers, and such like magic.   The problem being that the bags were supposed to go inside the bigger one, while the smaller of the two serves as a tool chest and is only opened when there´s something to do that requires using a tool, which isn´t that often as a hammer and a screwdriver for everyday jobs are kept outside, and the power drill doesn´t see much use outside of a move in progress.
So, after emptying some bookshelves of their literary payload, I took a measuring tape to that tool chest, and voila- it now fits nicely under one of those bookshelves that I rearranged a bit for the purpose ( thumbs up to those incredibly versatile IKEA shelves).
The other chest now has a big basket on top that serves as a receptacle for bags and such, keeping them contained instead of flying all over the place.
Removing the tool chest also opened up the entrance optically, making it look a lot less cluttered.
Again, having a thing less makes for a better look. The tool chest fits under that bookshelf completely, and as it´s from the same wood as the shelf, blends in to appear almost a part of the shelf.
One other thing I have done is make an agreement with DH to make the living room a paper free zone. That means that no letters, advertising flyers, newspapers and such may be put on the horizontal surfaces of the living room, with the exception of one leather-bound file folder I keep next to the computer that holds bills and such pending their being taken care of. Anything else has to be removed. As DH is such a keeper when it comes to paper stuff, what we agreed on is that the new place for his paper stuff will be the former guest room which now has become his home office and den. Perhaps having to pick it up and take it there might even make him throw some of it out at once....
In any case, I am right now enjoying my paperless living room. And eyeing the tchotchkes on the shelves for potential evacuation candidates.
The less I have to take care of, the better I feel. And it´s rubbing off on DH, too.


Julia

Too many lights?

With both of us working full time outside the house, the time we spend actually inside our flat (and awake) is mainly in the evening and on weekends. As the house we live in is situated at the bottom of a valley, so, the sunlight is blocked by a mountain , and the windows of our living room are facing southwest, that means we usually have to turn on the lights rather early if we want to avoid that cavern feeling. Which, in turn, led to a proliferation of light-emitting stuff, as in lamps, more lamps, candle holders, LED lamps, and more such like occupying the better part of the available horizontal surfaces.
The thing being that several of these illuminating devices weren´t even plugged in, and thus didn´t even provide any illumination, while several others were rarely if ever switched on because the light they gave was too feeble to make a substantial contribution to the overall brightness of the room.
For some time now, that is, since the too-many-chairs epiphany, I had been feeling a vague unease about the things on top of our shelves. I think I found another culprit for the general cluttered feeling of our living room.
Thus, today was lamp reduction day. The LED lamps, which I had originally intended to be spotlighting some artwork on the wall, were the first to be removed. Then I proceeded to the unplugged lamps. One of them is DH´s, an electrified version of a petroleum lamp with a brass foot and orange glass lampshade. It looks pretty enough, but with the original arrangement (that had another narrow glass cylinder inside the lampshade) you couldn´t put fluorescent bulbs in there. I have, tentatively, removed that cylinder and inserted a fluorescent bulb- if DH agrees to that solution, that lamp will be used again. For another of his lamps, I´ll have to get a new lightbulb, too.
Of the candlesticks, I removed all of mine and left only one of DH´s which is rather decorative, too.
Then I added a stronger lightbulb to a bone china decorative lamp, which now shines a lot brighter than it used to, and replaced that where the LED lamps used to be..
The overall effect is, once more, stunning. Less visual clutter, less cables hanging around.
The only downside is that I now have those LED lamps lying around. They were outrageously expensive when we bought them because the technology was very new then, but right now, they just don´t have a home. Still, I´m not ready to throw them out. Perhaps I´ll find another use for them, but until then, they´ll rest inside a storage bin instead of cluttering up my living room. 
Tonight, I´ll see what else I can do to improve the lighting and reduce clutter. But once again, it seems that removing the excess is the way to go.
Isn´t it always.


Julia

A galaxy decluttered

Last week, at work, was once again sheer pandemonium. What with being the only of the colleagues left at the office who wasn´t taking their annual vacation, plus another spell of above-thirty-degrees centigrade heat, I neither had any time left to blog, nor did I have, come Friday, any energy left.
So I allowed myself a Bruno Mars style lazy Saturday (as in Today I´m not doing anything, less the part about the nice girl;)), and on Sunday my spirits had returned enough - and the temperature dropped- to make me go at another decluttering project I had been procrastinating about, namely, those red IKEA boxes I keep on top of a shelf in my living room to contain small stuff and papers that aren´t currently needed but which I don´t want to toss, either.
I took all of them down and went through the contents, culling what I didn´t regard as a keeper any more and shredding the discarded papers at once.
With regards to that, an important lesson- just because I once decided an item should be kept, doesn´t mean that decision won´t be revised by time. Where I live, there´s no real possibility that I´d ever need, say, the heating bills from my former flat again when I´ve moved out twelve years ago, nor the repair bills from my old car or even a ticket for speeding I got five years ago. So, what I do is set an expiration limit and return to the receptacle I put the stuff in after it expires. Yesterday, that meant that the content of one whole box went to the shredder. Which came as quite a surprise, as I had already gone through that stuff years ago and ditched all those old rental contracts from long-ago flats, operating manuals for gadgets I no longer own, and receipts for non-taxable payments completed ages ago. And still there was one box´s worth of paper trash that could be tossed immediately.
Another box turned out to hold the remains of my formerly beloved Star Wars collection. I had, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, been an avid collector of roleplaying books, which I hadn´t ditched because I had still hoped they might have some resales value.
Not so. I checked the prices for those on Momox, and found out that of all the lot, only two had an asking price at all, which was a fraction of what I had paid for them and wouldn´t have been worth the hassle of having to pack and post them. So, the whole lot is now in the recycling bin, making me a lot wiser as to the futility of keeping things in the hope that they might be worth something someday. While there might be someone out there who is as crazy about that stuff as I used to be, I won´t keep the stuff on the off chance of finding him because the now empty box it was in can certainly be put to a better use.
In total, I ended up with two completely empty boxes, and enough free space in some of the others to allow me to relocate some items from my everyday filing cabinet, freeing the latter up a bit.
Once again, getting rid of things of the past will give me space to live my present life. It´s liberation at its best, and I will, whenever I have a sliver of time left, continue to weed out the stuff that´s left.
The best thing being that, due to the shopping embargo I keep, the result of such a session is really free space, not just a chance to stash some more acquisitions. And that is definitely something I can get used to.


Julia

Library declutter: done

I took advantage of the fact that DH´s out of town over the weekend today and pulled out all of my pocket books that were slumbering in the closed parts of my living room shelves, spreading them out on the floor and then sorting them by author.
And then... I grabbed one of those reusable shopping totes I have that can carry a whole week´s groceries... and proceeded to fill it.
First thing I noticed- I still had "double" editions around. Books I liked and which I had bought both in their original language and in translation. As I don´t really need two of the same book, I ditched the ones that were in worse shape, keeping the better ones..
Next to go: those books that are nowadays available for free via Kindle or Project Gutenberg. I am reading quite a lot of classics, but those well-thumbed Penguin editions of everything from Dickens to Bronte really don´t have to clog up my shelves any more.
Next on the list: the unfinished projects department. Some books look better in the store than when you try to read them. In the past, I used to keep these and add them to my (mental) reading list, as if they´d be less uninteresting at some nebulous point in the future. Meantimes, they, too, took up plenty of space.
Lastly, some books that had turned out to be trash, or that had disintegrated so badly that keeping them simply wasn´t worth it. 
Several hours later (I admit to browsing through the books and getting caught up in some of them) I had not one, but two of those totes full of paper to take to recycling, and enough space liberated in my bookcase that I could put two shelves´ worth of pocket books that used to be out on display into the closed compartments.

The shelves that used to house those will, for the time being, be left empty.
And my living room is one step closer to the minimalist look I want to achieve.



Julia