The Joys of Clutter

 

After Today's trip to the Storage Facility

What you see represents over half a dozen trips to the storage facility, and we're not even close to filling the thing up -- although we're going to run into some challenges when it comes time to start packing stuff in around the car; I may have to build some kind of framework around it like the loft I built in my own garage. This only represents a tip of the ol' iceberg.

This picture doesn't do justice to the depth of this space. It's twenty feet deep and ten feet wide, and we've got boxes and other assorted paraphernalia jammed all the way up to the back wall. We are trying to leave a lane open next to the car so that we can pull it out if we need to.

But there is still so much clutter in the house. We're trying to go through it carefully, to get rid of the things we don't need, to reduce it to a manageable level.

But we've got over twenty years of memories (books, artwork, documents, etc.) to go through, and deciding what to keep and what to throw away is an emotional roller coaster. Some days, I'm ready to toss it all out on its ear just to simplify our lives; other times, I want to wallow in meloncholia and memory, re-living the days when we were all young and silly and had a whole life ahead of us.

We're in the process of having all our photos and videos professionally archived to digital format, which is expensive but worth it; there's no way we'd have the time to do it ourselves, not with our day jobs and all the other things we have to do to keep the house running smoothly. Then if something ever happens to our own physical media, we still have the archives.

And perhaps in the meantime, we can reclaim the space it was all taking up so that we can move on with our lives.

The hardest part for me is getting rid of all my old electronic gear -- the broken stuff -- because I've always dreamed of having the time to just sit and fix it all. In face, when I was in high school, my dream was to open up my own fixit shop so I could just tinker with radios and TVs and toasters and appliances all day long, fixing everything and making people happy while having a wonderful time (because at heart I'm just an overpaid tinkerer).

But nowadays it's very difficult to do that because it's such a throwaway society and everything is made of plastic (which is near impossible to repair to any useful condition) and so dirt cheap that it isn't worth fixing. I hope that changes someday but the whole point of technology is to improve to the point where everything is ubiquitous and cheap. Unfortunately, real craftsmanship is (mostly) too expensive for normal human beings to afford and no one wants to pay someone to fix something when the labor cost far outweighs the cost of parts.

So I keep lots of ancient hardware around on the off chance I'll finally find the time to tinker with it, and the mountain of clutter keeps getting higher and higher.

Storing it in a facility like this is just shoving the problem a little further down the road. At some point, we're going to have to finish the de-cluttering process. And it's going to hurt.