Bathroom Before and After

A very legit before and after post invites you to feast your eyes on it a mere few lines ahead! Unfortunately, the before pictures aren't very revealing. I thought it was interesting to realize that, when I was taking the before pictures, there were a lot of messy issues that didn't even register in my mind as important to document. We'll talk about that as we go, though. Now, here is our bathroom! Click the photos for larger versions (some are grainy, sorry).

BEFORE

AFTER



It may not look like a lot has changed, but that's because I didn't take pictures of the inside of cabinets and drawers. I decided my reason is confidentiality, when in fact that is a lame reason and the real reason is forgetfulness.



Look closely at the linoleum behind the toilet. Notice how normal in cleanliness it looks? Prior to this it was absolutely caked with dust. 13 years' worth, I daresay. The main thing that prompted me to clean back there was actually pretty gross. I'll let you guess. If you need a hint: that area IS near the toilet...



This ridiculous cart was probably the thing that bothered me most. Why oh why were there FOUR bottles of mouthwash sitting there before? Overall, this cart is just annoying and tacky. I would much much prefer something like this Ikea cabinet, but I think it's a tad too big for the space. Oh yeah, the toothbrushes on the right are mine; I have three because I sometimes forget mine when I go to stay with friends, and they graciously provide me with toothbrushing tools.



You can see in this picture that our manager did some re-caulking of the shower tiles, but he didn't finish. He's kind of a bum. But hopefully he'll finish someday, and our shower will be beautiful.

Tada! Other changes that went down in this de-cluttering adventure: overhaul cleaning of entire floor (including blue rugs that my mom insists on using to cover the whole floor); moving my hamper from the bathroom to my closet; discarding an old radiator that was just wasting space; having our manager come over to fix the drippy faucet and messed up pipes; and clearing out the sink cabinet, medicine cabinet and cart and reorganizing the contents.

It feels nice to have a clean room in the house!

Promises

I'm so sorry to not be posting very much lately. I can assure you, it's not for lack of de-cluttering. Problems with our bathroom sink and plumbing gave me an excuse to clean out our bathroom, which was already the cleanest room in our house, even though it was pretty gross. Before and after pictures to come soon!

But before that...

I'm having a yard sale with my grandma, her husband, and my mom tomorrow at my grandma's house! We did one last weekend, but we didn't advertise, so the turnout wasn't great (42 people in 6 hours - I made a couple high scores on my phone's Diner Dash game, make no mistake). So we put out some ads for tomorrow and hope to sell everything! I took pictures last time and will take more tomorrow, so those will be coming forthwith! Dang that is an old fogey word.

Sorry to be all teasy and such and not even give a picture on this entry!

Safeway is King

Yesterday, my mom and I did a buttload of errands. Some de-cluttering, some not. We were all over the place! The best part of the day was finding the recycling center back behind a nearby Safeway that recycles lots of stuff and offers CRV (California Refund Value). They even take #6 styrofoam (those huge annoying blocks)!!! It was a bit ironic that we found out about the styrofoam though, because we had just tossed a huge collection of styrofoam blocks, after coming up short on recycling resources. (Waste Management told us it counts as garbage in this area so we could throw it out. My mom says they were just trying to steer business their way, which sucks because throwing out styrofoam is SO BAD for the environment!)

Moral of the story: your city probably has some amazing resources that are hidden behind random grocery stores or other weird places! Do some hunting and find these great places.

Anyway, things are looking better every day! I drew up some ideas I had for floorplans when we're ready to move stuff around. I have one for my room and one for the living room. Maybe I'll post them tomorrow! In the meantime, my friend L and I are hosting a hillbilly hootenanny birthday party for ourselves tonight, so I might not post till late tomorrow. :P

Quick Tips

I'm back! I didn't post for a few days because the traffic was really low and it bummed me out. But here's a short and sweet update with some tips:

• A lot of our clutter was huge empty boxes! I don't know how we amassed them, but I think it was the whole "this could come in handy someday" idea. I was kind of relieved that most of the boxes were empty, because it was so easy to just break them down and recycle them. Try ridding yourself of these space Napoleons (=coup d'etat, really bad joke, etc.) today and see how much more open you can make your home.


• Always be careful about letting clutter pile up again once you clear it away. Make sure everything has a place and that things go there! A lot! All the time even! If you don't do this, you might end up using every possible flat surface as storage, like we did, and it can get ugly.


• ARGH BOXES! I'm still bothered by the topic. Let's discuss. Even despite and during this whole process, our living room is still full of boxes, but it's not empty stereo boxes or empty shoe boxes. It's boxes of the things found while de-cluttering that are marked "to keep." Problem is, they're those awful white cardboard boxes with handles that people use for cleaning out their cubicles when it's time to move on. This won't do. I'm thinking of switching them out with something like this in something bright - green or red maybe.


• The whole box thing has resurfaced because I'm making big progress on our front closet. I mentioned that earlier but I'm still really happy because hopefully soon we will have somewhere to put the boxes so that visitors won't be appalled and affronted by them.

Flashback

I've become very fond of seeing the dirt and dust washing off my hands after I take a break from de-cluttering. It's some sort of weird relief, like seeing the burden of the clutter just flowing down the drain.

Today I was working on our front closet, and it made for my favorite kind of de-cluttering: old photo discoveries! It's so weird to see my own face grinning up at me from over ten (and sometimes over fifteen) years ago! I was a cute little butt head. Here are some of my favorite photos so far! Check back later and there might be "after" photos haha. Probably not.

My treasured stuffed tiger. I could never decide on its gender, but s/he is still with me today. Ragged and sad.


Don't blame me, it was the 90s.


"No wonder Clark was such a weird cat." - My mom.


Not a morning person. Even on my birthday. Or maybe I was just irritated at photo time.


That's a shark on my face. I don't know why.

I would put dates to these faces, but a) some don't have them, and b) laziness! Always laziness.

Clutter Personality

I've noticed a pattern or two as I've been slogging through the living room. Today, as I was starting to clear off the third of three sitting spaces (1: couch, 2: love seat, and 3: big chair that goes with the couch), I thought to myself, "There is SO MUCH PAPER here." That reminded me of this article I read on clutter personalities.

I revisited the article today and decided that, out of the five personality types listed there, my mother must embody at least four, these being: the hoarder ("This might come in hand someday!"), the deferrer ("I'll think about that tomorrow!"), the perfectionist ("Next week, I'll organize everything--perfectly!"), and the sentimentalist ("Oh, the little darling!"). The fifth is the rebel, who's still bitter about mom's nagging to clean that room.

This melee of personality types may make it sound pretty bad, and it is, but I do acknowledge that it could be a lot worse, like those people in the video I posted a couple days ago. But I think the combination of all these deadly personality types makes me understand a bit better just how much my mom needs someone else to take initiative in de-cluttering.

The paper-pileup is definitely a byproduct of her hoarding personality. She brought me up to always consider that something might be useful later and to never get rid of anything if you can help it. But this is only sensible to a point. There were receipts up the wazoo on the chair I was cleaning today, from Jack-in-the-Box nine months ago (that depressed me a lot) to endless printouts from online. I really don't think proof of your Junior Bacon with Cheese is going to come in handy soon OR later. About.com has some nice tips on how to eliminate paper clutter.

Think carefully about what kind of clutter personality you have, then take the appropriate steps to de-clutter yourself! This is a very important step that I'm feeling the weight of right now.

Thank to this site for the image.

P.S. I hope the people who have found this blog with similar projects underway are finding my tips and progress helpful/inspiring in some way! Always feel welcome to post comments about your own progress and projects. :)

Do It Yourself

Well, it's been a busy past few days! Not only with de-cluttering, but with birthdays and hanging out with my best friends for summertime fun and trying to get myself a job. I did de-clutter one of our couches in the living room. However, I sat down on it today and realized it's a depressing spot! It receives almost no light, even though it is about five feet from the window. Of course, this is because one of our bookshelves is placed illogically and uglily between the two! Hmm. I can't wait to start the re-arranging part of our project. In the spirit of DIY thinking*, here's a fun link about how to fuse plastic bags to make stuff! Just don't inhale those hot plastic fumes, kids.

Via Curbly.com

* Ok that's kind of a stretch, from my progress to "DIY" but I don't have much to write about...

Search and Destroy

Or: Search and De-clutter. That might work better for our purposes. Anyway, here's a technique I've found that helps me a lot in de-cluttering. I never really formed it as a complete thought until somebody posted about clutter in the Livejournal community ourbedrooms.

Tip: If your project seems overwhelming, take it one step at a time. This seems so basic, and it's hard to actually put into practice because you see the mess every day, and every time you think about it, it seems like this monster undertaking that could never possibly get done by doing small pieces of it. However, I find that I make a lot of progress by identifying a single area in a room that has been bothering me in particular, and tackling it.

For example, we couldn't open our front door all the way, like I mentioned the other day. That bugged me a lot. The door was blocked by my mom's wire shelving unit where we stored paper products. I looked around the living room, which has been my main de-cluttering project lately, to find a place I could relocate the shelves to. I cleared out a spot, then made the change. At the same time, I was organizing and not simply moving the clutter around, because I dumped all the paper stuff out and reordered it based on category.

Now our lovely door gets the swing space it needs and, while it still doesn't open all the way, it's a really nice and refreshing change. A helpful one, too, since I don't have to do acrobatics to get all my trash/recycling out the door anymore!

So try the "this bugs me" method and see how far you get! If you have any of your own techniques, feel free to comment and tell me about them!

Update on Freecycle

Lookee here for yesterday's post on Freecycle.

So today I released three of my clunky possessions to the wind that is one Ms. R.L., who had responded last night to my Freecycle post. And now I have one experience with Freecycle! Here is what I think.

• I'm definitely glad that the Yahoo group has rules set down and tips for your freecycling needs. They're very concerned about your safety, which is great, considering that things are picked up from you by strangers and it's all done through the Internet up to that point. In fact, I felt a little relieved when R.L. e-mailed, because I recognized her last name as that of someone who currently goes to my old high school.


• The community is the perfect size. There are about 5,000 members in my area, the East San Francisco Bay Area, so that's just enough to get a solid number of responses, but not too many that it's not overwhelming. I think I got a total of 6 or 7 offers to take the ab machine off my hands, and 2 for the pillows. Perfect! Also, I got absolutely no unsolicited e-mails from anyone about stupid, irrelevant things. I can't say the same for Craigslist, where I posted my resume the other day. :(


• I expected the worst: a) R.L would be late/not show up; b) she would not be R.L. at all but a homicidal maniac who had been planning to kidnap me for months and was finally going to succeed; or c) some other bad thing. So I made sure to keep in contact with her (she was an hour late) over the phone (we only exchanged numbers over e-mail when the deal was confirmed), saying that I wanted to reschedule if she was going to be by after dark. Luckily, she arrived around 6:15, and it was not dark. Of course, it was smoky, but certainly light.
       She was a little weird, with a van packed full of clutter (see point below), some of which she had just bought. Her demeanor was friendly but definitely odd, and she struck up a conversation with me about her need to exercise, and whether I, since I'm "small" (I'm not), liked this little black PJ top she had just gotten. I scurried away and thanked her for taking the stuff off my hands. o.o


• When I was telling my friend (tommykat39) about the site and deal this morning, she thought it wasn't a good idea because it essentially meant that clutter was just being passed around and around. I said that it wasn't the offerers' problem, just the takers' problem. Interesting that I got a fellow clutterer my first time. What do you think? Should transactions be better screened so that hoarders don't do themselves worse? Or is it solely their problem for indulging in more clutter?

Sites I Like #6: Freecycle.org

Ok I know I like JUST did a Site I Like, but this one is actually helping me in my progress! I'm giddy right now.

Today's site: FreeCycle.org



This is a .org site, but the part of it that I'm making the best use out of is the Yahoo group for my area. Basically, it's a very well-run organization of people pawning off the crap they don't want, and for free. There's no trading, no adult themes, and no money involved. Also, there's no worries about clogging those landfills or making some epic trek to a specialty recycling center. If you've got something that works but that you no longer want, you send an e-mail to the list serve (with title tags such as OFFER, WANTED [they prefer you don't use this one much], TAKEN [for completed "offer" transactions], and RECEIVED [for completed "wanted" transactions]) and interested parties e-mail you back.

Around 5 p.m. today, I put up two posts: one offering this stupid old floor ab machine (like the one at the bottom of this picture), and one offering two body pillows I don't want anymore. By the time I got home from a crepe outing tonight at 9:30, I had four replies - one for both posts, two more for the ab machine, and one for the pillows (it read: "i am interested in your pillows." Nothing more.). As I type here, I'm simultaneously making arrangements with the first woman who replied to have the items picked up. She's the one who wanted everything, and I suspect she is a compulsive/impulsive shopper, but that is fine with me, since it gets rid of my stuff for me haha.

We'll see how it goes! I'm excited to get rid of more crap and brighten somebody else's day. :)

Important News Break

Today: huge progress.

Front door opens all the way.

Almost.

But more than before. !

Living room is looking better and better. Excited to have after pictures soon.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

/totallyunoriginal

Sites I Like #5: Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse

As with most of the links I absorb into my bookmarks, I can't remember how I found this one. But the URL (www.messiemother.com) is extremely endearing, it's relevant, and it has a flash game!

Today's site: Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse

So one of the things I like about this is that it's German. The end! No, I'm just kidding. :) But German things really do entice me. Anyway this is the site for a documentary made by Thomas Haemmerli about his mother's death and the clutter at her house that he and his brother had to wade through in the ensuing month.

There are several things I particularly enjoy about the site:

• The dumpster flash game (or muldenspiel)! I found it too hard because they make you take the wind direction into account! F that. But give it a try when you're taking a break from de-cluttering your own home. That guy down below makes a funny angry noise.


• The family history twist of the film. The brothers find so many amazing relics of their family's past throughout their project; it's inspiring. I'd really like to see the film, and this aspect is actually more intriguing to me than the de-cluttering. I love finding old photos of my mom's past when I'm cleaning. They're like decades-old Easter eggs that don't smell half bad.


• The film's relevance to my own fears. I sporadically get this feeling of dread that of my mother will let the clutter consume her again when I leave home for good and go make a life for myself. I don't want her to die alone in a sea of carelessness and disorder, despite how much I can dislike her (in times like this week, when she refuses to talk to me because of things I've said to her out of frustration and callousness brought on by the project).

As far as our own progress, we're a bit past the one-month mark and things are going ok, but not as good as those deutsche Brudern. We can actually sit (well, one of us can sit) on our couch in the living room! The ottoman has space to lie flat! WE USED THE CORNER OF THE COFFEE TABLE TO PLAY SCRABBLE (and I won 3/3). Contented sigh. Also, even in the face of our tiff (which is still going on because my mom is 5), my mother managed to cart off a carload of stuff to our standbys (Goodwill, Books for the Barrios, and her favorite used book store, Hooked on Books).

Expectations

Things I expected for today while attacking the living room anew:
- to get rid of the hideous bunny puzzle that's been sitting under the air conditioner for years (check)
- to find amusing tidbits from my childhood (double check)

Things I did not expect during the same period:
- SPIDER, whose filthy abdomen I heard go crunch beneath my Kleenex on the living room curtains. Sorry pal but u is gross (chchchchcheck)
- Sorta sad tidbits from my childhood (sad check):

From "My Autobiography" (by Xandi, age 6)
GLAD
*This makes me smile: Funny telivision shows. Presents. My Birthday Party.

SAD
*I feel like crying when: my mom yells at me. When pepole call me names. When I get hurt. When I trip. When my mom leaves for work. When I am all alone.

Depressing how many more there are for sad, don't you think? Poor Xandi.

Quick Update

I'm back from my trip! My friend and I drove to Monterey and had lots of fun kayaking and looking at otters (in the sea AND at the aquarium :D) and, for me, not worrying about decluttering.

Before I left, I put post-its on the boxes that had managed to stack up in my room during the decluttering process. On the post-its I wrote where I wanted the items to be donated, and asked my mom to take them to each place. I was pleasantly surprised when half the boxes were gone today when I returned.

However, it still gets me down that she acts like she has an excuse to not work on our apartment. Her reasoning is always, "You don't know what I'm going through psychologically and physically, so you need to stop talking about [decluttering]." Yeah, she actually emphasizes that I can't even talk about it. That's ridiculous, right? Even more so because she is not good at communicating and doesn't make an effort to tell me about her psychological problems (although she feels perfectly free to complain about the physical part). I think this is just because she wants to continue using her problems as an excuse and to keep saying I don't know "what she's going through." Telling me about it - making me understand - would make her excuse completely null, and that would suck, wouldn't it?

Oh well. I have a busy week this week (still not working... sigh) but I'm going to try to do some cleaning and continue posting of course! My next goal is to get rid of this horrid, dusty old puzzle of a rabbit OUT! Out out out because it's been sitting in the corner of the living room for about seven years and it's an eyesore.

Fancy Box How-To

After charging my camera batteries for around 815 hours, I have photos ready for a little tutorial. Keep in mind that I am only slightly creative at best, and my execution is kind of horrible. But the idea is what really counts: taking ugly old moving boxes from when you moved 13 years ago (hey hey) and making them look semi-decent so you can use them as storage anywhere in your house! This project is also good if you have over 50 rolls of wrapping paper that you need to use for something. Click the photos for bigger versions.

1. The box.



This is what my bedroom closet looked like before I cleared it out - I de-boxed the top shelf and I de-clothed about half the clothes rack, and I de-crapped the floor. The boxes were still hanging around after all that, somehow, so I came up with the project I will now demonstrate via pictures.

2. Wrap it like a present.



I estimate my boxes to be around 8x13x8, so the wrapping paper didn't quite fit perfectly on each side (you'll see this more in later pictures). But you can start by just laying the box on top of the unfurled roll and cutting it so that the paper covers each of the wide sides. I then folded the extra paper onto the inside of the box and taped it there.

3. Cut diagonally at the box corners for easy folding.



Just make little snippies at the inside corners of the box, so when you fold the paper up over the remaining sides of the box, you don't get paper bunchies. Have some yummies as a snack, maybe rub your tummy, listen to your munchies go crunchy. K I'm stopping.

4. Now fold the new extra paper in like before.



The remaining two sides of your box should now look like this on the inside. Keep in mind you can also use a square box or any other shaped box if that's what you have on hand and want to fancify.

5. When you fold up those two remaining sides of the paper, you should get a triangle-like shape down at the bottom.



This is a little tricky to explain, but hopefully you can use your present-wrapping skills, along with the photo, to figure out what I mean. If you need to, go back to where we made those snippies at the corners. Now pick up the tips of the paper that's hanging off the side of the box and bring them in to meet the center of the box side. Folding over the paper onto the inside, with the help of our snippied part, tape that extra paper down to secure it. Now smooth out the doors of paper you just made against the box; you should get something like the triangle I have here. If you're better at wrapping presents, then you'll get well I don't know what you'll get, just move on, you queen of present wrapping. Whateva.

6. Fold up that triangle.



Easy as pie. Now just tape that pie slice (the triangle) up to the side of the box. Smooth out any weird paper waves.

7. Be "creative" and cover any mistakes you made.



Since I'm not the queen of present or box wrapping, I had an ugly strip of my old box showing, and the triangle was shorter than I expected. So I took out some old poster board I've had since high school and made this little strip. I did it on both sides because I like symmetry. You don't have to like symmetry, but you also don't have to call me up in the middle of the night when your ugly box is haunting you from the closet.

8. Wrap the box top.



Pretty self-explanatory. I just barely had enough paper left on this dying roll to do each short side of the box top. My creativity knows no bounds, so for the top...

9. ...Be creative. Always.



I used more of that same poster paper to cover up the still-hideous top of the box. Got many different paper media used up that day! Success.

10. Labels!!



Labeling is important, as I've said before. So do something sorta makeshift or whateva. You can see how laughable my own writing and labeling is here (I didn't have enough room for the word "contents" so I cheated in a very erudite manner by making it French - "contenu"). Do your own thing. Or copy mine. Better, though. Of course.

Tell me your project ideas! And link me to photos (completed projects or incomplete, doesn't matter) if you want. I may even try them for myself. Better, though. Of course.

Bay Area Awesomeness

Today we went to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center to drop off a box of jewel cases. I am proud to say I now have no more commercial jewel cases in my room (by that I mean cases that came with CDs I purchased; I have a few of the slim ones for CDs I'm going to use to back up my computer before we take its half-dead self into the Geek Squad)! Next is to donate our now-superfluous CD storage.

I've had the site for the jewel case recycling place up here on my "resources list" since the first day, but we hadn't made the trek out there till today. Turns out they take much more than jewel cases; just check out the site. I'm very pleased in general that it's so easy to find sustainable solutions around the Bay Area. Maybe it's because I haven't lived in New York long enough to understand all their environmental workings, but it seems like a less progressive place than the Bay. I constantly see people in New York toting their plastic bags, often throwing them out, and the littering is a huge problem, even though it's improved a lot over the past decade (I hear). San Francisco, on the other hand, made the decision last year to ban non-biodegradable plastic bags, which I appreciate. When I'm home, I love the fact that I see so many people whip out their canvas or other eco-friendly bags, not only at the grocery store, but many other places too.

This past year, after my suitemates and I quickly amassed a collection of plastic bags by the end of the first month of school, I grew to hate the plastic bag. But I found a way to take advantage of it: Tip: Keep one plastic bag in each of your purses or bags (yes men you can do it, too), so that when you're out and buy crap on an impulse, you don't have to consume more plastic bags and realize later you have no idea what to do with them. Another nice option for around the home is the Cole Hardware Biobag (an SF-based company :D), which my mom told me about.

Thanks to Art.com for today's image. You can buy the print, by artist Daniel Menchaca, at that link. P.S. for the non-natives, that's the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate. :)

All Quiet on the Wrapping Paper Front

I had an idea for the wrapping paper that was so controversial in our house before. I'm beginning to free up space in my bedroom closet (we left Barbie Double Skatin' Fun in the capable hands of Books for the Barrios today - I don't know if that's the kind of toy they want, but it's the kind of toy they got today), and I want to start migrating the crap from my bedroom itself in there.

The problem is, the boxes I have to store my stuff are mostly horrible old moving boxes - cardboardy and belabeled (now incorrectly) in bright red marker. So I was thinking of how I could make my closet storage prettier. While I first thought of buying some classy boxes like these ones from Ikea (in red, because I think it looks so impressive and bold, and I'm formulating a color scheme plan for my room involving white, brown and red), I had a better, more sustainable idea.

Since my good friend, who has been posting very helpful suggestions and feedback here, reminded me of the importance of reusing, I thought I would take some of our wrapping paper and use it to cover my moving boxes. I'm thinking I'll use one paper for a few boxes on the floor of my closet, and maybe a couple different ones for the boxes that will sit on the top shelf I have. Labeling is of course necessary, so I think I'll concoct some sort of handwritten, concise labels out of paper lying around, backed perhaps by construction paper. I do enjoy construction paper (it makes me feel like the kindergarteners I work with during the school year :D)! I'll be sure to post photos when they're completed. (Sadly, there are no real before pictures of my closet, because my stinking rechargeable batteries die if I don't use them within 24 hours of charging them. Any tips?)

Reasons It's Hard

It's funny how "cleaning out the closet" can stir up so much nostalgia. Today it was a file cabinet, rather than a closet, that did it for me. I was rifling through a bunch of random papers and came across all my old college application documents. Essay drafts, pamphlets and acceptance letters (with that one nasty rejection letter, but we don't think about that one). They really made me think for a while, about whether or not I regretted my decision to attend NYU. I decided I don't regret it, but it took some convincing myself.

I think the nostalgia is a big part of why decluttering is so hard. Maybe for some people it's not hard at all, but maybe those people are heartless jerks. Because I'll tell you, I kept all those letters, even the rejection one, because it was a big part of my life. I'll never forget slaving away on endless paperwork and paying stupid application fees and pouring out my manufactured soul to these colleges like I was worth something more awesome than they could ever dream. So yeah, for the memories, I'll keep those papers. But the important part of going through all the past that has piled up over the years is to draw the line between milestones and mess.

I think my mom and I both have a problem recognizing that line, and the only reason we're getting so much done is that I've become sufficiently more heartless than I used to be, so my cold, bitter tendencies to re-cycle rather than re-member have cleared us of a lot of our paper weight. And I do admit that I'm heartless for some of it! My mom, though, has said that it's been very difficult to let go of my childhood toys and stuffed animals and some of the books I donated.

But in the end, when all's said and done, there's a time when you need to just get rid of your shit.

Decluttering is Happy Business

Today was a pretty low-key day on the decluttering front. My mom and I had a bunch of other stuff to do (one of which we thought was going to be coming home to an empty carport where our old decrepit second car usually sits - it was supposed to be finally towed, but whatever), but we did manage to procure for ourselves some fresh juicy apartment air by getting rid of stuff. Dang that was so many words I just wrote.

Anyway, I found this place ERecycle On Us through a Google search (Lord I love Google!), and it was so close to our apartment it was tickling us. Anyway, they take all e-waste you could think of but just no appliances. Luckily the e-waste part was what we needed, so we loaded up with VHS tapes, taking two trips when that darned Mercury wasn't gone the first time (the tow notice said 12 noon, come on tow guys! Forget your bootless pastrami, there's TOWING TO BE DONE). The staff wasn't in the office when we arrived, but they had friendly notes and a great big box for our dumping pleasure. What? Either way, out went our tapes and memories of my irrational admiration of the 90s Mickey Mouseketeers.

My mom was so happy that we had found a close place like this that she gushed about it in that gleeful old person way (no offense Mom!) and I was glad too. Google saves the earth! In roundabout, sorta indirect ways like this and probably others!

So my unabashed promotion of Google and finding local resources for your decluttering needs continues! I probably could have skipped the story to wiggle out that public announcement, but who cares! You're entertained! I love laughing.

I'll try not to post about irrelevant life details most of the time, but can I just say it is ridiculous trying to find a summer job right now?! It's always hard, but I went to five places in downtown Walnut Creek today and only one even offered me an application. Guess I'll make my millions elsehow.

And since you're probably still wondering: yeah, I said bootless. Dictionary it!

Linen Closet - Before and After!

Today I started on my closet goal! I'm so proud. My mom said she wanted me to start with the linen closet, which disappointed me because I thought it was the one that needed the least work. But ohoho was I wrong. Man.

Since we have such little space around here, the linen closet hosted not only linens but a lot of random toiletries like TP, tissues, little paper cups, bars of soap, uhh girly things (we ARE girls after all), and laundry supplies. I found no less than 9 boxes of Kleenex, to give you an idea of what went on in that disaster of a closet! So I spent a good amount of time rooting through all the duplicates of things we had in the closet and reorganizing/folding our towels and bedding.

I realized that one big problem we have as pack rats is that all the mess gets so hidden by the rest of the new messes that are constantly piling up, that we often profess things we can't find as lost forever and just buy new ones. The Kleenex for instance. So think of it this way, if you're facing a massive decluttering and just can't get yourself started: you may save money! Tip: Organize your supplies, whatever they may be, in a way that helps you see all of them all the time. That way, there's never any confusion about what you have enough of.

All in all, I'm still sure we have way too many freaking towels (most of them pink - why??), and in retrospect I didn't follow my own advice about stuff's visibility, but here are the before and afters anyway! Since this is an ongoing project, I'll probably redo everything later; this is just the first step. Also, keep in mind that I did this one on my own! So it's not neat as a pin, per se. The before pictures are inaccurate, because I forgot to take them before I started! They were taken about halfway through, when I had thrown a bunch of crap out into the hallway.

Click each photo to view a much bigger version.

Before:


After:





As you can tell, I ended up a little pressed for space in the end. My Space Bags have holes in them. :( So I couldn't vacuum the linens up to save space like my mom suggested. Hopefully the comforters crammed at the top of this closet can go somewhere else once we, uh, have space somewhere else.