De-Cluttering During the Lockdown

This morning I got up and decided to de-clutter.

 

It took me long enough during COVID Lockdown to get to this point, didn’t it?

 

That’s partly because I knew as soon as I started doing it, I would run across a ton of stuff that I’ll want to donate to a thrift shop, but there isn’t one open yet, so I knew I’d end up with bags filled with “to go” items that I know other people need, and some of it they’ll actually treasure.

 

But since Jackie decided to upgrade her kitchen this year, come hell or high water, we secured a loan to do that plus whatever I want to do in my end of the place to bring it to some semblance of  praise-worthy at somewhere around ten to twelve grand. Right now, except for the bathroom, which I worked on a few months ago, my place is cringe-worthy.

 

One corner of my bathroom

 

The people who had this property before us lived mostly in Jackie’s side of the place, from what we gather, while their kids–teenagers–lived in my part of the place. ‘Nuf said?

 

It’s kinda like a duplex: we have our own separate living areas, but it’s all under one roof with a door between us into Jackie’s kitchen. We share a garage, and she gains access to her part of the house by walking through my living room.

 

Jackie’s side of the house has been upgraded some since we moved here. (She made  a lot more money than I did.) My side was “refurbished” by the same handyman, but by  the time he got to my side of the house, I think he was pretty much done and delivered more harm than good.

 

As a result, I’ve got terrible “bubbly” counter tops, a cork bathroom floor (No! No! No! Do not ever put a cork floor in a bathroom!), a linoleum kitchen area that has cutouts in it where he needed to get under the house to work, and decades’ old carpets in three small rooms that need replacing, and I’d like to turn my bathtub into a walk-in shower or aging-in-place walk-in tub with a door. (You’ve seen them advertised.)

 

(I’m telling you this by way of saying we’re going to have to start moving furniture around and unburdening dressers and replacing vinyl flooring and carpets within a few weeks, so I decided I’d better get busy and de-clutter to throw out or donate all non-essentials before we have to start upending ours lives to let the contractors have at the place. Moving what’s left will be headache enough!)

 

So this morning I tackled my work room/den/writing room. Ho boy!  I carried out no fewer than eight heavy waste baskets of paper-based stuff, to include redundant articles I’ve written over the course of fifty years,  photos that don’t float my boat or are duplicates, negatives that don’t need saving, etc., etc., etc.

 

While doing this, I ran across a lot of stuff I had despaired of ever finding again. One item in particular is an experience I had with a Warner Bros. coworker when he and I flew from LA to Sacramento to see DeForest Kelley at a Star Trek convention. The article– a humor piece– is called Pollyanna Busted (Story at Eleven) and I’ve been hoping to run across it again for literally decades. I remembered it as being  particularly funny and hoped that if I ever ran across it again, it wouldn’t disappoint me.

 

It didn’t.

 

I will resurrect it using my OCR scanner and publish it here in the next blog post.

 

But first let’s finish this one up.

 

My den feels lighter, fresher and a lot more presentable now. There’s a pile of stuff for my friends and family to go through before I put it in the garage until I can take it to a thrift shop, but other than that, this place looks pretty stinkin’ awesome. It will be manageable when the time comes to get everything off the floor so a new rug can be put in.

 

The other two rooms with rugs (my bedroom and living room) won’t be as time-consuming to de-clutter because there isn’t as much in them to make them the chore this room was. There will be some mighty heavy lifting when it comes time to move the furniture out so the carpet layers can work unimpeded, but Jackie will help me with that, I’m sure.

 

I’ll take some before-and-after pictures so you can see the difference.