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Decluttering

Stuff! Where to find storage space for it

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Frugal Scholar, still one of my favorite bloggers after all these many months, reflects on decluttering and the challenge of living in a historic house with little storage space. LOL! I do recall that the beautiful cottages in Phoenix’s Encanto district could be heavy on charm and light on closet and cabinet space.

FS describes some of the things we can’t bring ourselves to get rid of for sentimental reasons. That led me to google Steiff animals—I have a whole trunkful of them, my mother’s Christmas presents bestowed each year throughout my childhood—which led to this amazing site. Is this or is it not a hoot? And OMG, I have one of these! Who would think anyone would pay that for an old stuffed animal?

So, given the fact that we are not about to give up our 50-year-old stuffed toys or the faded midcentury tablecloth we acquired as a young bride, what to do about storage space?

In this house, I’ve managed to contend by

• adding or widening shelving;
• rededicating clothing closets to other kinds of storage;
• building new closet and cabinet space; and
• using furniture creatively for storage.

One of Satan and Proserpine‘s DIY renovation projects was to pull out all the early 1970s kitchen cabinets and replace them with handsome new Kitchenmaid cabinets. This made the kitchen look very attractive. However, it had a few drawbacks.

Those old Mediterranean-brown cabinets were very spacious, even without adustable shelving. Moving in, I discovered that my dishes, which are Heathware and sized the way dinner plates were sized in the 1970s, wouldn’t fit in the wall cabinets! They ended up in one of the deep under-counter drawers Satan had installed for the pots and pans, leaving that much less storage for cookware.

And the house originally had a generous set of cabinets hung from the ceiling over the counter that held the sink. This was where I had kept two sets of dishes and all my glassware in the old house, built by the same contractor. Satan and Proserpine had removed these by way of opening up the space between the family room and the kitchen. This did indeed look very nice…but it meant the kitchen had just enough storage space for dishes and cookware used every day, assuming you were the type who thinks “cooking” means “warming in a microwave.”

Well, I do cook. And I have a number of items that I don’t use every day but when I need them, I need them. Easily, without having to climb into the attic to get at them.

When I first moved in, I set up some bricks and boards in the garage to hold things that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen, along with various yard care and cleaning items. This worked OK, but the problem with open shelving, especially outdoors, is dirt. The garage door doesn’t fit tightly, and so dust would seep in through the cracks all the time. Whenever Gerardo and his Home Depot Parking Lot Caballeros would show up with their blowers, they’d blow dirt and leaves in through the cracks; same would happen all summer long while the monsoons held forth. Any kitchen items had to be washed thoroughly before use.

Eventually I installed inexpensive garage cabinets. For about a thousand bucks (as I recall—may have been more like $800), I lined both sides of the two-car garage with melamine-coated particleboard cabinetry. Because only one car is parked in there, one of the cabinets could be extra-deep. It leaves plenty of room for two smallish cars. On occasion, SDXB has parked his Toyota truck in there next to my van—that’s a tight fit, but it can be done.

These cabinets hold a ton of stuff. They allow me to stash lifetime supplies of Costco’s finest paper goods and cleaning supplies and still cling to my precious collection of old someday-(surely!)-it-could-come-in-handy glass bottles.

I moved the bricks and boards indoors and set them up inside the closet in the bedroom that is my office. This provided ample space for work supplies, useless old scraps of computer hardware, books that won’t fit in the small bookcase in here, and a great deal of worthless junk. Removing the closet rod created extra room between shelves. There actually is room in there to install another board shelf above the one that came with the house, but I’ve never gotten around to that project.

Notice that bricks & boards lend themselves to constructing extra-wide shelving. The two bottom shelves are two boards wide, effectively doubling their available storage space.

The guest room had no closet. For reasons unknown, some previous owner had removed the closet from this bedroom. Low on linen closet space, I hired a handyman to build a new closet and install closet doors like those in the other secondary bedrooms. He did this for surprisingly little cost—I don’t recall how much, but it was nothing like what I expected. If you know how to frame out a wall and can tape and plaster wallboard, you could do the job yourself. Just because a room has one closet doesn’t mean it can’t have two closets. You could easily add a second closet to a spare room that’s rarely used.

The new closet, too, was furnished with bricks and boards. The handyman offered to install a set of built-in shelves, but since future buyers would be looking for clothes closets in the bedrooms, I decided to keep the shelving mobile.

All but the top shelf in this construction are two boards wide.

Widening shelves that don’t span the depth of a closet can add a surprising amount of storage space. In this hall closet, for example, the original shelf was only half as deep as the closet itself. Simply setting another board atop supports nailed to the drywall more than doubled the size of the shelf.

That flange toward the back is a metal coathanger thing nailed along the front edge of the old shelf, installed when the house was built. So, all the space in front of it is new shelf space. The extra board not only gave me room to store lightbulbs, vacuum cleaner supplies, and miscellaneous junk, it even provided a space for one of those battery-powered closet lights.

In the master bedroom closet, Satan had already added an extra shelf by spanning the width of the back end of the walk-in closet between existing shelves that ran along the left and right walls. It’s not much extra space, but every little bit helps.

The left side of that closet was designed with two shelves accommodating those strange coathanger things (which substituted for traditional clothes rods—SDXB replaced one of them with a regular rod), providing twice as much closet space for short items. Very nice, but the lower shelf was quite narrow. Here, too, I simply added another board. Years ago I got in the habit of storing shoes out of dog’s reach, since the German shepherd was given to eating shoes and the greyhound liked to furnish his nest with them.

Beneath the shelf, there’s a small bookcase, which also holds shoes and boots.

You realize, of course, that armoires were originally intended to store linens and clothing, not televisions. I was reminded of this when visiting my sister-in-sin’s beautiful old Seattle house, where she had placed an armoire on the second-floor landing and filled it with bedding and towels. So, when I bought a new lightweight feather “blanket” for summer and couldn’t figure out where to stash the winter comforter, I thought…why not?

This would annoy me if I watched TV very much. But I don’t. Eventually, I’ll probably hang the television set on a wall and fill the armoire with linens and things. It came with an extra shelf, which is stored inside the piece. With three deep shelves and a large drawer, it offers a lot of extra storage space.

So it goes: cobbled together—some of it jerry-rigged—but it works.

How much paper do you keep?

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The Cremains of the Day

Just finished shoveling bushels of paper out of my file drawers, reorganizing the file system, and incinerating bank statements, credit card statements, health insurance claim statements, investment records, correspondence, and related junk that dates back to the early 1990s.

Before I started, a four-drawer file cabinet in the garage was chuckablock full of old records, and the five file drawers in my office stuffed to capacity.

Now, after a good six hours of feeding paper into the fireplace, after the liberation of 73 manila file folders and 33 hanging files (not counting the ones I reused on the fly), the garage file cabinet is again chuckablock full, mostly with different records. The firebox is filled with ashes. But at least there’s now a little open filing space in the office.

They say you should keep tax-related documents for seven years and tax returns forever. Highly problematic:

a) If you have a side income from self-employment, where the heck are you supposed to find room in your house to store years’ worth of related paper?

b) Once you’ve stuffed seven years worth of trash in a file cabinet, you tend to forget it. Hence, paper dating back to the Pleistocene, fossilizing in the garage.

Some of this stuff should’ve been donated to a local historic archive, not reduced to ashes in the fireplace.

But some of it… ???

You know, some things could come back to bite, even after the magical seven years have passed.

For example, late in the 20th century, a man whose last name (allegedly) was the same as mine somehow convinced my bank and a bunch of his creditors that I was responsible for his debts. I’d never heard of the guy.

It was difficult to get out from under that. You can easily prove that you did something, but you’ll play hob trying to show that you did not do something. The ensuing battle dragged on for week after week after week.

Should I throw out all the correspondence, all the paper trail, all the records of how I went about arguing that I was not a deadbeat? Or at least not that deadbeat?

Then there was the time I made a job offer, with the dean’s written permission, to the Southwest’s pre-eminent graphic designer of publications. She, desiring to do the kind of work our office did, turned down a far better-paying job that would have had her doing advertisements and brochures. Then, after she had passed up the other, far superior opportunity, the College reneged! On a written job offer that she had accepted! In writing!

Well, she hasn’t sued yet, though she certainly should have. But I still have all the documentation. What’s the statute of limitations on civil suits, anyway?

Then there was the endless, incrementally bitter slow-motion war with My Bartleby. My ass is covered there by a 200-page daily journal, written at the behest of the College’s HR representative. This monster fills two hanging file folders and a CD-ROM. Should I keep all that drivel?

She hasn’t tried to make any trouble yet and probably won’t. On the other hand, Bartleby is even crazier than I am. And I’m capable of anything.

In the crazy old lady department, I undoubtedly go way overboard with this business of saving documents. It’s a habit acquired from ex-DH, who, as a lawyer, advised me that we should save every scrap of paper that had anything to do with anything. He wasn’t kidding. At the time I left, he had a collection of canceled checks that dated back to before the start of our 25-year-long marriage. I figured he must know something, he being a fancy lawyer, and so I went forth and did likewise.

And I do have to allow, it was mighty gratifying to be able to produce my original pay stub that time ASU tried to claim I had been working there only fifteen years when actually I’d been there sixteen.

Still…how many times does something like that happen?

I suppose it only has to happen once.

Ah, well. It’s back to work. A stack of incoming paper sits on my desk, waiting to be handled, acted upon, and filed.

Am I alone with this conundrum? How much paper do you keep, and for how long?

Decluttering: What to do with the electronic junk?

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So… What do you do with old CD backups? I mean, really old CD backups that you no longer feel any compulsion to store in the closet?

The other day, when I realized the point had come where I will never have to go back to GDU again (except to return the keys to their office, which I’ll do on the 31st), I decided to shovel everything that has to do with that place out of my home office. This entailed filling the blue barrel to its rim, since I work at home a lot and so my office contains a lot of printouts and digital media related to the job.

It also dragged along with it a lot of other junk of the sort that piles up like dust. Some of it, you suspect you might need some day, so you stash it in the closet. Some, you’re just too lazy to figure out what to do with it, so you stash it in the closet. And some you really should keep, so you stash it in the closet.

So there was plenty of stuff to empty out.

In amongst all that junk were several large containers of old CDs and Zip disks containing Quicken and Word backups, none of which are relevant to anything today. Despite their antiquity, though, they do contain personal information that I’d just as soon not have seen by any random viewers, especially of the sort who go through trash.

The Zip disks were easy to disable: a tap with a hammer dents the metal disk in the center, which I expect will render them unusable.

But all those CDs… That’s another matter. There are hundreds of them. Many are e-books I sold to my students on the side, to help generate something closer to a living wage than GDU pays its lecturers. I don’t give a damn whether anyone reads those. But some contain personal information—because I didn’t have an external disk drive on those old PCs, I was in the habit of backing up Quicken, Excel, and Word files regularly.

Breaking them is problematic. They can be shattered if you hit them hard enough with a hammer. But “shatter” is the operative term: they scatter glass-like shards all over the place, some of which want to fly up into your face.

I understand some shredders will grind them up. Mine will take credit cards, but I’m not so sure about CDs. Just as soon not wreck that thing.

So the question is: How can I render these things unusable without making an unholy mess?

Image: Pbroks13, CD Layers. Wikimedia Commons.

Where does the junk come from?

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Does junk reproduce inside closets, the same way wire coat-hangers spawn in the dark? How does so much JUNK accumulate, after you think you’ve shoveled out every drawer, closet, and cabinet in the house? Where does this stuff come from?

Well, some of it just blew in from the Great Desert University: a week or ten days ago I hauled the last of the junk out of my office and deposited it in the storeroom, where it filled countertops and shelves, waiting for me to find a place to put it away. About half of it, I should’ve thrown out without ever letting it escape the campus. However, I figured if I get the Glendale job, I’ll need the yard-sale lamps, the battery-run clocks, the odd little Mexican mirror, the useless books, the sweet little fan that fits on a bookshelf, oh god what to do with all this junk?

That’s easy: dispose of the unused junk that’s already in the closets and cabinets to make room for the transplanted unused junk.

This inspiration led to half an afternoon’s worth of winnowing out junk, cleaning out drawers to accommodate shifted valuables, wistfully going through beautiful old linens made by or belonging to my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, folding them back up, finding a new place for them… Oh, well.

Tomorrow St. Vincent de Paul will get…

• a DVD player
• an AM-FM radio & CD player that runs on batteries or electricity
• a set of electric curlers
• an old smoke alarm
• two decorative ceramic dustcatchers jars
• a Braun electric coffeemaker
• 4 books
• a Bissell hand-held carpet spot cleaner gadget

And as I was about to sit down to tap out this post on the keyboard, I could hear the muted mating calls of the creatures still hidden in the closets:

• an old VCR player
• a keyboard so old it connected to a now-defunct computer with a pair of plugs, one purple, one yellow
• an ancient Toshiba laptop incapable of running any current software of any kind
• a straw basketful of old electronic hoodahs and doodahs
• a plastic basketful of old PC and Mac software
• the Evan Mecham television
• an old Mac keyboard
• an ancient flatbed scanner
• busted JBL speakers still sitting nonfunctionally on my desk
• two empty straw basketweave things for holding magazines

Where did this stuff come from? How did it get here? What is it trying to do?

Declutter! Clear your life of wasteful trash

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Why do we tend to fill our lives with dust-catchers and useless junk? Every week when the notices for the current round of estate sales arrive, my mind is filled with wonder.

What does a person do with all that stuff? Where on earth do you store it? Many houses where these estate sales take place are not huge…how do the occupants find room for the piles and piles of stuff? And why would they keep it at all? For that matter, why did they acquire it in the first place?

There’s this, for example:

Everyone needs a glass chicken, right? To go with the fake flowers. These photos aren’t the greatest, being thumbnails. But you get the (heh) picture.

Collecting is one thing I’ve never been able to understand. Why accrete a large number of useless items just because they have one trait in common—images of pigs, say? The pleasurability of this, for example, escapes me:

Scores and scores of Matchbox Cars, all in their original, unopened packaging. Someone evidently viewed this as akin to an investment, since enough people have a fixation on accruing Matchbox Cars to make them “collector’s items” and therefore, one speculates (and we do mean speculates) that someday they’ll have some outrageous value. So, we might speculate, will our house. Our stock market holdings. Our plastic hydrangeas…

They’re toys. Kids are supposed to play with them! Grabbed off the market and left to collect dust in some closet, their purpose is perverted.

Over the past couple of decades, developers have been designing houses with “plant shelves” (read “dust-collection platforms”). It also has become the vogue to install cabinetry that doesn’t go to the ceiling, possibly because high ceilings are popular and cabinets are built so cheaply these days they won’t span that much space. The result is that every newer kitchen (and many older, renovated kitchens) comes with ready-made dust-collection platforms, all of which call out to the homeowner: ohhh please: fill me with STUFF!

This kitchen scene appears in a house occupied by an interior designer, who’s in the process of unloading the high-end furnishings of her present home so she can start over in new digs:

The chintzy cabinets are in a large, expensive house:

But the developer still couldn’t see fit to provide the well-heeled (or generously financed) homeowner with cabinetry to fill the available space. So what has she done? She’s stuffed it chuckablock full with plastic plants, plastic fruit, plastic vegetables, fake duck decoys, decorative pottery, collector plates, carved wooden boxes, and basketry, all of it collecting dust and (if she cooks) kitchen grime. Makes sense, eh?

Just look at this clutter!

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She couldn’t use any of it if she wanted to: how likely is it that in the middle of cooking dinner she’s going to traipse out to the garage, drag in a ladder, climb up to somewhere near the elevated ceilings, haul down that gravy boat, drag the ladder back to the garage, and wash the dust and grease off the thing before she does anything with it?

But so pretty, you say, and you ask, “What’s wrong with this harmless expression of one’s taste and love of…junk?” Let us count the ways!

• It’s not frugal. Au contraire. It’s wasteful. Buying and stashing junk we will never use is incredibly wasteful! Think of the trips to Paris this woman could have taken with the cash she put out for all that debris. Or…think of all the food she could have contributed to charity, if she just wanted to get rid of her money.

• It’s selfish. It keeps products out of the hands of those who might use them. Case in point: the Matchbox Car fetish. When collectors grab these things off the market, it drives up the cost of nifty toys. Little boys (and yup, little girls!) who should be able to buy them with their allowances now can’t touch them. In this case, it’s akin to stealing candy from children.

• It’s not green. Consider the resources that went in to making and transporting all that pottery, basketware, and plastic foliage, just so it could sit on top of some woman’s kitchen cabinetry and collect dust!

• It creates a stupefying amount of extra work. We (or someone) will have to dust and clean all the tschochkies we’ve littered the “plant shelves,” cabinet roofs, and countertops with.

• It’s inconsiderate to the point of rudeness. After we croak over, someone is going to have to dispose of all the debris we gathered and stuffed into every closet, cabinet, nook, and cranny of the dwelling, garage, and storage shed. Why should our heirs or landlord have to spend hours (some have the privilege of spending days) gathering all the junk and finding some place to get rid of it? Why should they have to hire a company to sell Mom’s or Dad’s junk and then pack up the stuff that some other sucker wouldn’t buy and cart it to the dump?

What to do, what to do?

Well, first, let’s all refrain from collecting stuff that serves no practical purpose. If it doesn’t do something (collecting dust does not qualify as “something”), don’t get it.

Second, let’s invest our money in something better than speculative “collector’s items,” and leave the toys for the kiddies to play with. We could stash our money in a high-yield online savings account until such time as it’s accrued enough to buy into a low-load mutual fund. As investments go, savings accounts and securities are lot more likely to show some profit, a lot sooner, than will a collector’s item whose main function is to gather dust.

Third, resist! Resist buying houses that are designed with dust-collection shelves and corner-cutting cabinetry that shorts you on storage space. If you already live in one of those houses, get yourself some drywall, tape, and plaster and fill in the stupid shelves. If you know the brand and make of your cabinets, find the cabinetry maker and try to buy some matching cabinets that will fill in the space between the existing boxes and the ceiling. Don’t buy houses that give you useless space, but if you’re stuck with one, eliminate the useless space.

Fourth, at the very least, if we must have houses adorned with dust shelves, let’s refrain from filling them with dust-collectors. You could, for example, install up-lighting in them (puck lights are easy to install and very cheap at your nearby box home improvement store). Or…there’s no law against leaving them empty.

And finally, when something we don’t want anymore still has some use left on it, let’s pass it to someone else, whether by selling it or donating it, instead of saving it for a posterity that doesn’t want it.

Frugality is minimalist. Clutter is wasteful.

Get (re)organized: A better way to store current paperwork

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The other day it occurred to me that I was constantly digging through my file drawers to pull out the same folders full of material I’m wrestling with on a regular basis. The stuff falls into two major categories: the Layoff/Retirement hassle (phone numbers; the 403(b) rollover; COBRA; RASL; back vacation pay; relevant official policies; unemployment insurance) and the upcoming Social Security/Medicare hassle (estimated benefits; tax & earnings information and ancient W-2’s proving SSA’s errors; identifying documents). I hate dorking with pieces of paper—just hate it. Consequently, I try to be as organized as possible. That urge has led me to create altogether too many files stored in altogether too many places. Time to reorganize this stuff and make it a lot more accessible.

Some time back I’d realized that printing out my online Rolodex and storing it in a three-ring binder simplified life significantly: no more waiting for the Mac to grind away at the speed of a galloping snail to open the online file, and no more having to reboot if the machine was off.

So…why not organize the mounds of paper associated with the two current projects into loose-leaf binders, too? These can be stashed with the reference works atop the desk and grabbed whenever they’re needed. No more pawing through one, two, three, four file drawers in search of that one elusive sheet of paper!

This afternoon I dug out all those files and organized them into two binders. Original, official documents that I didn’t want to submit to the three-hole punch got photocopied; on the photocopy I noted where the original is stored.

I made dividers by sticking one edge of a mailing label to the edge of a piece of notebook paper, then folding the label over and sticking the back side to the paper sheet’s verso side. I’d bought some cheapie dividers at Target, but because the labels were supposedly erasable, ink smeared on them—covering the slick labels with pieces of mailing label fixed that problem.

Keeping paper and electronic records organized is a key process in frugal financial management. You can’t manage your money easily unless you know where your information is. Searching through drawers and boxes of files is a pain in the tuchus, and so is trying to find a single file or datum hidden deep inside a computer.

Yah, I know; Spotlight. Very nice: it brings up 87 gerjillion files for you to rifle through. Argh! Not to say $#%@&@*@*#$D!!!!! Eventually you’ll probably find what you’re looking for in a computer search, but it may be a long eventually.

Lots easier to organize this stuff efficiently at the outset than to do searches every time you turn around. Though there may be a better way, I’m fond of folders and subfolders:

Every now and again you should go through your files, toss or shred the junk, and tidy up the organization. This means more paper-pushing, virtual and real, a hateful process. However, sometimes it can be instructive. Today, for example, I discovered that the ancient piece of cardboard I thought was my original Social Security card is not; it was a “stub” that came with the card, issued in 1967. So now I’ll have to go in person to the Social Security office and order a new SS card—good thing I found that out before I went in to get SS benefits started! I also reviewed some old W-2’s my ex- sent a couple of years ago and realized that they show earnings for several of the years Social Security claims I had no earnings. That may jack up my benefits!

As exercises go, today’s project was less than fun. But the result, I expect, will make life a lot easier. And if that little revelation above increases my retirement benefits, the past two hours of ditzy work will pay for themselves many times over!