Attic Attack

I thought that this summer, I would finally weed through my huge collection of "stuff" (otherwise known as keepsakes, mementos, souvenirs, crap, clutter, and junk) and simplify my life. Or, rather, our lives.

I have boxes of stuff from ages ago, and stacks of stuff from just days ago. I have things to keep forever without a doubt, like the cute little Scottish cap we bought for our firstborn upon learning we were expecting him...we were in the U.K. at the time. There are things that can definitely go, like the once-precious painting of a butterfly made by a 3 year-old. It was so adorable at the time but now it's just a melted mess of crusty paint and wrinkled paper, from being in the attic so long waiting for me to do something with it. I need to take photos of the things that are enough to look at, like those works of toddler art, and get rid of the originals. I can scrapbook the photos and call it good. But then, scrapbooks pile up too and can become, themselves, a form of clutter. Usually I don't see it that way, but some days I do. Hmm, there's always digital scrapbooking, I suppose. Anyway...

There are things worth selling: an old 35mm camera that works but is just not useful in my lifestyle, decades-old historic photo slides from national parks that some collector out there would love to have, and various other trash-to-treasure selections. Some should just be donated to shelters and Goodwill, like the countless boxes of outgrown clothing filling up our closets, attic, shed, and garage. Yes, there is that much. I always expected that I would cut up the kids' old clothes and make a memory quilt for them, but then I'd probably hate that quilt because it would be a mishmash collection of patterns and seem unorderly, so it would just irritate me. I've decided instead to let my daughter wear what she can from my sons' old closet fillers, then get rid of them. Recently, though, I've been repurposing items that were made of great fabric and disassembling those with nice cuts and making patterns from them. Even though I'm something of a pack rat (ya think?!), I have honestly benefited from that many times. Hard to believe, I know, but it is true.

I need to sort through board games and make sure all the pieces are included in those we want to keep and get rid of those we don't or those that are missing pieces. I hate crushed game boxes, too, so I'm thinking of transferring them all to handmade cloth drawstring bags and hanging them from hooks on the wall of the closet under the stairs. I could put a little pocket inside the pouch, to hold the instructions. That's a good idea, right?

I need to scan the documents I want to keep, because even when I want or need to look at one I don't do so because it's such a pain to locate the one I want. This applies to medical records, genealogy documents, kids' letters to Santa, etc. It is okay to keep just digital copies of those, right?

I definitely need to scan photographs. Wow, what a monumental task that is in itself. This is a top priority, as those are the things that it would hurt most to lose of there were a fire or something.

Yesterday I approached the bookcase to locate a couple of good books to assign to my kids who are suffering from their self-imposed summertime boredom blues. I had been thinking that it was time to obtain digital copies of the books we love and get rid of the hard copies. We have two large bookshelves in the living room, two in Jim's office, the equivalent in each of the kids' rooms, and that much again in the Creativity Room. (Formerly known as the school room, craft room, anything room, etc. We change its name frequently.) There are about a dozen boxes of books in the storage space over the garage and probably twice that (at least) in the house's attic. There are books scattered all around this house, in every single room! But then, when I looked at the individual spines of all those wonderful books I again realized what a truly enjoyable collection of literature we have. It seemed, in that moment, that I couldn't possibly part with those treasures. So...I don't know what to do about that. Surely there are many that can go, but which ones and how many?

Well, I suppose I can forget about doing anything in the attic. It must be 120 degrees Fahrenheit up there, on a cooler day. In my mind, that means not tackling anything that has a connection to items in the attic (such as the books, though I realize that books may be one task that it's ok to do in bits). Why only do a task halfway? This stops me time and time again. Each task seems to require some other big job because everything is intertwined. I can't seem to isolate something enough to accomplish it without delving into others.

I'm probably not making any sense.

There it is. That's the thing that stops me most. If I can't completely finish something, I don't even want to start. When I snub that and go for it anyway, that's when I end up with unfinished tasks and a bigger mess than I had in the beginning.

This is really nothing you need to know and surely you don't care, but writing all this helps me sort things out, at least mentally, and makes the task seem almost do-able. Thanks for hanging out with me.

I think I'll just sit here and look at the nearby bookcase. Maybe if I'm lucky I can find a literary world to dive into so I can forget about the long to-do list.