My boys have a huge closet. This closet is full of shelves, more shelves than two boys need. I appropriated the topmost shelf, which they can’t reach anyway, for my craft storage. This is all well and good, except that my boys floor has been a disaster for weeks and yesterday I had to get into the craft supplies. The sound of toys crunching under my boots was the last straw. I stalked out of the room and returned with plastic bags.
I try to honor the property rights of my children. But there are limits. When their stuff no longer fits onto the shelves something has to go. I started by collecting a bag of outgrown shoes. Then I collected a bag of garbage. Then I collected three stacks of books. Then I collected a bag of toys that never get used, but get thrown onto the floor because they’re on top of toys that do get used. Once I’d hauled all of that out of the room, I could see where to begin. There was much sorting to be done.
One of the key problems in the boy’s room is that Link is a keeper. He needs reasons to get rid of things. I am not a keeper. I have to have reasons to keep things. Time after time I would hold up an object trying to negotiate. He never uses it, it is just in the way. Link would get wide-eyed and insist that this construction paper house was truly important. I had spread these treasures out on the floor so that we could see them clearly. I really wanted to be able to scoop the whole mess into the trash, but I didn’t. Instead I took a moment and looked again with Link’s eyes. The objects were all transformed into things with massive play potential. True he didn’t play with them much, but he might play with them. They might be the essential component to an as yet uncreated game.
We compromised. I got a file box and told Link it was his keepsake box. He charmingly transformed this into “Keep Safe box.” That was the label we put on the side. Then we put in the box all of the things that Link does not use, but that he is not ready to get rid of. The box will keep them safe and they will not be cluttering his room. The box went under the bed. Six months or a year from now, we’ll haul it out and Link will find new joy in his forgotten treasures. By then he’ll have acquired new treasures that he wants to keep safe. At that point he’ll have to make some decisions, because he is only allowed to have one “keep safe” box and the box is completely full. If he has more things to keep safe, he’ll have to decide what needs to go. It shouldn’t be too hard because that empty egg carton he put in there takes up a lot of space.
Now the boy’s room is clean. I can reach the craft supplies. More important, the boys can find the toys they like to use, because those toys are no longer buried under the detritus of games past.
Hrm. My wife and I have the same problem. She would gladly scoop every last thing in the house, no matter how useful, and throw it all away. I form very tight attachments to my things, and I have a good memory about which ones I should have stored away somewhere. She’ll toss a cable, then the next time I need to hook something up, I absolutely KNOW I had that cable that would work for this somewhere, and end up searching the entire house only to find that it has been discarded… Then I have to wander off to the store to buy another $5-$60 worth of cables I’ve already bought before. The worst is when it’s some obscure thing like an internal CDRom sound cable that you can’t buy locally anymore.
I’ve started keeping all the components and cables in individual ziploc bags in a drawer, so I don’t get a big cable knot anymore, and hopefully to keep them from getting tossed out. I’m out of drawer space though since she threw away my bookshelf that most of my games were in, and all those got transferred to the top 2 drawers.
I remember when my mom used to do that for my room. It was always SO nice afterwards, to have room to play and be able to get to all my favorite toys.
. . . now I’m in college and have to do all that for myself, and that’s not so fun.
I used to be much more inclined to keep things than I am now. I realized that space is just as valuable a resource as things are. If I fill my drawers with junk, then I don’t have space for things I’ll really use. Not just that, but I won’t be able to find the things I need when I need them.
Sorting and stashing are excellent defenses against your wife’s tendency to throw out. I’m much more likely to pitch things that are laying around, than things which are carefully sorted and stowed out of sight.
Well, the stowing strategy works sometimes, but it fails dismally in the car. I have a pack of fuses, a tire gauge, the tire jack and other components, etc. All of these are stowed, out of sight, in various places in the car, but I constantly have to put them back in the car because she cleans it and takes every last thing out, and puts them in a box in the garage. I worry sometimes that I’ll get stuck somewhere because my fuses were cleaned out and I didn’t notice it in time. 🙁
Maybe you could write on them in big black ink saying “Leave this in the car. It is important!”
I started out college living such a spartan existance, because I have a tendency to leave my stuff lying around whereever I finished using it. (Except for weapons. And Tools.)
So I brought with me one computer, and one bookcase, with one box of books, and five outfits.
Moving home at the end of the year, I moved back 3 computers, eleven boxes of books, 3 bookcases, a dresser, three boxes of knick-knacks, and…six outfits, four of which were the same.
Indeed, your Mom-fu is strong. 🙂
Honestly, this sounds to me like OCD or something related. Taking the jack out of the car to “clean up” isn’t rational.
My favorite part of this story is the part Sandra told me, but neglected to tell all of you…
She explained to Link that he needed a keepsake box, and he translated “keepsake” as “keep safe.” And that’s the name of the box now.
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People laugh at me when I try to tell them that I “used to be” a keeper, because my office is piled with stacks of clutter. They stop laughing when I say “no, I used to be a LOT worse.” And then they sort of try to picture it, and sometimes they cry.
Becoming less of a keeper, for me, took a big realization and a clever trick:
1. Realization: If I own a thing but cannot find it immediately, it is of no use to me. In the short term, this realization leads to buying the same thing over and over again because I keep misplacing it. In the medium term it leads to my house being saturated with multiple copies of a thing because I find the misplaced ones. BUT! In the long term, it leads to making a place for the item (I find I actually have to put a label on the place to make it BE the item’s place) and I stop losing them.
Also in the long term, it leads to the ability to throw things away because I know that while I might need it someday, I am sure that I won’t need it in the next six months, and I consider the $6 replacement cost a worthwhile amount of rent on the free space that I get by storing the item in the landfill.
Which leads me to one of the underlying causes of my keeperness: insecurity. I need my things to be safe. I need them to be secure. I need them to be mine. But this Analog Port Splicer? I only ever needed it to hook my Atari to my 300-baud modem, neither of which I own anymore, and anyway a new splicer costs $1. I do not need to be insecure about this item. I can get a new one, and it will be just as good. Out it goes.
2. Clever Trick: A wise man once gave me some advice. Whenever you move, and you pack up a box, write the date on it and what it contains. When you get to the new place, don’t unpack boxes that have things in them you don’t immediately need. That’s not so clever, is it? Well, that’s not the trick. The trick is: the NEXT time you move, if there are any boxes left unopened from the previous move, throw them away without opening them. You KNOW you don’t need their contents. And don’t open them to look at the contents: you’ll just talk yourself into “needing” them. Divertis en Potentia, the amount of fun I might have with this thing is a very real value proposition, at least for me.
I’ll be interested to hear how well the Keep Safe box works in this regard. Link will be able to open and review the contents at will. If this were happening in my childhood, it would become a second active toybox and parting with anything in it would be griefsome for me. But maybe that’s the point of the box, too: to help teach the lesson of letting go, to make it be Link’s choice to let something pass out of the box and into memory, and to deflect much of that angst by giving him control over what stays in the box…. Ooooh. Sandra, you are a sneaky mommy!
Well, honestly the jack isn’t connected to the car in any way, they just have it in a little bag in the trunk. I wish it was like my older cars where they had a place to lock it in. She just tossed it in with the basket with the rest of the stuff that was in the trunk.
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#2 doesn’t work for me because I rarely move.
The other problem is with things that can’t really easily be replaced, but are still frequently useful. I just cleaned my office out at work, which involved tossing old components I had no further use for, so I dismantled the CD drive and HD and pulled out all of the assorted magnets. I was running low on good, strong magnets and the only chance I have to get more is when I’m throwing away/stripping a dead hard drive.
All of the magnets are now either holding the picture I got from Howard up, or holding up the platters of said hard disk as decorations. 🙂
It’s more the headache of getting something like that out here where you don’t have big computer stores with diverse selections. The last place that would have things like digital internal CD cables closed down a year and a half ago. Also, when I get the urge to hook something up at 2AM, it’s aggravating to not have the appropriate part and have to run out and buy it… the next day… 300 miles away… or at the end of a 6 day UPS trip… after which, the project has been back-burnered and won’t be picked up for weeks to months.
I’m constantly running out of certain parts as well, such as AV cables, because friends ask me to hook something up for them, and I end up giving them 3-4 cables to make it work optimally. Whenever I run into a cable like that, I curl it up, drop it in a baggie, and save it for the next time I need one. It’s a bit like Bargain shopping when the sales are on, then using it throughout the year. Another example is a bundle of TOSLink/Composite cables I bought from radio shack. All of them were $2 each, whereas a new cable with TOSlink alone is typically $20. I bought 5 of these even though I only needed 2 immediately and stripped the Composite cable off each. I’m now using all 5 of them, hooking them up as new AV equipment has come into the house.
At work here, we packrat a good deal of software as well. I’ve looked through much of it, and found that if we tossed it out and ended up needing it, most of it wouldn’t even be available to buy anymore. We have active projects in the field that uses the software as well, so if we ever need to make a modification we would definitely need that software, even though we haven’t worked on it in 3-4 years. We had one 4-5 year old project come back to us and ask for a way to remotely control the system through the web, for example.
I know it’s silly for me to keep the write protect notcher for 5.25 discs, but I think it makes a great decoration on my curio-shelf. Just like the broken LCD panel I got from fixing that laptop. I actually have very little in the way of stuff that has no further value at all. Only one shelf, because once it’s broken beyond salvage, I strip anything useful or decorative off and toss the rest.
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Speaking of throwing those boxes away, have you thought about taking a picture of the box with a listing of the contents, and tossing it up on ebay? :p