.
.

Welcome

.
.
Make yourself at home. Put your feet up. Grab your favorite beverage and prepare to enjoy the reads.
.

.

Saturday

What' in your Garage?

Coincidental to my decision to "come out of the closet" with my plan to become a Minimalist, an Oprah episode was shown on TV this week, a re-run about hoarders.

Thank heavens I'm not a hoarder. Really. I'm not. I can get through my doorway and walk from room to room without needing to move anything out of the way.


Choosing to hone down my belongings didn't just begin out of the blue. When the father of a friend died a few years back, I helped him clean out the three car garage which had accumulated an impressive floor to ceiling collection of "stuff" crammed in tight to the door. That was when I realized his father had been a hoarder by the true definition of the word. Maybe not on the scale of ten, like the woman on the Oprah show; but a hoarder, nonetheless. I knew the house had been badly cluttered, with some items stacked up behind the sofa, and the dining room table piled up with miscellaneous things. But I hadn't given much thought to it. I just considered it the result of the old man's inability to get around much in those last few years of poor health.

Our first inclination, when opening the garage door, was to call in a truck and have it all hauled away. But, we started poking around a bit, and opened boxes, some of them holding papers dated from fifty years before. We realized there were things of a personal value to family members. Military keepsakes, family photos and movies, rolls and rolls of undeveloped film! This would not be a simple matter of tossing things! It took us more than a month to clean it out.

It was a challenging job and revealed much about my friend's family life. He reminisced as we encountered his boxed up memories. We found bags of clothing from when the grandchildren were little, a cache of his mother's purses, some still containing make up. We discovered a complete set of antique imported china ware carefully wrapped in crumbling tissue paper that must have been worth a thousand dollars. We were mystified as we opened boxes tightly packed of carefully washed plastic margarine tubs and lids. It gave me pause to consider the extra plastic storage containers cluttering my bottom kitchen cupboard. Just thinking about that bothered me enough to make me reassess my own growing collection of goodies.

Since that time, I have made a conscious effort to not squirrel away a mountain of stuff in my garage. Unfortunately, it has often been a molehill.

4 comments:

  1. My attics were all emptied about 4 years ago. I still have the basement to tackle, but like you, I want to be one who does not hoard!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ciss... the oddest thing for me about living in California? No attics and no basements! I think it has to do with earthquakes. I can't even imagine my attending to those two anymore.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My mom got married a few months ago and has since moved out of her house and put it up on the market. She lived there for 13 years, seven of the 13 with my dad and after my dad passed away my grandma moved in with her and was there for three years I think. Her moving out wasn't hard for me, but her getting rid of all of my dad's and grandma's things was very hard on me. I helped her with what I could, I love going through photo albums and other things that belonged to my dad and grandma. She let me have what I asked her for and then she just started unloading stuff that I have no where to put. She gave me a china cabinet that belonged to my dad's mom(my other grandma) and when we were moving it into the house the top part of the china cabinet just completely fell of the bottom half. I was so upset, and now I have nowhere to put all the china and glassware that my mom gave me...so guess where it's at, in my garage...and I am praying none of it is broken. We also have tools out there that belonged to my dad and half a room full of things that my brother left here when he moved about four years ago. It never fails, when we clean it out we get twice as much stuff than we had before. My husband is also letting our pesky neighbor store his junk in our garage...someday it's going to go in the trash...maybe more gradually. I don't go out to my garage anymore because it really bugs me.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's hard when our parents are involved, when my Mom moved she cried every time I lifted something up and said, "How about this?". You've given me an idea... I'm going to write about how I gave up family photos, old letters, etc.

    ReplyDelete

Blog comments are always welcome. I read, and enjoy, each of your comments. I will approve your comment as soon as possible.

If you don't have an account and don't want to sign up for one, you can still leave a comment. Enter your message and a name, even if it is Bunnykins.

You may use name and URL. Entering a URL is optional. If you have a site and you want to share it, this is a good opportunity to do so

Or you may use the Anonymous button.

Thanks for taking time to comment!