Getting Rid of Stuff

When I think back on listing and selling the other houses we have owned, I remind myself that each situation was unique, and each took a lot longer than I would have wanted.

After living in our first little Milwaukee home for eight years we were out for a Sunday drive, came upon some open house signs, toured a neat house, made an offer, and bought it a few days later. It was a quick closing, and we did a "bridge loan" for the down payment.  We moved, cleaned up the little house, and listed it empty.  It took about six months to sell.

Several years later Craig took a new job in Texas, moved there by himself, and the kids and I stayed in Wisconsin until the house finally sold, about six months later.

When he was offered a job in California, I did not want to repeat the separation, so we again emptied the house, put it on the market, moved to California, and used a bridge loan to buy our next house.

The Texas house took about eight months to sell.

Selling our first California house presented no problems because it was in the path of a new freeway, and the state bought it from us.

So here we are again. Technically, we moved out of the house about five months ago. The furniture and a lot of our personal things stayed, but we've been living in the Alfa either on trips or up the hill in the driveway.

When we returned from our Christmas trip, we knew we would never be moving back into it, and it was time to get rid of everything.  We decided on not having a storage unit a long time ago.

I can honestly say that we have worked very hard every day since our return and are almost finished. It has been a bit emotional and very stressful at times. Although I've been trying to get rid of things for the last three years, there were still lots of little collections to sort through.  

• The big junk drawer in the kitchen, 
• The three little junk drawers in the kitchen that I had emptied, but had somehow refilled themselves.  
• Top dresser drawers.  
• Closet shelves. 
• Boxes in the attic. 
• The closet in my former studio, which once emptied of art materials became a deposit place for many other things.
• The huge mound of stuff I had gotten rid of by putting it into boxes in one of the five garage spaces on the property. 
• Craig's tool and workshop garage. 
• Drawers, drawers, and more drawers! 

Craig had his work cut out for him as well. He had to make final decisions about his tools, and sell his high end audio system.

Considering our location, and the unpredictability of the weather, we rejected going to the flea market or having yard sales or an estate sale.  Craigslist and Ebay are a crapshoot, and not a good way to get rid of all the small stuff, and the worn out furniture.

So we decided to use John, an "estate liquidator", which is a fancy name for John the junk man! He is sort of a wholesaler to antique shops, a flea market vendor, and a cleanup man all in one.  He came, looked things over and listened to our list of the few things we wanted, and gave us a price on the whole lot. 

It was very little, but we had to keep in mind that it was the wholesale price on anything salable, minus the cost to remove it, minus the cost to remove and dump all the unsalable stuff.

 He and a helper have been working for three days.  All that is left are a few collections of things Craig and I have to look thru, some boxes of things we are storing in our daughter's attic: family pictures and tax records. (We're taking two years of tax forms along in the Alfa in case we need them.)

Personally I find this month has been very stressful, very sad, and very exciting, at different times and in different ways.

As he packed up my dishes, flatware, cutting boards, and pots and pans, I felt a bit of panic.  I need those things! No, I don't.  I have all I need in the Alfa and haven't wanted any of it for five months. Seeing my favorite comfy recliner loaded up on a trailer made me want to say: "Stop, I need that to sit in front of the fire on a cold winter 's night." Nonsense! I will be in Arizona, Texas, or Florida by next winter, and the only fire I will be sitting by will be a campfire with new friends.

Seeing the patio furniture being removed from the upper deck reminded me of the many summer dinners we have had up there. Now we will share our BBQs on a picnic table in a National Park.

The barstools in the kitchen are gone, the microwave is gone, the dining room table is gone, our bed is gone.  The rooms are empty.
The house seems so big now that it's empty.

Next week we will be doing some heavy cleaning. 

It is disgusting to see the dust that was behind the heavy furniture. I have a vacuum up in the Alfa that I can use.

 
But when it's done, the house will be ready and waiting for the next owner. We will be free to leave any time and not come back. Which is exactly what we want to do.

Four weeks at Camp Driveway has been long enough.  Hitch-itch is developing.

Since we do not get very good TV reception here we have decided to drive down to San Diego again so we can enjoy a Super Bowl get together.

After that who knows ...  Jello time!

June 15, Half the Month s Gone

Leaving on our next Alfa Adventure in 55 days!

Craig has really picked up the pace since we returned from our Grand Canyon trip.  He said he hoped to have the house listed by the end of June.  That won't happen, but the end of July just might be possible.  We have several more "two week or more" projects to get thru, but most of the little things are getting done. Things like removing the big dish satellite from the front yard.

I hired someone to do it!  Craig wanted to, but he can't do everything.

As I compose this post, Craig and our handyman, Mick, are installing a new vanity in one of the bathrooms.  Still to come are the mirrors, medicine cabinets  and details like towel bars and new baseboards.  If all goes well we will have three complete bathrooms by the end of the month.  Well, almost complete, Craig had to special order some woodwork for around the doors and it might not be here for a few weeks.

I, on the other hand, have not been doing very much. There really isn't much I can do without Craig's help. It is a waste of my time to clean since new clouds of construction dust seem to settle over the floors every day or so.  I refuse to get serious about it until the last really dirty job is done.  I would like to be washing windows, but we still need to sand three sets of stairs and two deck surfaces.  That will cover the windows with sawdust for sure! Best to wait until the deck is done.

Many drawers and closets are close to being emptied, but that doesn't mean their contents are gone.  Much is piled up in the garage waiting for either a flea market day or donation. There are also lots of piles of stuff around the house.  If I take it out of a closet, it doesn't go back in!  

I really need Craig to work with me in getting rid of things.  The stuff is both of ours and many things might still be needed before we are out of here.  Last week I went through the garbage cans, or bags of junk in the garage, three times to retrieve something I had tossed. 

But I find it very difficult to deal with the disorder. There are little collections of tools here and there waiting to be used to finish this or that.

I'm not a very good housekeeper to begin with, but I find having the additional mess everywhere very stressful.

Every room seems to look like this.  Stuff everywhere!

Oh well, this too shall pass.  We will get there. It is our time!

If you are a full timer, who got rid of all your stuff and sold your home, what stage of the process did you find the most stressful?

How did you deal with it?

Old Wine

[From Craig] Friday our efforts to get the house ready for sale led Merikay and I to confront our Very Old Homemade Wine.

Back in 1977 when we lived in Wisconsin, we sold our first house and bought our second, out in the country (or the cutting edge of suburbia). We found our property was near many kinds of old fruit trees and bushes, and took up the hobby of making homemade fruit wines. In 1977, our first year, we made Apple, Pear, Elderberry, and probably other kinds that we've forgotten.

Most of the first-year stuff was surprisingly drinkable. When our son took it into his head to get confirmed in a religion that had never been in our family before, we threw a party for our and his friends and relatives that featured homemade sausage, homemade bread, and homemade wine. A very homemade party!

The next year we seem to have made Huckleberry wine, although neither Merikay nor I can remember where the fruit came from. Then we moved to Texas where our lot included six persimmon trees. Guess what kind of wine we made those years? Unfortunately we could never overcome the alum mouth-puckering component of the persimmons.

We continued to drink our Wisconsin and Texas wines occasionally, and the remaining ones came along when we moved to California in '83. When we moved into our current home in '88, they were consigned to a wooden cabinet in the closet of our family room, of which one wall is an uphill retaining wall that provided some temperature stability. Occasionally we would try one of the old home-brews and discovered that they were turning to sherry that we didn't care for the taste of. So they have just quietly continued aging in their cabinet for 20+ years.

Until Friday, when my projects came to include painting concrete closet floors. We found that several of the bottles had started to leak, leading to gooey brown deposits in the cabinet. We hauled all the bottles up to the kitchen sink and started to empty them, tasting a few of those that had intact corks and reasonable-looking colors.

 All of the persimmon wine, about two dozen bottles from several batches, was still contaminated with the alum taste.  The few bottles of apple, pear, and huckleberry didn't prove to be anything we wanted to drink. The elderberry has been gone since about 1980.

Which leads to two related lessons: 1) only good quality red grape wine improves with age, and 2) if you make fruit wine or white grape wine, drink it soon or toss it.

Anyway it was a more interesting day than many of ours lately. And yes, the floor of the closet that the wine had aged in got painted.

Any past home winemakers among our readers?

Patience

I really am trying hard to be patient and take every day as it comes. Last week I spent some time sorting and tossing. So much stuff!

After working on art materials and writing a thoughtful post about moving on, I got a couple of orders in Friday's email from customers who are willing to wait the couple of weeks it will take me to make the animals they want.  One is from a lady that has ordered something for her son every Christmas for the last  five years.  He has quite a collection! The other is from the UK, and the customer promptly reconfirmed when I emailed the shipping cost, and production time details.   So I guess I'll be working on sculptures for a bit.

Craig had a cold early this week and so put off starting any new work around the house.  But he felt better by Thursday, and since the weather was dismal, he took my suggestion to do a little drywall repair in the upper hall. 

 We had a leak there before the new roof was put on and there is some water damage. It's a good "putzy" job for a rainy weekend. It will probably take a couple of days for him to do, and then the hall will be ready for me to paint. I'd like to have that done before we leave for Christmas.

Friday, I spent some time going through my closet. 

I pulled out everything that was too big, worn out, or not wanted.  

I have done this several times in the last two years and although I know I still have too many, I  feel I am getting closer to having the right amount of clothes. 

Over the weekend I measured the length of the closet pole in the Alfa and marked off the pole in my closet in the house to be the same size. There is  24 inches of pole on my side of the closet.  I have installed some plastic shelves and a shoe holder on my side that take up the remaining space. Craig gets 32 inches of pole on his side.

Now I can see what is going to fit. It looks like I still need to cut down by about 1/3. It seems that jackets take up a lot of space.  I eliminated two today, but I still have more than I will have space for.  

I also have more Tshirts and sweatshirts than I need.  I tossed at least a dozen Tshirts into the rag bag today. We will be staining some new doors and woodwork soon and they will come in handy.  Since it is winter now I am wearing long sleeve shirts every day.  I know I'll need both long and short sleeved shirts in the future.  I wonder if I can stow some clothes somewhere other than the closet.

Little by little I have also emptied the overhead shelves on my side of our closet. 






I did another pass thru my dresser drawers too, and have tossed just about everything I don't wear.  I found a couple of pair of shorts that I didn't remember that will fit me now, and got rid of several that don't.

I also found this old treasure: A pair of cotton lady's dress gloves.  I've had them since we lived in Wisconsin 35 years ago.  I had a dressy winter coat that had a fur collar and three quarter length sleeves.  I wore these long gloves with it. I wonder where Goodwill will put them.  They are in perfect condition.

Craig doesn't agree with my way of getting rid of things a little at a time.  He says we can just load up the Alfa and whatever doesn't fit we will dump.  I told him his head will explode from the pressure of all the things he will have to think about in the weeks after the house sells!

[From Craig: as Merikay has been talking about this, I'm about ready to go in and throw almost all of my old clothes away. It would be a lot of
fun, and I would avoid having my head explode...]

 We will get through this.

Sorting ...

Rain again today ...

Friday morning is our trash pick up. I pay for three cans a week, but often do not fill them. I recycle some things, but because we are on a small rural road our trash is all together.

This morning I filled two cans with debris from the studio.  Not hard to do.  I have been getting rid of stuff on and off for a couple of years, but there always seems to be more to toss.

Over a year ago I pulled several boxes out of our little attic that needed to be sorted. I tossed things that I considered "mine" and set Craig's aside in the upper hall. He needs to say: "save or toss" if it is something of his. He has not shown any inclination to deal with stuff, but he knows he will have to.  

Today he went thru the pile of boxes in less than a half hour.  Almost all of it went into the van for the next dump run.  His decisions prompted me to cull out a half closet of fabric scraps.  

Dare I add the skis?  I know I will never ski again and there doesn't seem to be anyone who wants them as a donation.  

Maybe tomorrow. The van is not full yet.

What was hardest for you to sort thru?