Chaos Attraction

Weekend of Cleaning

2016-02-15, 7:51 p.m.

So, I'm moving.

Just down the hall, not like, anywhere else in the world. My rent is going up to the point of Too Much Money to continue to keep my 2 bedroom apartment (I fear it's edging up on being 3/4 of my ever-never-growing salary), so I am going to get a one bedroom in the same complex. Unfortunately they want me to move sooner--either April or July when the two moving out are going. I said pretty much July because while cutting a month and a half off my move time isn't great, ain't no fucking way I can clear 15 years of crap out by April. Maybe it won't be so bad because I won't be having to deal with this town's official Moving Day (virtually all leases run out on the same day, August 31). Maaaaybe.

So instead of say, going to a con this year or even seeing the Deadpool movie or doing anything at all fun with my three day weekend, I spent it cleaning, theoretically dedicating one major room to each day.

My bedroom is entirely cleaned at this point, and it only took me less than 12 hours on Saturday! Which sounds better than it feels. Mostly I was clearing out stuff and taking it to the SPCA, so I got rid of toys, old blankets, I forget whatall was stashed in the back corner. I also went through the clothes in that room, reorganizing the dressers and stuffing clothes in there so that the room looks unused (because really, "neat and clean" translates into "it looks like nobody lives here and it's a hotel room," and I won't get much notice when people get paraded through on a tour :/) I started a pile of clothes to get rid of in the back corner and was calling it the "Wall of Jericho," but nobody I've talked to this weekend really got the joke. I also piled up jewelry, hats, purses (I have too many purses/bags), all the shoes I bought that gave me blisters the second I walked out of my house, etc (probably a third of my shoe collection right there because my feet are whining bitches). I was exhausted. Anyway, most of my clothes are now hidden away except for the aforementioned wall.

I made a lot of paper piles to get away--I had all of these books and papers about moving to LA, which have now been rightfully trashed because that's never going to happen. I also found a bunch of old mementos that... well, are being buried back in the desk for the time being. Don't want to throw them out but can't really look at them either.

My back already started hurting Friday night. Not a good sign.

Sunday: Meg suggested I get some vacuum bags at the Dollar Store, which it turned out they did not have. I proceeded to waste $20 on sweater storage bags that were... literally worth a dollar and ripped if you sneezed, so that was super fucking smart of me. I will probably have to go to a real store for this next weekend. Incidentally, the Dollar Store was the most blinged out for Valentine's Day I have ever seen in my damn LIFE. Yikes. Then I went home, where Valentine's Day doesn't exist, hah. I also found my old broken heart shirt and bag in the rubble and a pin that said "No V-Day," hah.

This day I was going to dedicate to the middle room (i.e. my craft room/spare room), but mostly just ended up making it a bigger mess. I went through all the clothes in that room (again, one closet and two sets of dressers), which took most of the day. I have a lot of old costumes stashed that I will need to get rid of, sadly, and clothes I made myself that are only so-so on me. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do about my handmade stuff--maybe beg the CC to take them early for the December auction, especially since you generally can't sell anything that you made of someone else's pattern. And let's face it, some of my stuff is weird and just won't be appreciated by anyone else. I don't want to throw those things directly into the trash, but I fear that might have to happen.

For all of the work of figuring out what clothes to get rid of, I...cleared out one empty drawer. I had an avalanche of clothes in the back room and yet no actual empty space. I have to halve my current stash because I am losing a whole room. This isn't good. Also, apparently my boobs are still growing because a fair amount of things were gotten rid of because they no longer zip that high. Argh.

I really didn't get too much else done in that room. I packed up a bunch of Oprah magazines (no recollection of why I have so many of these) for Mom at her insistence, and I'm going to have to get rid of my office toy collection since I no longer have the office space to house it (and will never get a bigger office again), but that was about it for the rest of the room. Oh yeah, and I did pack up some yarn to give away at the CC. But I'm going to have to go through the rest of my magazine stash, pattern stash, craft stashes, etc. And oh god, that. I don't want to get rid of the projects I have in progress in a "I'm not ready to do this yet but want to someday" way. Hell, I have a half finished corset that I can't fix--I had boning issues and the store to buy them at went out of business. I'm probably just going to have to waste all of that money and throw it all directly in the trash, dammit.

This is going to suuuuuuuuuck.

Oh yeah, and I also started ripping up old bills, of which I have a giant pile because it all falls under the category of "Important Papers I Will Probably Never Look At Again But Can Never Get Rid Of," and it's easier to chuck them on the hall table than actually deal with them. I'm surprised at how draining literally checking how old a bill is and ripping it up is. Ridiculous. I decided to just keep anything from 2015 on and it's still a lot.

I looked at consignment stores and apparently most of them are not for me--they want high end labels, they won't give you money unless it sells, etc.--but one place in town sounds like they'd go for most of my stuff and pay cash. However, they have a whopping three hours a week to take items for sale, and that's during work on Tuesday. Argh.

Monday: I've slept about 9 hours a night for the last three days (rarely happens unless it's Christmas vacation with me) and I'm still exhausted. I had to go clean the rest of the house for impending guests--move the books to get rid of pile over, clean the floors, etc. I continued the bill shredding and that's still going on. I organized the clothes into the following piles:

(a) Mom may want these
(b) Clothes nobody probably wants, like boring shirts, stuff Dawn gave me when she moved, etc.
(c) Clothes and costumes that could possibly go to the consignment store
(d) Clothes I made myself but did not design (i.e. other people's patterns)
(e) Clothes I designed myself, which may or may not be sellable, but more likely not.

I don't know what I'm going to do about all of the stuff I made that I don't want to get rid of but have to--seriously, some of that may just end up in the trash because nobody but me will want it.

I am running out of big boxes and bags to put these things into. Between that, cleaning the bathroom/kitchen, cleaning up the living room (which in all honesty, I didn't sort through and just ended up shoving things into bags and moving said things off the furniture and shoving those bags into the middle room), I was pretty well freaking dead tired and ready for a nap by 1 p.m. Which isn't good. And much as I hate to say this to the rest of the country, we are having our annual weird February heat wave here and it's in the 70's all weekend and gorgeous and not when you want to be in your house.

Eventually I went over to Meg's house, where she said it was inspiring that I was getting rid of stuff, and we knitted and did some tarot, and I felt better. She's also going to attempt to go to the consignment store for me, so we'll see there. And her caregiver can also take clothes away if necessary.

It's been a long drag of a weekend and I should be having a lot more of them until I move. Sigh.

The thing about cleaning is that it makes me feel like a horrible person. I'm a slob with way too much stuff and a borderline hoarder in some respects, and cleaning is a ton of effort and yet knowing that I'll probably make another mess again like, tomorrow. Because when I put clothes Nice and Neat and Away Out Of Sight (like they are right now), that means I'll end up rummaging through all of the very packed dressers and ripping out clothes left and right trying to find things. Ugh. Just...ugh. I should be proud of myself, but I feel like I only just started climbing a mountain and am drained dry.


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