photo credit: Julie Smith David

There was no need to do any housework at all.  After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

— Quentin Crisp,
The Naked Civil Servant, 1968

Recently, a friend of this blog wrote on her blog that “A friend of mine and her partner contribute meaningful articles on their blog every day…and I do not mean comments like “well I guess I’ll sign off and start dusting!!!”

Well, not to be disrespectful, today I’d like to focus on “dusting.”

The reason for this is that despite the fact that housekeeping isn’t my #1 interest in life, I’ve spent a fair amount of the time that I’ve been working on clearing out my folks’ house trying to create spaces that are clean enough to “live-in” temporarily.

I’m the kind of person who likes to see the change when I clean.  To some extent, I need there to be discernable dust.  Then I feel that I have accomplished something when I take out the Swiffer and “swiff it” around.  This is not a problem in the folks’ house.  As a matter of fact, if I were to use a Swiffer, you should all buy stock in the company because each Swiffer would last about two seconds before needing to be replaced.  So my approach has been to wipe most things down with a wet sponge and then do it again.  Finally, I dry the surface.  THEN I can start to use the surface to sort and pack stuff.

If I’ve Done So Much, Why Does It Look So Bad?

So, finally after two weeks working on the house, I think I’ve started to win the “dust war.”  Part of the problem is that my folks lived in a naturally dusty environment – the desert.  Lots of sand comes into the house each day, just because there is sand being stirred up by the wind all the time.  At last, I have removed enough of the dust that more of the house has clean surfaces than doesn’t.

The problem is that dust is just the first part of the problem.  Clutter is the overwhelming problem and I’ve discovered a basic fact of this kind of work.  Each time you attack a new area, you “unpack” it.  As you do that, the items you are sorting expand to fill the available horizontal space – and then some – and then eventually as the sorting progresses and the packing begins, the sorting space contracts again.  The Goodwill donations space expands.  The recycle space expands.  The trash space expands – and everything looks worse, if that’s possible. (Of course that’s possible, I’ve proved it.)

Suggestions, Anyone?

This is the first, and hopefully last, time that I’ve taken on so big a project.  Admittedly, my house gets out of control occasionally and I need to devote time to getting it back under control, but it’s never been this bad.  When you add in the emotional overtones of sorting knick-knacks from my childhood and finding 30-year-old picture of relatives, it feels like a very long journey.

When I first started, I’d make “review later” decisions thinking that my brother or sister would make the decision.  Since then, I’ve discovered that there’s no one else to do the “review later” and I’m being very cut-throat about the decisions.  The problem that bothers me most is that it seems like such a waste to throw away so much stuff – but who would want it?  Even my folks weren’t actively using this stuff.  It had just been put into storage in case “someday” it would come back into fashion or be needed for a party or such.

So, I’m open to suggestions.  Have any of you faced a task like this?  What tricks did you use to get through the mountain of work?  How did you make the keep/donate/toss decision?  Did you regret having donated or tossed some stuff?  These are all things that I think about when I have the energy.  My best guess is that when all is said and done, I won’t know if there’s something that I should have kept because there’s just so much to go through that no one thing stands out.

And as for my house, I ain’t buying no more knick-knacks and if those clothes don’t fit, they’re out of here – just as soon as I finish with the folks’ house!