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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Sunday, May 30, 2004 - 1:17 am
I must admit that slashing our housing by $1000/mo feels good. We'd have never been able to keep up on the payments. Perhaps someday if we move, we'll go to three bedrooms and I'll have my own space again. But, for now, I plan to make my stuff fit the space we have.
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Vee
Member
02-23-2004
| Sunday, May 30, 2004 - 4:24 pm
The party's over and I am ready to crash. It has been very windy the past two days so I have wind burn instead of sun burn. We planned to be on the deck, but we all managed to land on the porch instead...no caterpillars...no wind. My sink is full of dirty dishes and I'm trying to summon the strength to get to them. You can see what takes priority here. Now let me also say that even though things have been taken to the garage, it isn't organized in the least. The deck looks good, the window boxes have been planted, and the porch is clean...that's it! So don't let me mislead anyone. I'd love to post pictures, but I'm picture posting illiterate. I have a scanner...too complicated, and I have access to a digital camera, but until I get lessons... Lkunkel, you know how to eke out some space for yourself...that's cool. Purple, I live in at two-bedroom home and they're both taken! But the garage has wonderful potential for work space if we can get it together. It'll be good to get back on the FlyLady plan as of tomorrow. Hope you all have a great Memorial Day.
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Purplecow
Member
12-08-2003
| Sunday, May 30, 2004 - 5:38 pm
LK, one of the silver linings on getting old, wrinkled, droopy, gray-haired and toothless is that usually your mortgage has been paid off. Of course, it's a 43 year house badly in need of repair up and general updating. We re-plumbed a couple of years ago and I know the house needs to be rewired next. The carpet is so thin that it feels more like a piece of moleskin! House would have been paid for years ago, but we re-financed to pay for DD's college. Vee, I guess in Maine a case could be made for turning a garage into a workspace. Here in Florida the garage is just too hot 8 months of he year. It would take a major, expensive overhaul including insulation and air conditioning. The garage gets so hot in the summer that if I let my cottons hang there for a couple of days after they come out of the dryer they iron themselves. No joke! Our garage has twenty years worth of junk, broken appliances, baby furniture, outdoor toys, lamps, chairs, a couple of bookshelves . . . you get the picture. I can't believe how DD manages to back the car into the slim slot left for it. My deck looks like cr*p and I don't have any window boxes, so I'm still WAY impressed!
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Sunday, May 30, 2004 - 7:28 pm
Ah. We tried the house thing, but with our income going to erractic/non-existent, we just couldn't do it. The Super Fling starts Tuesday--let's see how much crap we can get rid of in that time period!
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Spinner
Member
10-27-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 1:25 am
A year and a half ago (long before I found the FlyLady) I decided that the garage clutter had to go. Most of it was my daughter's teaching stuff (she did elaborate room environments when she was a classroom teacher) but now that she isn't in the classroom anymore (she's a coach for teachers and uses photos/movies of her classrooms to teach with-not the actual items), and didn't have room for all this stuff, she'd been storing it in our garage. There were over 40 storage boxes of things, some of which I knew had real value, but all of it just couldn't stay. I am willing to keep the really valuable stuff because she has no storage at all at her apartment and the historical periods her stuff represents are of interest to me too. So I figured out how much room I was willing to devote to her stuff, and any other stuff I might find that isn't normally garage stuff--I call paint, electrical supplies, tools, etc. "garage stuff" and I bought storage bins with lids at the Walmart to use. My rule for myself was that I'd keep what would fit in those bins and no more. I found that the more I pitched the easier it was to pitch and pretty soon my DH came out to help and it went pretty fast. I saved actual artifacts from the historical eras, really good books and pictures, and one copy of any teaching manuals/pamphlets she had--she had many complete class sets of these things, but I couldn't keep all that. I kept going until all we had were the bins-full, and my DH kept working on other parts of the garage--a real bonus since I'd only hoped to clear the storage boxes. The amount of stuff that accumulated in the side yard, awaiting the trash pickup which only happens once a week was incredible. As we filled trash barrels, we moved the contents into plastic trash bags to free the barrels for more. For three consecutive weeks we piled HUGE amounts of stuff out at the curb for the trash collector the night before trash day--enough stuff to completely cover the parkway between our driveway and the neighbors--60 feet or so. In addition, any good stuff that we didn't want was put out on the curb daily with "FREE" signs on them and all that got taken by new owners too. Some of the classroom sets of things did go to teachers we know. The rest wasn't even something the Goodwill would want. We met the trash collectors with smiles and a few dollars in our hands to get them to take all this stuff--they always filled their huge front loaders several times; ordinarily, they said, they can do the whole street without having to dump that front bin. It was hard to believe all that stuff had been in the garage--it had not looked bad, all stored in boxes along the walls, and we were still parking 2 cars in the garage, but the evidence of our pack-rat-ness for the last 40 years was right there on the curb. A year and a half later we still have a neat garage with no more stuff in it than we had when we finished the decluttering. When we bought paint, we threw out old paint so it would fit on the paint shelf. Ditto for other stuff we needed to buy for house repairs, the yard, etc.. It was a lot of work for 3 weeks--we didn't do much else, but it was worth it. The other thing that helped was that the original owner of a lot of this stuff (my daughter) trusted me to decide what to throw out--she was in the midst of decluttering her own home so the landlord could paint and she was in no mood to have to decide about stuff at another house. The rest of the stuff was ours, of course, and after pitching all of her stuff, we were finding it easier to pitch stuff than to decide what we might do with it should we decide to keep it. It can be done! And it's worth it. Knowing now what I've learned from the Flylady, I think I would have done it in segments--what we could do in an hour or so, and spread it out more. But it's such a mess while you're working, if you can spare the time to keep going, it's probably easier to just keep going, at least until one section is done and you can put away what's going to stay there.
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Vee
Member
02-23-2004
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 4:53 am
Spinner, your post was very inspiring. Like you, we are saving "stuff" for the kids. Three dollhouses for the gals, a bike for the boy, and lots and lots of boxes. Nothing like you were saving for your daughter, though! Teachers do collect a great many things; I can appreciate all that was there. I gave up teaching just last year. I had had the incredible opportunity in my 25 years of experience to teach every level from pre-school to college. That translated into a whole ton of stuff, which, like you, I have tried to give/throw away keeping only the things that are the most meaningful. What are you doing with all your new found space? It's a bit easier here to unload a lot of stuff in that we must recycle and haul our own to our "transfer station"...translation: town dump. At least that way folks don't see the sheer volume of it sitting along the curb. Instead they just think that we have the dump trots. I agree with you that breaking it down into workable chunks just isn't always feasible. Although it certainly works for the remainder of the house while the "big" project is ongoing. I was running around putting out hotspots and trying to keep the danged sink clean even in the middle of the bigger projects this weekend. This caused a fair amount of consternation on my sister's side of things. She did admit that it made a huge difference in the end when the house had not fallen apart, though. You and your daughter certainly have a very trusting relationship. I think you, your husband, and your daughter are all to be commended for that. I'm sure that she appreciates all that effort on her behalf.
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Spinner
Member
10-27-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 5:40 am
Vee, I am quite content simply to have that new-found garage space empty. The garage actually looks like a nice room, with things placed around its perimeter rather than crammed into every space nearly to the ceiling. I used to teach too, and my daughter and I share a lot of philosophies. We'd collected a lot of her historical stuff together so she knew that I knew what to keep. And I've kept a lot--four good-sized storage bins have her things in them. But they're better kept than before--nothing's going to damage what's in those covered bins and before, everything was in cardboard file storage boxes. We live near where she was last teaching, so she could swing by and pick up a box or two when her room needed changing and bring back the boxes of things she has just taken down. Handy, but cardboard doesn't really protect. Yeah, I've often wondered what the neighbors thought, but really, I didn't care. No one's ever mentioned the month that it must have looked like our entire lives were out on curb display, and we never started hauling it out to the curb until the night before the trash collectors were due--stuff sat in a hidden corner of the yard until then. Of course, that meant that every bit of it was hauled twice--once to the yard and then to the curb. It sounds like you did a great job on your own part, trying to keep the structure of your household going in the midst of a "project" that was going on all around you.
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Vee
Member
02-23-2004
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 8:09 am
That's my goal, too...to keep the center clear. Just in case I've been sounding too put together, my own mother just called to say that she would like me to come and get all the boxes that my sister has been storing in her basement. Oh dear! Will it never end?! 
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Purplecow
Member
12-08-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 8:47 am
Wow, Spinner! I haven't even considered tackling the garage.

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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 10:50 am
Uh, Vee? Why are YOU getting YOUR SISTER's boxes? I understand dealing with your own, or even your offspring's clutter....but why your sibling's?
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Dipo
Member
04-23-2002
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 2:13 pm
I am so impressed with all the work you guys have been doing. I finally signed up for flylady and even though the emails can get annoying, they are really good reminders. I am slowly but surely working through all the stuff I brought back from my Mom's. So flylady does help, doing it for 15 minutes instead of dreading the day has really worked well. But what is her obsession with trash and laundry??? I don't have enough of either to need a reminder every day!!!! LOL. Thanks for all the inspiration. Purple, I have the same question as LK!!!!!
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 2:20 pm
Dipo: I use the trash reminders to check the cans in the bathrooms and DH's office. The laundry reminder reminds me to look in my drawer to see what the status of laundry is. (And to see if DH left his on his side of the bed--again!). Trust me, it's really easier to miss a reminder and let it overflow. ::sigh:: I have so much around here that I want to do and can't until I get the cars written up.
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Vee
Member
02-23-2004
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 2:35 pm
Lk, my sister moved in with me after her divorce. We liked living together so much that we decided to become the old spinster sisters on the block. She works two jobs and I am currently sitting on my duff so anything that I can do to help her I do. She sure does a lot for me. The kids I speak of are my two...a daughter and son...and her two daughters. We think of all of them as "ours." (My two are on their own. Her two are still in college.) Now her stuff is my stuff and my stuff is her stuff. It's a strange arrangement in some folks' opinion, but, so far, it is working for us. By the way, I got said stuff out of my mom's basement and now it is stacked in the middle of the garage floor. I just hope that there is room for her to pull her car in when she gets home. I may hear screaming when she realizes what happened. Until I read the e-mail from FlyLady today, I had not realized her opinion about yard sales. I think she's correct because we just keep sorting and sorting. I'm going to suggest that we a) take it to the Salvation Army store b) put it on the curb and "bless" the neighbors with a "Take it...please." Good luck with your car reports, Lk. You will soon be back to your flying.
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 6:15 pm
Okay, that makes sense. It just sounded odd without knowing that you were bringing the boxes into your home, not knowing that you were using the plural you. (One of the many challenging aspects of English...) I am plugging away on the car write ups. I'll likely stay up tonight to finish at least one more of stupid things. I also need to do an art journal submission so it can be mailed out tomorrow to the next person on the RR (round robin). Soon, I'll be back at it. One thing that we--okay I--decided is that our decorative shelves are leaving our bedroom. I'll be taking them down, filling the holes, and then hanging up shelves similar to what Purple posted. We could go 5' high and 4' wide. I have stuff in decorative boxes, but they're on the floor and stacked atop of each other. I so much like the idea of getting this stuff off the floor and having more room for both display and storage. I'm going to Home Depot tomorrow. Depending on the cost of shelving, I'll either come home with one set 3.5'H x 4'L/W (for my books) or two sets 4.5'H x 3'-4'L/W (for the bedroom); but it's unlikely that well have three sets. Of course, given DH's attitude when I tried to address it with him tonight, it might be one set for my books, and one set for MY side of the bedroom, and his will be waiting until later.
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 7:06 pm
Here's (some of) the wall that the books are going in in the living room:
I just keep hoping the shelves will help me deal with the mess next to the bed:
I think it will. I mean look at the wasted space I will be utilizing. My primary problem is that I can't easily put things away, and the shelves should solve that.
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Spinner
Member
10-27-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 7:27 pm
Purplecow, if your garage had the stacks of cardboard storage boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling along two walls that we had, you would have considered decluttering the garage! <G> Thanks for the vote of confidence. It looks like everyone is finding her own solutions. What works for one just won't work for all--our situations are so different.
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 7:41 pm
Spinner, I once had a garage like that...it was a relief to clear it out. We got to enjoy the emptiness for a year before we had to fill it for the move. I look at the floor mess and want to cry...but I will conquer it.
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Vee
Member
02-23-2004
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 7:44 pm
You have found the right solution to your challenge, Lk, with the shelving units. You really do have a lot of space there just waiting to be used. Imagine how wonderful it will be to have a place to put things. When your hubby sees how great your side is looking, he'll be convinced.
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Vee
Member
02-23-2004
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 7:48 pm
Oh, I forgot to ask...in your living room...is that a deck beyond the sliding glass door? Are you putting your books to the left of the doors or are you putting them along the half wall under the bar? Cute kitty!
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 7:53 pm
Vee: yes, that is a deck beyond the sliding glass door. A friend moved, and blessed me with 30-40 of her houseplants/extra pots. It is a really nice area in which to relax. The shelves are going under the breakfast bar. The bar is unusable: it tilts forward and down. To the left of the sliding glass door is my desk. Speckle is a cute cat, most of the time.
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Purplecow
Member
12-08-2003
| Monday, May 31, 2004 - 11:22 pm
LK, if you get the kind of shelving I have you can keep adding to it. The large "unit" on the wall in my office started off as 4 3' shelves. I recommend that if you put that kind of shelving under your breakfast bar that you have knock off the corners. They're very sharp and that looks like a place where one would likely bump into them. We knocked the corners off the shelves next to the door at head level and below. You can heat up the edging with an iron and pull it away and then re-glue it on the rounded corner. Also, if you're going to be putting books on the shelves be sure to get bookends. BTW, your new night stand looks wonderful! Spinner, if the stuff piled up in our garage were in boxes it wouldn't be as shocking. I'll try to take a picture tomorrow. If the washer and dryer weren't in there I'd never set foot in the place. I remain in awe of you! Dipo, I get Flylady in digest form and it comes just once a day, in the evenings. I don't really care about the reminders (I haven't had shoes on in more than a week!) but I do like reading the letters.
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Tuesday, June 01, 2004 - 12:21 am
Purple: I planned on getting the corner bumpers for the shelves on my side of the bed, because it's next to the bathroom door. I'll consider it for the breakfast bar area too; especially once I see how many times I gouge myself. Bookends...good idea. I had already written down 1x6 boards cut the same length of the shelves. (I'm planning on getting 12" shelves, so I'll be able to fit two rows of paperbacks on them. Hence, the lumber risers.) That wasn't planned, but I figured the 12" will hold all of my books--hardcover, trade, and paper. Trust me--the ability to add to the shelves is something I plan to utilize. I plan to start mine in the bedroom at the top and work my way down. I just so want a place to put things! Thank you--I love my new nightstand.
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Spinner
Member
10-27-2003
| Tuesday, June 01, 2004 - 6:02 am
LK, it's going to look so good, and work so well for you. I know it's going to be worth having stuff on the floor and in piles for now. The lumber risers for the paperbacks are such a good idea. I like the nightstand, too. Purple, I remain in awe of myself! <G> When I think back on what it took to clear out the garage I'm amazed that we actually did it. Goes to show, though, how boxes (matching, no less!--the kind you buy at the office store for file storage; heavy, with lids) and shelves (even when they're junky) can hide what is, in reality, just CLUTTER. Stuff you don't need or plan to use--stuff that would have to be cleared out someday by somebody, even neatly stored, is still stuff that needs to be gotten rid of. My goal (very long-range: baby steps!) is to get the whole house to that point. I suspect that those "neat"--well, pretty neat! shelves in our storage closets are as full of junk as the garage was. I won't be able to pitch with such abandon and speed when working on the closets, though, because there is stuff there that we actually need and use or that is important family history that shouldn't be tossed. Even if I'm not particularly interested in it, there are people in the family who are. And I need to keep following the rule I sort of hammered out for myself when all of you helped me work out how to decide what to get rid of in my hobby area--now that I'm getting more organized and actually have more time for myself, some of what I would have pitched because I'd never have time to use it will indeed be useful now and if I'm not to have to repurchase what I just threw out, I need to at least set that stuff aside until I'm really sure I should let it go. Being able to think through these plans "out loud" here in this group, and getting everyone's wise input is such a valuable part of our online group here! All of your experiences have helped me figure out better ways to proceed and given me encouragement.
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Lkunkel
Member
10-29-2003
| Tuesday, June 01, 2004 - 7:14 am
Spinner: You can do it! Use this fling (and the concept of moving) to motivate you. (It scared me, but that's okay, too.) I definitely plan on having everything together no later than the 28th. I'd like it to be done sooner (like by the end of SuperFling), but I don't know when I'll have the money for all of the shelves. For now, I'm working around them, but the shelves are a definite must. I'll still put up the decorative stuff that is on the wooden shelves now, just on the new shelves. I may even put those shelves on the wall with the lamp. Maybe not, but maybe. (At least, maybe the shelves with our wedding related stuff on it.) Anyway, there's where I'm at right now. A lot to do, but I definitely plan to finish this. I deserve this. And besides, that would clear out three large projects and give me more time to work on my remaining 8: finishing HNB; sorting through my AOL PFC; organizing my graphics/fonts; organizing my files; writing my e-zine; becoming the healthiest me possible; assorted art projects; and compiling recipes into MasterCook. So, for the next 15 days, I'll be finishing the flinging/cleaning/and organizing. I figured out meals for the two weeks--just have to buy the ingredients. I love our board/group. We have a collective knowledge wealth that is incredible. We are also an EXCELLENT support group.
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Purplecow
Member
12-08-2003
| Tuesday, June 01, 2004 - 7:51 am
So, Spinner, are you telling me that it will be easier for me to dig out my garage because it's all a mess and nothing is neatly boxed up and stacked against the walls? LOL Vee, your point about your crafts is the reason I'm saving my sewing room until last, even though it's the first room I'd like to be able to use. I think I'll be more likely to use some of the things I might have tossed once I actually have the time and space to use them. LK, if I had to cook while I'm going through this I don't know where I'd be. I admire you for being able to do it. I'll bet you enjoy cooking, right? Oh, I hope so. I hate to think of your HAVING to cook! I do like cooking for special events, parties, dinner guests. It's the day to day grind I hate. I figure I did it for 25 years and I'm done with it now. After all, there are things that DH did for 25 years and doesn't do anymore except on special occasions . . .
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