I previously mentioned my occasional frustration with never-ending to do lists. One element that appears and disappears from our lists regularly without ever really getting done: unpack boxes.
Irene and I have always struggled with unpacking. There were unpacked boxes from our move to the coast when we moved out of our house in Cloverdale. Some of those boxes came with us to Castlegar, and have been joined by another twenty or so. That means we have unpacked boxes that are twenty five years old now.
What prevents the cleansing of these ancient vaults of questionable value from our dankest dungeons? I really wish I knew the answer to that.
Mostly it is forgotten memories
I opened every box we had left in Cloverdale when we were moving to Castlegar and asked whether we could get rid of what it held. The boxes had, after all, sat largely undisturbed for 20 years already at that point. They were stuffed into a crawlspace in the eaves over our garage where getting at them was almost painful. I got rid of the majority of the boxes, but what was left….well, those boxes contained … Important Things™.
Things like painting drop cloths and associated equipment for painting a room. Or books from decades past. Similarly, there were boxes of stuffed toys from Irene’s childhood, and a few old computer bits from the 1980s in my collection.
I am fairly aggressive about disposing things, and that is fine with my own stuff. Those “few old computer bits from the 1980s” are down from probably a thousand pounds of stuff including complete monthly issue collections of a half dozen early computer magazines. I keep a handful of items out of each box, and can usually convert four or five Rubbermaid tubs into a single one. Irene struggles with this same task, looking for new owners, places to donate things, and so on- ultimately never actually getting rid of anything.
I’ve tried to help Irene, but mostly we just make each other mad. I want her to more aggressively throw things out: just put them in the garbage and be done with them. This never works for her, and the more I push the harder she pushes back. And I’m not allowed to empty her boxes for her. I get this, but it means zero progress is made.
The current state of things
I have about six Rubbermaid totes in my den that require compression. And there are another 20 or so additional Rubbermaid totes plus about the same number of cardboard boxes in the main house. Our basement is filled with the things. We made some progress during the first year after we moved to the Kootenays, but then Irene’s Mom passed and that’s where the cardboard boxes came from.
My feeling is that we should be able to get our total down to about 10-15 Rubbermaid totes: five or six each for Irene and I. I really want to get there, but it is a dysfunctional process. I hold out hope that Irene and I will find a common method that allows us to dispose of things more quickly, but we haven’t found it yet.
I knock down a couple of boxes occasionally, boxes that reside in my den for the most part. But I keep walking into the basement and seeing all the space down there, a space that could be a games room, occupied by boxes of miscellany. The basement is where I really wanted our jigsaw puzzling ‘zone’ but it ended up in my den instead mostly because of all those darn boxes.
It just frustrates me to no end. No end- just like the boxes themselves.
