Spring Cleaning

[cimorene]

We don't typically do a Big Clean in the spring, but this year I started feeling the urge then. At the time I was stressed with studying Finnish, and waxjism was so depressed she barely ate/slept/moved and she had to get a long-term sickleave from office work school and a drastic change of medication. It took her about two months of even MORE sickness to taper off of it, during which I was too anxious/depressed to do much of anything besides try to make sure she was eating.

So by the time she started to feel better, the need for cleaning had been fomenting for months and my relief/zeal combined with her sudden rise to awareness/energy to move her body around and we embarked upon simultaneously deep cleaning everything, reorganizing everything, and throwing away as much stuff as possible.

We:

• moved all the furniture in the livingroom and reorganized and shifted the contents of the 5 livingroom bookcases


• replaced the kitty gym with this bookshelf hack


• threw away the hard cases to all our DVDs, transferred them to CD wallets inside boxes, made a database of them on the computer


• sewed covers for the two footcubes that have been unclothed for a few years (me)


• cleaned out all the closets, shelves, drawers and other storage things, sorting, throwing things out and reorganizing


• are in the process of doing all the laundry/washing all the things

But we still haven't finished cleaning and organizing the kitchen (we can only hope that we will be able to find space to put everything away) and we still have a bunch of heavy and/or unwieldy trash objects that we don't want to carry down four storeys to the dumpsters.

We concluded that we have lived here for way too long. And it was kind of overdue for a cosmetic makeover before we arrived.

Comments

[niqaeli]

I've been cheered, reading your cleaning adventures, as my own household as been in the midst of much the same. We swapped out our craft room and library for space concerns and have been working on ripping and cataloguing all the music CDs, as well as cataloging the library.

We have way too many books, has been my conclusion. (We got RID of twenty boxes! We STILL have way too many books.)

[cimorene]

Because I moved here to Finland, I contributed way less books to our library than I otherwise would have. I brought a fair number in my suitcases and my parents have spent a LOT of money mailing me boxes of them, but the cost of shipping books is such that in many cases it's cheaper to buy new ones.

We did actually cull our bookshelves and get about a garbage bag's worth to throw away, though. Our book collection is kind of tiny now. It's like a hundredth my parents'... I guess that's one plus to us having lived ten years in a small flat instead of buying a house early like they did! When they retire they plan to move halfway across the country and they're going to have a moving NIGHTMARE.

[niqaeli]

Yeah, I can see how international moves would make that difficult.

I've literally never lived in a house without a library. Well, I guess there was the couple years I lived by myself, but I was still in the same town as my parents and therefore had access to my Dad's library still. And even with that, I still had a small collection of my own to move when I moved in with my spouse... which, yeah, the household had an extant library.

And these days we have four adult bibliovores with overlapping but not identical interests in books. So, uh. Yeah.

We've gotten quite a LOT of trade credit with the local used bookstores out of the culling, at any rate.

[cimorene]

We only have a tiny carrier bag of Finnish books to take a to a local used bookshop and a slightly larger one of Swedish books to take to a nearby town that's majority Swedish-speaking (there are no second-hand Swedish bookshops locally). And I don't think there's anywhere to take the English books that make up the majority of what we want to get rid of, except a local book café that has a single milkcrate devoted to free bookswapping...

[niqaeli]

So basically what I am getting is that it's good that I'm not moving to Finland any time soon, because of the books ALONE. >_>

[bluesbell]

The main library has a small shelf for redistributing your unwanted books.