Tag: shipping containers

Report Card

This pitching and packing up party is just about over. I promised I would check in on the results of my big purge and moving exercise.

And I am doing this update on a Monday, instead of the Saturday when I thought I would. The truth is, I wasn’t far enough along.

This has turned into a two-phase project. Part now and the rest next Spring or Summer or sometime in the as-yet-undefined future.

Two shipping containers were emptied during this process as was a storage barn in my backyard. Boxes and boxes and boxes of paper are tucked away in a tidy storage unit. For future reference. And review. How often have I said that over the years?

Clearing out the back shed meant effects only made it as far as the back deck. I learned my stuff was sharing house with a dazzling assortment of critters. Raccoons mostly I determined upon checking the stool samples they left behind.

Sometimes I think I am just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But maybe not. The 23 yard dumpster sitting in my driveway is full to the brim and will be hauled away tomorrow to make way for a smaller dumpster. For those things I have yet to toss.

There were some sad discoveries. Beautiful Italian leather shoes ruined by dampness. I would never have worn them again anyway. Random papers and receipts congealed and stuck together. At least it was an easy decision to throw those out.

Tomorrow the “deep” cleaners arrive. I can hardly wait. These are cleaners of the “I do windows and baseboards” variety. They are a dying breed and I’m lucky to have found them.

With all this detritus leaving my life, I am both relieved and a little scared of what will replace it. Naturally we all hope there will only be good things ahead which is unrealistic and unwarranted optimism.

But among the lessons I am taking forward from this hideous sorting, tossing and packing up exercise is that I will not have to face at least half of this ever again.

It was too much to hope that I could clear out every corner of my boxed up life in one go. But I got this far and I made real progress.

Maybe real progress is enough.

Pressure Cooking

Officially day one of sorting and tossing and packing up the big hoard.

What miserable work! Not a blessed good thing to say about it except that pinhole of light I currently see at the end of the tunnel.

Or that may be a floater in my eye. I’m not sure. Google it.

It is astonishing to me how in one life you can be the very soul of dithering and indecisiveness at one time.

At another time, you’d swear I’d eaten a full bowl of Wheaties. Today I was an offloading and “get that sorry stuff out of here” machine.

I am already breathing deeper. How about that?

In another glaring confession, I currently own two shipping containers. You know the kind I mean. Long, big ugly boxy things that transport all of the cool merch from China to here in North America for all of us happy consumers to enjoy.

Ugly, yes but boy are they spacious. And dry. And weathertight.

So these two butt ugly shipping containers have served me lo, these past four or five years at a lonely storage spot in the wilds of rural Ontario.

Tomorrow they will be emptied. And moved. And hopefully, some – no make that lots – of the contents will be diverted to a charity or a landfill. That is where the contents of the dumpster will eventually end up.

This is a “check in, along the way” post. I am aiming for Saturday evening reflections when containers will have been offloaded, house scoured and downsized.

My remaining effects will have been tidily arranged and the new locker moved into. Contents of the current locker (did I mention that one?) will be transferred and all tucked away.

This business of your expectations diminishing as you get older is so true. Wheee. A single, tidy, well-organized storage locker.

This hasn’t precisely been Swedish death cleaning but it has come close. The concept of Swedish death cleaning became popular after a 2017 book was published by Margareta Magnussen. It is meant to take the burden of “going through stuff” off of your loved ones after you die.

In practical terms, this means organizing and decluttering your home to reduce the burden of sifting through dozens of objects and trying to decide what’s significant. With Swedish death cleaning, you’ll have already done that for them by only holding onto items you’ve determined to be essential. 

We’ll see if that’s how far I get this week.

Maybe. Maybe not. I’m working on it.