declutterbug

Last night I went back down to my room for Round II of sorting. I got my butt kicked by the piles o' paper. Eventually, I just stacked it all back up and declared it done for now.

Next, I put 4 banker boxes in the place my file cabinet was going to go. Ki and I were supposed to relocate said cabinet of wonderful organizingness to my house a few months ago, but that didn't happen. I'd "cleared" space in anticipation. This really means I moved several boxes from the place the cabinet will live to in front of the TV cabinet, and what that really means is that they stuck out well into the MIDDLE OF THE FLOOR.

The contents of the boxes I moved TO THE MIDDLE OF THE FLOOR were going IN the cabinet. It seemed like a good idea at the time: move boxes, put in file cabinet, empty boxes into file cabinet, and VOILA. But two months later, well, it wasn't particularly convenient to have a pile of banker boxes on my floor. It would have been okay if it was just them, but, alas, with all the other "no place to put it" stuff on the floor, things were mucho crampo.

The room isn't in great shape by any stretch of the imagination, but it's somewhat better. I just don't have the ROOM for systems. Things need to be stacked, in rows, thereby blocking access to other things. Think storage unit. And if you think it's all crap I don't really need, well, you may be right about the old filing and such. I'm going through that, pulling out things like tax documents and tossing old papers I no longer need. I wasn't the one to pack those boxes--I was merely informed to come get them. Ki just dumped it all in. Some of the folders are intact, but overall there's no system. That means whatever logical order I had over at 517 is completely destroyed. Hence, the paper-by-paper sort through.

But the other stuff? It's my bills and receipts from this year. It's my dance teaching materials. It's stuff I need to get to regularly and easily. And it's piled up. I find when things aren't accessible (e.g. I have to get into the third box down, second row back,) I don't put things away properly afterwards because I know I'll just need to pull everything apart again in two days. It's frustrating.

If I were reading this, I'm sure I'd think something like "wellllll, if you leave that box out, and put another one you don't use much in the back, things will be easier!" Alas, the ratio of "need to get to it" and "don't need to get to it" is like 8:1. So for every box I may need once a month (and therefore don't mind having tucked away or in storage), there are several others I need pretty frequently.

I'm trying to figure out what to do about this...