The Year Of Tidying Up

It crossed my mind some weeks ago that, with my grand tidy-up now into its fourth great month and counting, there is still so much more to do. I wondered if 2007 might not be "The Year Of Tidying Up", in that it might take me the whole year to get it all done.

It could be worse than that - but I hope not.

A bit later I realised that maybe it might not be quite that bad. After all, there's not too many rooms that need my attention - the bathroom is in pretty good order, and the kitchen isn't in such bad shape either. The problem areas are really things like cupboards, bedrooms, front rooms, and the hallway which has been such an easy place to stack boxes "just until I get tidy".

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. It's still some way away, but I'm getting there, piece by piece. Tidying is pretty much the only thing in my life right now, but progress is slow, and this week entirely non-existent because I have been laid up with something mid-way between a cold and the full-on flu.

Tonight I am feeling slightly more human again, and as the easter weekend awaits I am hopeful that I will be able to conduct still more tidying. I have my eye on a tea chest underneath my old computer desk, which I had not been able to (easily) reach for some years. I'm pretty sure there can't be anything too important in it, so perhaps if I can break it out and have a look through it, I will find more opportunities to be ruthless and dispose of some more long-hoarded junk.

I'm making small amounts of space by judicious re-packing of storage boxes, and this evening I brought four boxes of "stuff for eBay" down to three (helped by having sold some of it), and I was also able to rationalise three boxes of used jiffy bags and bubble wrap down to just two. This has freed two boxes which I can use to store more things in, more neatly, freeing still more space to enable me to reach those previously-buried places where junk and rubbish is hiding.

Actually "junk and rubbish" is a bit harsh. None of the things I have are junk or rubbish - but with my new spirit of ruthlessness and tidiness and "can't possibly live like this any more"-ness, they are things which I don't want quite as much as I once did.

I'll doubtless be unloading more and more of the salvagable stuff onto eBay - a recent impromptu listing of about 110 CDs and books and DVDs actually ended up with me shifting about 35 of them (and making £170 in the process) and that's not bad if I do say so myself. Of course small things are easy to sell, and easy to post. It's the big things like huge old computers that are tricky. You don't see may Amstrad PC1512s on eBay (perhaps because they're nearly 20 years old now) and even when you do, nobody seems to want them. I have three of the things. I fear that I will have to be my most ruthless yet and actually throw them away. I need some time to build up to that.

I can't help but worry how astonishingly boring it must be for anyone actually reading this blog, how it seems that the minutae of tidying up is the only thing I talk about now - over and over, again and again - but hopefully once the whole agonising process is complete, I'll be able to think about more interesting matters.

Let's just hope it doesn't take me much longer.. :-)