For my own sanity, my current organizational goals must focus on the upstairs. If I even start thinking about our basement, I’ll become to overwhelmed to do anything.

We finished cleaning out the MIL’s apartment on Saturday. Besides three different trips to Goodwill, and two trips to Value Village that included two large bags of stuffed animals, 140 VHS tapes, and some furniture, we have added a significant number of items to our basement. Some things, like the cedar chest and the doll that C’s grandmother made to look like him when he was born, will be with us forever, and hopefully something we can hand down to our children. Other items, like the boxes and boxes of photographs will be scanned and then distributed to other family members.

And still other things will just live in my basement until C can bear to part with them. (And that’s a conscious choice of words. His mother collected bears, and dolphins, and orcas.) It is those things that I have to allow myself to let go of emotionally. I know they will never be used in decorating our home, so they will remain in our basement until C can let go of them physically.

And I have to be honest, some things that we’ve kept are my fault- the two intarsia pieces that my step-father made for her will likely never be hung in our house either, but my step-father has also passed, and I have very little of his work.

And then there’s the combo DVD/VDR player. We have to keep that. I know, I said we got rid of 140 VHS tapes, but we kept the Star Trek box set (actually mine) and a set of the original Star Wars trilogy. (I think we probably have at least one other box set of that, and two box sets of the digitally re-mastered versions from before we were a couple.) And, being the geeks we are, we believe it imperative that we one day be able to show our child/children the original movies, you know, where HAN SHOOTS FIRST. This is not optional.

There are items of mine down there that I need to be responsible for getting rid of- like collectible Avon perfume bottles. Sadly, they go for very little on eBay. I may, though, be able to get around $40 for my Rainbow Brite doll…

This bear will never live upstairs, My dogs would destroy it.

So, focusing on the upstairs. I’ve had a firm goal of when I move something, I’m moving it to where it is actually going to go, instead of just getting it out of the way. That way, I move things once, instead of three or four times.

We have made some progress. We have shredded a ton of paperwork we don’t need anymore. Today, we moved the printer from the office/spare room/future child’s room into our room. That means that we’ll be able to get rid of the desktop in there altogether- including a CRT monitor. I have to remind myself that small steps are still steps, and any forward progress is good.