Junk

It was time. We needed to start cleaning out the spare bedroom. I had big plans for putting in a bed or futon of some sort so people visiting us would have a place to sleep. Instead we have used it as a room for sick cats to sleep, a place to store books and musical instruments and as a sort of office for C. There's a file cabinet,a bookshelf piled with books,a plastic bag filled with Beanie Babies, a large cardboard box filled with books,catalogs and other stuff and a wicker hamper filled with stuffed animals. There's also three guitars and my viola. There are magazines and papers stacked on the floor and on the built in desk. I forgot to mention the cat tree in the corner.
We keep the door shut most of the time. It's not a pretty sight.
I was starting to get tired or the disorganization. I would go in there to try to find a book and spend 20 minutes digging around the piles. I was tired of having to walk around things and hoping I wouldn't trip over something and break my ankle.
The last straw was when I brought the viola up from the basement. I don't know why we put it there. A basement is usually not the best place to store a wooden instrument. I managed to clear off a small space for the viola by moving things around. It was clear that more needed to be done. I am hoping to acquire a Celtic lap harp in the next few weeks and would need a place to keep it. We need a place to store our growing stock of instruments in such a way as to make them easy to find when needed. It would also be a good idea to have a place to practice besides the living room.
C and I had been talking about making the room into a music room for several weeks. We could move the file cabinet into the computer room. It was a better place for it anyway. Clearing out the cardboard box would also open up quite a bit of space. There would be enough room to store the instruments properly and have a chair and stand for practice. We needed to take the first step. I needed to clean out the file cabinet.
The file cabinet had been with me since my first apartment. I put important papers in it. Somewhere along the line my mother had helped me to file my papers. I hadn't really looked into it in several years.
I started with the bottom drawer thinking it would be easier. I pulled out piles of papers,books and notebooks. I started to go through them. I found calculus problems from college, grade sheets from my first college chemistry class and a few journals. I found a stack of letters that I had written as an intern living in Grand Rapids that my parents had returned to me. I found some jokes that I'd saved and five notebooks with many blank pages. There were pictures and poems that I'd written. I found open enrollment information for a pharmacy that I worked at over 5 years ago.
I can't believe I saved some of this stuff,let alone moved it two or three times. There were banking papers and mortgage papers from ten years ago. There were books from insurance plans I no longer carried. I found the letter offering me the job that I have now. (I kept that one.)
I sorted the paper into two piles. One pile was things that need to be shredded. Another pile was paper to recycle. The third pile was garbage. Colby and Scamp moved between the piles giving everything a careful sniff.
C saw what I was doing and joined in. He went through all his papers too. I called a halt at the end of the afternoon. There were four bags of paper to take for shredding, two garbage bags of paper to recycle and the garbage can was full. I filed the papers we decided to keep and put them back in the cabinet. It should be light enough to move now.
It felt good to get rid of that stuff. Doing it made room for things we had been keeping elsewhere so there is a little less clutter. It didn't change the look of the room, but I felt that we had made progress anyway.
Next item-the cardboard box........