December 31, 2020 by Amy
The Great Clean-Out of 2020
There’s a lot to reflect on the past year, clearly, for all of us. Most people, I suspect, would focus on the effects of a pandemic, people forced to stay at home and forgo many of life’s creature comforts. Or, for a too significant chunk of the population, a loss of employment and income, sometimes loved ones, in addition to housing instability, health risks, and more. I am fortunate in that, while we did experience a financial impact through M’s company taking action to ensure most of its workforce could remain on the payroll, it was minor and didn’t hurt. Well worth knowing other employees didn’t have to worry or panic.
My reflection on the past year goes deeply inward. Yes, of course we were affected by the pandemic. We moved to working and learning from home. We stopped going out to eat, to concerts, to the zoo, or anywhere but the grocery store. We, at one point, worried about running out of toilet paper. But honestly, none of this felt truly life altering. Maybe it’s because, thanks to a brilliant architect and a patient design process years ago, we live in a house that was built exactly for our needs and in which it was easy to make small adjustments to accommodate a new pandemic lifestyle.
M’s office/project space never really functioned for its intended purpose and had become a catch-all of paperwork, bits of unfinished hobbies, and a variety of electronics and cords. We cleared it and moved the furniture out, creating a lovely space for yoga and strength training. M moved to work in his beloved man cave, setting up shop with one of the desks from his old space in front of a wall of beer steins that sparked more than a few questions on his video calls. The other desk from his old office space was repurposed into the guest room, which Zoe moved into for virtual learning on school days and which we began referring to as Zoe’s One-Room Schoolhouse, or just The Schoolhouse. We had read that older students, if possible, should work in a private space that wasn’t also where they relax or sleep. Since we weren’t expecting guests any time soon, it worked well. I moved into my home office, which is a space I created wholly for me and which I love. Except for the chair, a cheap rolling chair from IKEA that was fine for the spurts in which I used to work in the space but became the target of my hatred when pressed into full-time service.
A few weeks before lockdown, I signed up for an online decluttering course. It takes participants through the hard work of cleaning out crap week by week, tackling a different section of your living space in each session. We started small, with the car, which for me was the easiest assignment as I never leave anything in the car and any trash that accumulates gets cleaned out every time I stop for gas, a habit I began years ago. Then I moved to working on the actual house and shit got real.
I can’t remember where we started. It wasn’t the kitchen. I think the bathroom, maybe? I do remember faithfully following the course, week by week, watching the videos and reading the tips and tricks. There’s even a private Facebook page where we intrepid declutterers can gather and get inspiration or share funny stories. Compared to many of my classmates, some of whom were on their second, third, or even fourth trip through the course, I thought we were in good shape. We aren’t keepers by nature, and had deliberately designed a very small unfinished storage area in the new house.
I jumped into this project with abandon, which helped me feel better about canceling our cruise around Australia, our week on Martha’s Vineyard, a week in Cabo, and two in Florida with family. Zoe hopped on board, perhaps to drown her misery over losing her 10-day school STEAM trip to the UK and France. She began cleaning out her room with gusto and has created a wonderfully calm oasis that belies her 15 years. M was incredibly supportive while also staying out of my way, which was exactly what I needed. I emptied closets, cabinets, shelves, the pantry. The kitchen was easy, possibly because I have no emotional attachment to anything in it. Strictly utilitarian. Bathroom was easy, too. Old medicine was disposed of properly, according to guidelines I found online. I discovered we had approximately 5,742 containers of floss, mostly those little free ones you get every time you visit the dentist. (Not coincidentally, this got me into a daily flossing habit as I wanted to get rid of all the damn floss but felt guilty throwing it away. Hooray for accidental good oral hygiene.)
It was slow but steady work. The garage filled with boxes and bags of items to be donated. The recycle can was full every week. We sent very little to the landfill, which made me feel good. When the garage got too full for comfort, I’d load up the car and make a run to St. Vincent de Paul or Goodwill, depending on which was open and accepting donations (turns out everyone was taking advantage of being stuck at home and cleaning out crap they no longer need).
Then, I tackled the basement. It should really be called The Beastment. This is where I learned of my extraordinary powers of organization. It turns out that I am very, very good at organizing a bunch of shit we do not need. We had managed to cram a ton of unwanted stuff into a relatively small area. I pulled it all out. All bins and boxes were taken to the finished part of the basement where they regurgitated their contents onto every available horizontal surface, including the floor, pool table and ping pong table. It was painful to sort through. Agonizing. Much, much worse than the upstairs. I found a card from my mom when I was in college, and it gutted me. I bolted upstairs and didn’t return for days. Turns out that if I didn’t want to deal with something, downstairs it went. This was why the upstairs felt so easy. I had packed all my really intense feelings into carefully labeled bins in the basement. I grew overwhelmed and walked away. Upstairs, where I couldn’t see the piles.
Unfortunately, this left M downstairs with all the clutter. Clutter that had reached epic proportions. Every once in awhile I’d head down there, work for a couple hours, call it a day, and retreat to the oasis above. It stayed like this for months. Then August rolled around and we were called back to campus and I vacated my home office. M seized the opportunity and moved upstairs to my space. My beloved green, open desk that faces the large windows now had two giant monitors the likes of which NASA uses to coordinate manned spaceflight. The windows disappeared. There were piles of paperwork with M’s scribbles all over. He always quickly vacated when I needed the space, but I was surrounded by his stuff, none of which I liked. So of course I griped, and then he explained that he hated working downstairs now, because of the enormous mess I had left. Fair point.
This was the motivation I needed to finally finish the job. That, and M’s new standing desk and chair purchased in part by his company were arriving soon and it would kill me to have them downstairs not being used because of something I could fix.
I swung into motion, renewed with a sense of purpose: I had to reclaim my space. When driven by the proper motivation, it’s amazing how quickly one works. Within a few weekends, I had everything cleared out and down to a few small piles that I wanted M’s input on. I clearly married the right man because for 99% of it, he said, “Toss.” Into the recycle bin it went, or into bags and boxes for donation. The side of the garage filled yet again.
That brought us to our two-week vacation over the holidays. The house was looking good and I wanted to dedicate some time to writing. I went into my office, now vacated by M, and set to work. Except there’s a pile of mail to go through. And bills to pay. And that big iMac behind me just looms with its wanton obsolescence and simultaneous grip on all my digital photos. And all the photography gear crammed into every nook and cranny, most of which I haven’t touched in years. An idea began percolating. I have built up my decluttering muscles to the point where they ache if not exercised, so a new workout routine was set in motion.
First, I hatched a plan for the technology. I needed M to see if we could salvage the on-site storage system we had set up a couple of years ago. It resided on a shelf high in the storage area and had leaped off sometime last year, thanks to the zealous vibrations of our washing machine upstairs. The fall was long but swift, the gear detonating eight feet down onto concrete. Turns out computers, which is essentially what those four drives were, don’t handle that sort of impact all that well. He put forth a valiant effort but the drives could not be saved. I’m still thanking my lucky stars I didn’t wipe the iMac clean after transferring all the files over. I’d have lost all my baby pictures of Zoe.
Given that experience, I’m now wary of hard disks located in our clearly dangerous-to-technology house. That means moving to the cloud. I wanted Google. I know Google, I trust Google, I’m comfortable with Google. M, of course, ever the necessary fiscal conservative in our family, shopped around. He found a company with excellent ratings and a less expensive rate than Google, and I created an account. And then I proceeded to waste several days doing completely the wrong thing and discovering that the service he found, while an excellent place to stick files you may rarely access again, is not conducive to an active work structure. There was one night where our, um, contrary issues and competing priorities came to light in an explosive manner that was kicked off by the site in question undergoing maintenance and me losing my shit thinking everything was gone. We eventually worked through it and went to bed with a solid plan for the next day.
I couldn’t sleep, so our solid plan was implemented at 1 a.m. when I upgraded to a Google One account, killed the new account with the company that had given me a heart attack, and began transferring files to Google. I went to bed happy and secure. The next morning I logged into Google with my MacBook Air and saw that my files were steadily transferring and I could already access some of them. It’s been four days and my files still have 16 hours and change left, according to my last check. This includes one hiccup with our new router deciding to update with no warning, kicking us all off our network. Google handled it like a champ, pausing its transfer and picking right back up when we were connected again. Have I said I love Google?
When the files are finished transferring, I’ll wipe the iMac and prep for recycling, since Apple cheerfully told me that my 11-year-old computer is “ready to be recycled!” Then the MacBook Air, now five years old, will be sold back to Apple in exchange for a new MacBook Pro. We bought the Air when the iMac was still functional to process images, so the Air is very scaled down and was intended only for writing. Good idea at the time, but now leaves me in the precarious position of having two outdated pieces of equipment, neither of which serves my current needs. I am irrationally excited about having one, new computer to replace two old computers.
Having made this decision, I went into full-on tech analysis. The Nikon D750 that quickened my pulse a few years ago sat largely unused in my office, along with various photography detritus that I’ve accumulated over the years. The full-frame was really what spelled the death knell for the iMac, as the D750’s super large file sizes quickly overwhelmed the processor. Editing photos ground to a halt, which pretty much meant that shooting anything on the D750 was pointless. I had my iPhone camera, though, which is actually pretty good and gets better with every iteration. Since I have it with me always, it naturally became my camera of choice. Why was I still sitting on the Nikon?
Because a part of me wonders if I’m a “real photographer” without “real gear.” Even if it’s gear I never use. That part of me was clobbered over the head by my decluttered brain, which likes to scream, “Get rid of it if you don’t use it!” My sister-in-law has traded gear with Adorama in New York quite a bit, and I knew it had an outstanding reputation. I got in touch with them, spoke with a wonderfully friendly native New Yorker named Frank who gave me a good quote on the D750 and the main lens I used on it, along with explaining how their very easy process works. As we were hanging up, he mentioned, “Oh, if you have anything else you want to throw in there, I’ll add ‘extra weight’ to the shipping label.” Music to my ears. A day later I had to email him back with a long list of items I was sending and a request for a second label, as it was too much to fit in one box. I dumped years worth of gear collection in one fell swoop, and man, it feels great to be unburdened by this stuff that just sat around unused.
This week, we finished off our entire decluttering process. M hung six pictures (five in my office) that have been stacked around, waiting patiently. The photography gear went to UPS, destined for Adorama in New York. An ancient computer, monitor and printer, none of which we’ve touched in over a decade, went to FedEx, to be shipped to Apple’s preferred computer recycler. A ton of broken down boxes, including from our large televisions, went to a mixed-stream recycling dumpster. The styrofoam from those boxes went to a local foam manufacturing company that collects it for recycling. We made a final run to Goodwill. As soon as the iMac finishes uploading its files to Google, that will be wiped and packed up for recycling, and the Air will be traded in.
We are a lot lighter than we used to be. I figure that we own less now than when we moved into this house almost eight years ago. M backs me up on that, and since he is a lot better at estimating, I’m going with it.
Now I have no excuse to not write. There is literally nothing left for me to work on around the house. It has taken me hours to write this, because I keep getting up and wandering around the house, looking for something to clean, straighten, or declutter. This has become my natural state. It may take some time to get used to it being complete, to not feeling as though there’s something left to do, to work on. It’s always a journey, isn’t it?
Here’s my helpful list of ways you can get rid of your unwanted crap in an environmentally-friendly manner. Some of these places are St. Louis-specific but you may get an idea of how to find a local place if you’re not here in the bi-state area.
Computers, Phones, Monitors, Printers, Etc.:
Hit up https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in to turn in old computers. I started with an ancient G5 tower that I’ve hung on to since I upgraded to the iMac 11 years ago. (No, I don’t have an excuse for hanging on to what is now probably a 20-year-old computer. But let’s focus on the positive that I finally let it go, and in an environmentally-responsible manner.) They congratulated me that my computer was ready for recycling and emailed me a FedEx shipping label. It was in its original box so all we had to do was tape it up and tape the label on. So then I checked on the monitor that had gone with it. Yep, they’ll take that. Then I tried the old Epson 2200 photo printer. Sure, why not? Shipping labels for all. They don’t seem to care whether your gear is Apple or not.
Electronics:
For anything not computer-related (which for us meant a VCR, a transistor radio that no longer worked, an old film camera body, seven old Dell laptop chargers, some other crap, and about a million miles of wires), hit MRC Electronics Recycling. They have a location in South County but that’s currently closed due to covid. We took a nice drive out to Imperial and ditched three large bins of electronics. You fill up your trunk, drive out, back up to a garage door, and let someone in the office know you’re there. They will, in masks of course, open the door and help you offload. Check their website or call first to be sure they’re open as there isn’t a place to leave your items if no one is there.
Large Cardboard Boxes:
Too many boxes to fit in your curbside recycle bin? Or large boxes like from TVs that won’t fit? Kirkwood has the Francis Scheidegger Recycling Depository, or you can usually find a large mixed-stream recycling dumpster in the parking lots of churches and schools. A local church near us is our go-to on this. Please do us all a favor, though, and break down your boxes before throwing them in. It’s disappointing to show up with a car full of cardboard only to find someone has thrown in a giant box that fills the dumpster completely, allowing no one else room to recycle.
Styrofoam:
Our televisions were well-packed in styrofoam, which we appreciated when we bought them, but then we were stuck with giant pieces of styrofoam that I was loath to send to a landfill. That shit takes way too long to break down. Not cool. I poked around and found that Foam Products Corporation in Maryland Heights takes clean styrofoam for recycling. Pull around the side of their building at any time and you’ll see some large, plastic-sided bins. Just don’t throw in used food containers or anything medical.
Donations:
Saint Vincent de Paul and Goodwill are both great options for ditching your unwanted stuff that someone else will treasure. From clothing and shoes (in good condition, of course) to home goods, they’ll take it and give you a nifty receipt you can use to write off your donations on your taxes. Call or check their website before going, as their hours have shifted due to the pandemic and sometimes they aren’t accepting donations due to a shortage of help with sorting. If you have large furniture, there are organizations (here in STL there are veterans organizations and Salvation Army) that will come and pick it up at your house. You can always, of course, try your hand at selling things online through Facebook Marketplace or Craig’s List, but we found that experience to be hit-or-miss at best, and frustrating and a waste of time at worst.
Batteries, Paint, Pesticides, Fuel, Etc.:
Did you know you can recycle your used (non-rechargeable) batteries? Not only can you, you should! Those things are horrifically bad for the environment. This goes for old paint, pesticides, gasoline, motor oil, and antifreeze, among other things. Nasty stuff that you don’t want laying around your house but also don’t want seeping into the water table. Great news! Check out St. Louis Household Hazardous Waste and find a place to safely dispose of these things. Appointments are necessary, and you don’t even have to get out of your car. Just pop the trunk and they’ll remove the stuff.
Old Medicine:
When was the last time you cleaned out your medicine cabinet? Do you have mercurochrome from the 70s in there? Painkillers from that tooth extraction back in the 90s? Don’t throw it down the sink or stick it in your garbage. Keep everything in their original containers and see if your local police station accepts them. Many do (ours does) and they know what to do with them. Local hospitals may also accept, and many communities regularly hold expired medicine collection drives.
I hope this helps. Happy decluttering!
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