small spaces

day 4: things get ugly /  by Katherine Hajer

People with houses tend to have a room or area in the basement. For people in apartments, it can be as small as a drawer or as large as a storage locker. 

It's the junk pile, the place where things with no place or immediate need wind up. In my apartment, it's between the bed and the bedroom window.

The photo above shows what sorts of things I've been tossing from there:

  • paper and periodicals
  • things I thought I would use but never did, like shopping bags
  • clothes I don't want anymore (this one is hard, because some of the clothes I made — it's hard to toss that time and effort)
  • charity items, like the hat I made that's visible on the right-hand side of the photo

And yes books, always more books. Some of them will be heading to the book exchange shelves in the recycling room, but some of them will find proper homes on the newly-thinned shelves.

I was very pleased to rediscover my copy of Radio Free Albemuth again, as well as the Dutch-language Tintin books you can see beneath it. That's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick directly below — a great book for writing prompts!

I'm blogging Day 4 and 5 together because they're both devoted to clearing out The Stuff Behind the Bed. It's halfway through the reverse shopping frenzy to Yule. It'll be interesting to see if I every run out of paper to get rid of.

chic reverse shopping (day 3) /  by Katherine Hajer

A while back, and I can't remember where, I saw these rugs which were made by crocheting doilies, except using materials like nylon rope or upholstery cording. If you can find one for sale at all (as opposed to just by-the-way in some design magazine), they cost between a 120 to 200 dollars.

I went to IKEA a few months ago and spent about 35 dollars on a king-size linens set. I've been procrastinating on it for ages, but thanks to the Twelve Days of Purging I'm finally turning the sheets and pillow cases into a rug. Better finished and on my stone floor than crumpled in bedlinen form at the end of my couch. The photo above shows it just over halfway done; once it's completed I'll post about it on my DIY blog. Finally there will be a nice rug to sit on while contemplating the books on the lower bookshelves in the office.

The rug is counting as four items towards the ten-items-a-day total (two sheets plus two pillow cases). To round out the total, I found two more books to put on the book exchange shelves in the recycling room, a t-shirt with holes in it (why wasn't this thrown out already? embarrassing), and paper that needs shredding. The shredding counts for several items in itself — the mailing slips and out-of-date business cards are just a small sample. If I'd dumped all of the paper that needs shredding onto the floor for the photo, it would have been impossible to see the rug.

It's only Day 3 of the purge, but it's become pretty clear — and it was already pretty clear when I did a similar exercise last year — that paper management is the biggest deal around here. I mean, sure, I have a lot of books, but at least those are read and appreciated before taking their leave. The paper just keeps showing up. The building has a recycling bin in the mail room, so like most residents here I just toss any flyers I don't want before they even pass my threshold, but ads from companies who already do business with me are addressed and are therefore safest shredded. That winds up being a lot of paper, and it's hard to keep up with. There ought to be a way to opt out of physical spam, the way that some web sites let you choose what sorts of e-mails you receive from them.

reverse shopping blog post, part 2 /  by Katherine Hajer

Once I got going on the book purge, it just made sense to keep going... and going, and going... The scary thing about the pile of books in the photo above is that hardly any of them were "hesitation" items — it was very easy to decide they had to go. Not that I didn't enjoy reading them! But I decided to get rid of my mysteries, just because I never re-read them and rarely reference them. The only reason to keep them would be to give them to a friend who wanted to read one.

I did feel bad about getting rid of my back issues of Descant. They were the first magazine I ever had a story published in, and they just announced they're going to cease publication after over forty years (with issue 167). It's just that in an apartment, it's hard to justify having periodicals which, again, I'm not likely to re-read, however much I enjoyed them the first time around.

Despite purging all of these books (and I could probably do some more), that only means that I can now fit all the "overflow" on the shelves. I haven't actually made much new space.

Eeep.

the reverse shopping bag blog post /  by Katherine Hajer

 

You know those YouTube videos people post where they show off all the stuff they bought on their last shopping trip? My nieces love watching them, and although conspicuous consumption isn't really my cup of tea, I have to admit there's something weirdly compelling about them. I watched one with Niece the Elder where someone unwrapped about two dozen Kinder Eggs, pausing to show off what prize they got inside each one. The joy of surprise and discovery really came across.

Me, I live in a 60 square metre apartment that is always cluttered no matter what I do. Okay, mostly I read Apartment Therapy and wish I could get more organised, but last year I got rid of a lot of stuff, and this year I'm doing it again. There are ten days between today and Yule, and I've set myself a challenge to get rid of at least ten items per day.

The sad thing is, a hundred fewer things will not get me anywhere near the ultra-neat spaces featured in Apartment Therapy, but I like to tell myself that's because they hide all their stuff at their friends' apartments for the photo shoots.

I'm starting with an obvious target: like any respectable book lover, I have far too many books. Here are the ones which got collected and moved down to the book exchange in my building's recycling room today.