Reorganizing Life's Accumulations

Since my retirement in the late summer of 2008, it seems as though one of my ongoing projects has been the organization – and subsequent reorganization – of various parts of the house: the linen closet, the two “guest bedroom” closets, the utility room cabinets and closet, the side hallway Techline installation, the garage shelves and cupboard, and the two desk areas (computer and rolltop) in the family room.

Can’t I get it right the first time? I’ve asked myself repeatedly.

Of course, everything in a particular area would stay in perfect order only if it was designated as permanently off limits. But how practical is that? Not at all.

Every time I go through this exercise, I have the opportunity to reconsider the need to keep certain items. Yesterday while putzing around in the garage – a favorite location the past week – I moved a large, domed-topped chafing dish from the top of a tall shelving unit to the center of the old kitchen counter we installed against the west wall of the garage interior. With this shift, I freed up some valuable space for three large plastic storage boxes. One of them contains four “week-at-a-glance” appointment books from 2002 through 2005, in which I had accumulated receipts, lists, and other odds and ends in a unique method of filing. (Which I abandoned in 2006.)


Do I really need this stuff? I asked myself. I never look at it.

Except when the mood to reorganize strikes.

Some of the appointment books contain journal summaries of the day’s activities, so they do retain some value – at least until I transcribe these notes.

A second container holds five or six scrapbooks – sketchbooks, actually – the pages of which are filled with clippings from the Warren Times-Observer, to which I have subscribed by mail since the late 1990s, even continuing to do so after the newspaper made its news content available online. Now I add articles of interest to a blog that I created in 2008, Retiring Guy’s Roots.

Here’s an example.

I won’t be able to dispose of the content of this box until I scan each page of the six sketchbooks. Definitely a “back-burner” project.

The third box contains a ten-year run of the Rand McNally Road Atlas, the oversized paperback edition, into which I have scotch-taped newspaper articles (mostly from The New York Times) that focus on specific cities and states. (Chicago: “A City’s Once-Lowly Bungalows Rise to Beloved Status”; “Deep in Elk Country, Pennsylvania”; Frisco, Texas: “In Exurbs, Life Framed By Hours Spent in the Car”.) Another of my “furniture-less” filing projects. Since I moved this project online – Retiring Guy’s File Drawer – my interest has waned, at least based on the number of posts I’ve made. 65 in 2008. 23 in 2009. 6 in 2010. None in 2011. It seems silly now to keep up this blog, one of seventeen I manage (with varying degrees of frequency and interest), when I can access archived articles from The New York Times without having to create my own collection. I don’t want to spend the entire day tethered to a computer. I have other things to do. Like reorganizing all the stuff I’ve accumulated in my life!