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Pixelante
Mar 16, 2006

You people will by God act like a team, or at least like people who know each other, or I'll incinerate the bunch of you here and now.
I inherited a house full of crap and just about lost my mind trying to deal, until I separated the task of item "triage," from item moving. Yeah, it's cool if you can do the hoarder-show thing where everything goes into piles on your lawn but unless you've got a team of people with you, it's not going to work. My method involved a lot of hefty plastic bins that had good handles and could stack (these are the best I've found) and several colours of tape.

When it comes to quality clothes/books/whatever, allow yourself a bin for keepers--but only that bin. If you put something in, and the lid won't close, take something out. Can't decide? Decide later, but you still only get one bin. Sometimes it's useful to do that in piles, rather than one-at-a-time. Over the next year, most of what went in that bin ended up getting donated, I just needed to get out of crisis-mode before getting realistic about things my mother had loved.

I ended up hiring a professional organiser and her team to do the basement. It saved me, but it was a little hard to watch things happen so fast. I'm not a hoarder, but I got a glimpse of how they probably feel. It was like running downhill and occasionally losing my balance a bit. Every day, I made myself acknowledge that mistakes were going to get made, but that was a worthwhile price for getting the drat thing done in two weeks instead of a year.

And for the rest, I'm just gonna quote my advice from another thread:

quote:

It is really, really hard to get rid of books--physically, emotionally, and mentally--so here's some practical advice:

Start sorting on a shelf-by-shelf basis, not a box-by-box basis. If you start with boxes, you'll hurt your back, have dust allergy attacks, and get overwhelmed by adding underfoot clutter to what's in front of you. I ended up with a sinus infection that took two rounds of antibiotics to clear. (The black mould didn't help.)

Get coloured tape. I used "Duck" tape from the craft store. It was nice having rolls that were big enough to wear like bracelets so I didn't lose them in the process.

Find a shelf that's all things you want to get rid of, and put a stripe of red (or whatever) tape across it. If there are a couple things you want to keep, move them to another shelf, and put a stripe of green across it. Work your way along by categorizing each shelf, shifting things into Red or Green shelves as you go. I added Blue for things my brother wanted to keep, and had him move the stuff he wanted to those designated shelves.

You can make a lot of progress rather quickly that way, and if you change your mind about something, you don't need to rummage in boxes to find it again. Essentially, you're separating the task of deciding from the task of packing. Once all the shelves are clearly toss or keep, you can bring in boxes. I had to hire help with the house, and the colour coding made it easy to step back and let them handle it.

I also used that code with the rest of the house--furniture, decorations, closets. Red went out (one way or another, depending on how easy it was to donate), Green was shipped to my apartment, Blue was shipped to my brother's.

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