I read a book once where the main baddie was called The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles. It was a good book and the name stuck with me. We could currently do with a Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles because every way we look there seems to be an insurmountable obstacle.
Yesterday I took a car load of crud to the dump and was there for about an hour and a half queuing, dropping large pieces of chipboard in to skips and individually flatpacking about 40 8 and 16bit computer game cardboard boxes, removing the plastic inserts, and flinging them into a cardboard recycling skip.
It was a large car load too. I now have a company car, a Honda Civic Tourer, which is a posh way of saying estate. With the seats flat, like they were yesterday, it has a boot capacity of over 600 litres. I still had stuff in the passenger foot well.
After that we filled the boot with several hundred (probably somewhere between three and four at a guess) books and drove them round to the Oxfam Bookshop. The staff looked a little shell-shocked as we did about 8 trips to bring them all in.
Next up was six bin bags full of clothes to be recycled. I got rid of some that I have pictures of me wearing on our honeymoon. We were married in 2004. I did find some nice newer stuff that I had forgotten I owned, which was good. Basically I’ve been wearing the same 4 t-shirts on rotation for about a year as anything else requires me to have my section of the wardrobe out in it’s entirety because it’s rammed past capacity with clothes. There is still room for improvement though. I still have 5 pairs of shorts and ten jumpers, which seems a little excessive.
So all this stuff removed, a car full of junk, 3-400 books, 6 bin bags of clothes, it’s transformed our house right?
Nope. While we have almost cleared one bookcase, we still have about 3 ft of books on it and most of the four other bookcases are double stacked. We could easily fill it over again and still not completely un-double stack everything. The garden does look a bit tidier as the horrible plastic toy car has gone but that’s about it.
I keep telling myself it must have made a difference because I can see physically the amount of stuff we’ve removed but it really doesn’t look much different. I suppose the only way forwards is to do it again. And again. And again, until we’ve got next to nothing but space.