2007
and never give it more than a frowning hour
maura @ 8:48 pm
Lately I’ve had the nearly overwhelming urge to get rid of lots of stuff from our apartment. Between the big purge I did at the beginning of this year and our last stoop sale we are running pretty lean + mean here at mauraweb! HQ. But like everything else, it could be better. Sometimes I daydream about the eXtreme minimalism that would be possible living in a studio (or one of those very small houses I love so much). And wouldn’t it be easy to keep it clean?
Part of the problem is that I recently read a bunch of posts on 43 Folders called My War on Clutter. As I read through these posts I couldn’t help thinking how much stuff we still have that we don’t use, things that could still go. Sometimes it’s stuff we can’t even see: old CDs I’ll never listen to again, unused art supplies (why do I seem to have so many boxes of crayons? From COLLEGE?!), etc.
Of course, once the things are reviewed and decisions are made, there’s the hurdle of actually getting it out of the apartment. I have used Freecycle, but you have to be home for people to get stuff, sometimes they flake, etc. What I wish is that we had a monthly Really Really Free Market (essentially a huge free swap meet) the way they do in San Francisco.
I got to 43 Folders from No Impact Man, which I am not going to link to because you can use your own google-fu to find it easily. Also because I am trying (so far unsuccessfully) to stop reading that blog. It makes me feel guilty about taking the subway and using the washing machine. When really I should be all, hey, I could be driving and using the dryer!
I have a love/hate relationship with ecoblogs. Right now they are my preferred source for interwebs distraction/procrastination surfing. But when I read about all the eco stuff others are doing I tend to get bogged down in all kinds of coulds + shoulds and then I feel bad. Which is silly, because we are doing a pretty decent job in my household of avoiding plastic, conserving energy, wasting not, etc. So yay for us, we rock!
2 comments on “and never give it more than a frowning hour”
We have the curb too, and I feel like it mostly works, but sometimes I get worried that someone won’t take what we put out and then it will go into a landfill. Plus some of this stuff is small — for us the curb seems to work best for furniture.
I do take stuff to Goodwill too, but that doesn’t work for some of the weirder things. Like the contact lens solution I get always comes with a free contact case, and now I have about 10 of them! But maybe someone wants them? I feel like everything has a value to someone, you know?
We have a great system. It’s called “the curb.” You put your stuff out on “the curb” Wednesday afternoon when people are coming home from school/work/whatever. Thursday morning is the trash/recycling pickup, and there are scavengers roaming about.
Sometimes things are gone from “the curb” within minutes. In fact I put a little end table out there right when we moved in. Someone had given it to mom and nobody liked it. It was semi-broken. I came back in the house, found a missing piece from it, and took the piece out to “the curb.” By the time I got there the table was gone daddy gone.