Space Bags: Fact or Fantasy?

By now most of you have seen or heard of those plastic storage bags known as Space Bags, or some equivalent.  While they aren't pretty (and neither will you stuff be once it's stored in one), they do work and they're pretty easy to handle.  My mother put a bunch of pillows and blankets in some for me a couple years ago, and gave me extra bags to use just in case.  Last week I put a king-size down comforter in one, and the results were impressive:

Madonna CD added for scale purposes!

 It really is as simple as enclosing it in the bag and using a vacuum hose to slurp out all the air thru the little round door in the side.  I didn't think my vacuum cleaner would do a good job because the nozzle is wider than average but it all went to plan.  The hard part was making sure the zip lock at the opening was securely fastened all the way. 

This kind of bag is kind of nice to store away things in a pile on a shelf.  The bag shown here hasn't taken on any extra air, and neither have the ones my mom sorted out for me.

Don't use it to store your kid, dummy!

What's behind the mask

Things have come a long way and I'm willing to give myself credit, but there's always another mountain to climb.  Here is a picture of that mountain.  The photos I had taken a few days ago concealed what's going on on the far wall of the room: all these books and magazines.  I think I'm going to get radical with this area.  I'm not going to reveal what I mean yet, but I promise I won't set any fires.

Someday, it would be nice to have a roommate.  I'm not ready for one, but even if I was he or she couldn't move in.  There's too much upstairs that might have to come down here, and there's not enough room still.

While cleaning tonight though, I cleaned up an item I found on the street a long time ago that should help me sort a few treasures:

It was filthy, but now it's on a shelf holding art supplies.  I came up with a new tip: If you can fit a container on a shelf that will hold things that you normally put in a unit that sits on the floor, go with the shelf thingy.  Freeing floor space will free your mind.  Every time I get something off the floor for good I feel ten times better.

I'm having another brainwave about having a garage sale or combining efforts with my mom in a couple weeks and bringing things up to Olympia to sell in her sale.  She has a better garage.  But, I would pay in time and gas traveling up to Oly, and I'd have to hold onto the things for longer.  Those Freakonomics guys should do a study on all the reasoning I am putting into where and when I disperse my possessions.

Getting to be a little much

I'm doing a few clean-y sort-y things tonight so that I can get them out of the way before I spend the day doing fun comic-y things tomorrow.  I repaired a pine storage shelf, the kind you can take apart that usually comes in a kit, which I had repeatedly rammed with my car in the garage until the slats started to splinter.  It was uncharacteristically lazy of me to leave it in the garage in the first place, and even worse when I realized that it was kind of in the way of the car.  I was waiting until there was more room elsewhere to move it, now I spent a bunch of time gluing and weighting down and such.  This is was a good lesson to learn.  Now it's almost as good as new. 

I've been going through those little white storage boxes on the shelves and figuring out which contents to keep.  As I said in a much earlier post, this is a process.  I want to keep a lot of my craft supplies, but I don't need quite so many of the same thing, say, a whole handful of chopsticks.  I'm glad that different people staff the donation stations at SCRAP because I think they must wonder where I'm coming from with all of these random office and art supplies.  I unearth something new every day.

Now I've decided to streamline the shelves in the basement, so I'm sticking to the white plastic boxes.  I'm addicted to containers, but too many sizes and colors add to the messy look.

I'm questioning even more my attachment to things as I handle them.

Here's a little tip: the shoebox size containers I have are great for photo storage!  I can't believe I havdn't thought of it before.  For years I had an orange and green box from Target that was made to hold pics, but I decided to retire it.  Orange and green?  What was I thinking?  I'm proud to be Irish American but the colors of the Irish Republican flag offend my eyes when it comes to decorating.

It's ok, I'm authorized

I forgot that I did this organizing/moving/space planning thing for a living at one time.  It's been a long time since I had a long term, full time job.  For a lot of reasons, things that happened less than two years ago seem more like a decade in the past.  Back in 2006, I worked for a company that contracted with Intel to move their office spaces and set up new ones.  I'd have to get these big groups of people to pack up their cubicles and I'd get a moving crew to take all their stuff to another place in their building.  Sometimes they'd move to a whole other building or campus.  That seems like a big job.  Then why does my house seem like such a big deal?  Wait, wait, I already know the answer to this. 

A year and a half ago I also worked for a company that also built offices, but furniture and fixtures from scratch.  I have to remind myself that I'm a pro!

I picked up a lot of crap from my bedroom floor this morning, it's been terrible for a long time.  I'm a DJ so I keep my CD library in there, and week after week I had been putting off shelving the CDs in order.  So, I did it today.  This whole straightening business is showing me what a perfectionist I am.  I was concentrating so hard on it that I missed a big stack of random papers that were sitting on the floor and spilling in a heap off a shelf. 

I did a lot of cleanup this evening tonite in the basement after visiting with some friends.  Sometimes I get started and without meaning to I just keep going and going until I don't see anything else I can take care of in that space of time.  In this picture that I just took, you can compare a section of my work with just the previous blog entry:

I figured out something else about myself that kind of bothers me on a couple levels: I want my containers to match.  Remember the one that had a purple lid?  I had to take that off the shelf and replace it.  I don't know what I'll do with it yet.  Uniformity of some things can help make a messy sight look a little better.  It seems like a form of snobbery to need that but if it makes me feel a little better then I'm just going to go with it.

I've been doing pretty well, as far as managing my depression.  I'm just putting as much as I can into my day to keep busy and checking things off my list.  Many years ago I found that even anticipating those feelings, or considering them in any way, made me anxious.  I didn't know how to deal with them, but after some therapy and trying different things I can head off the worst of it before it happens.  Most of the time.  I also have great friends that help me all the time, I have the best friends ever.

Limits of Control

I took a picture of some storage shelves downstairs because they need work, obviously, but it brought to mind some comments I wanted to make about my and other people's cleanup habits.  I noticed that some people buy a lot of containers so they can just stack everything they have.  I'm trying to get to the point where I need fewer containers.  I already have a lot of my buying under control.  There used to be a time when my favorite place to look in a thrift store was the shelves where all the little ceramic figurines sit.  I wanted to have loads for my curio shelves on the wall, and pretty soon I had to put them in those storage containers you see above.  I still have a lot but I try to get a couple a year instead of a handful every few days!

Not much progress has been made since my last entry.  I forgot that when you move the big things, like furniture, you have to find new places to stack the little things.  So now I have that little problem.  Not a terrible thing, but I think I know a way to take care of it for the time being.  I'm going to have to make use of some of those cardboard boxes I showed you before. 

I feel like I shouldn't even be writing here today.  My thoughts have been with my friends on the east coast all day.  I just wanted to make myself do something just a little bit constructive that I have some control over.