For the last few weeks I have been trying to organise my home, and in particular the many papers – everything from hugely portentous to utterly pointless – piled up in it. But to derandomise and thin out the paper, I need space, and I have had no space. I also hope to be doing more entertaining in the months to come. So, where to find space?
Space is always achievable if you try hard enough, and I have now, at last, identified a spacially significant category of object which I will henceforth be doing without. Cardboard boxes.
Amd that’s just the ones I have already found. There are more, I know it.
Whenever a New Electronic Thing enters my home, as Things often do in these times of ever more miraculous and less expensive Things, I have felt the need to preserve the box in which the Thing came. I have done this in case I – or merely it – ever needed to move. Also, these boxes may come in useful to accommodate other things.
But Things can be moved without being in their original boxes, and actually, they usually are. Frequently to the dump, as will be the case with that huge television you can also see in the picture, now broken and worthless. Also departing in the same rubbish vehicle, my photocopier, and a chair the bits of which also appear in the photo above.
But it’s the boxes that really take up the space, which is why boxes always get chucked out eventually. The boxes are most unlikely ever to be as useful to me as the space they now occupy.
If, at some future moment, I need a big box, I will get get one, perhaps by buying one.
So now, there will be a great cull of boxes, even of boxes which contained Things purchased quite recently. This involves chopping and tearing them up into pieces small enough to fit inside rubbish bins. This will be quite a labour, and I would love to be able to say that this job will be done on Boxing Day. Sadly, I won’t be waiting that long.
oh pitch it all. you’ll feel much better.
It’s much less labor to flatten boxes by pulling the flaps apart where they’re glued or cutting the tape holding them in shape. Tearing is bad, it requires far too much energy for the effect gained. Cutting bigger boxes along seams and folds works better, then tie the piles of cardboard up into easily carried packets to be dumped on the steps of city hall. You pay a metric buttload of taxes, allow the recipients of your extorted bounty to do some of the work. That’s what I do here in far away, exotic Mountlake Terrace, WA USA. I have gotten paranoid enough that I remove all my addresses from the boxes and wear nitrile gloves. to aviod fingerprints. I get the gloves out of trash bins in my Dr’s offices. They don’t seem to miss ’em, and I’ve paid for them after all.
Hey, I only realized right now that since I’m approaching my 68th birthday, does this behavior qualify as an endearing eccentricity or is it still a punishable misdemeanor?
LOL, Gerry:-)
Just cleaned out my attic of saved boxes for electronic devices, many of which I no longer even have. I’d been saving them for years and years. I broke them down and stacked them at the curb. The recycled-trash pickup crew must have thought I’d bought out the local electronics store.
For the papers, a suggestion that may be of use to others. It works for me, at least. If there are papers I cannot quite bring myself to throw away, but I don’t expect to use in the near-to-medium future, I pack them carefully in a box. This box is labelled with a date safely in the future, perhaps five years. So today I might label a box “Discard December 2016”.
This box goes into the attic. If, over the course of the next five years, I need something from it, I take it out. Whatever is left is – without inspection – dutifully discarded when I see the box on or after December 2016.
While I have quite a number of boxes cluttering my attic, every few years I sort them out and have the pleasure of ridding myself of quite a few. While this isn’t a cure, it at least keeps the disease somewhat under control…