Things I Found While Tidying Up
On Sunday, my landlords told me that they are selling the house. Not sure where this will leave me – guess that will depend on who buys the house and what they plan to do with it. The more pressing issue was the fact that my place generally looks like a tornado hit it1 and people will soon be traipsing through my place trying to decide if they want to buy the property. And it would really help if they could actually *see* the place under my many piles of books and papers and whatnot. So I spent most of the past two evenings folding laundry2, packing piles of paper that I don’t have time to sort through into boxes3, putting piles of books into actual bookshelves (that had been recently vacated by piles of clothes), taking a bag of clothes to a thrift store drop off4 and thanking the FSM that I recently had my friend Jen come over to clean my place, because at least that meant I didn’t have to scrub anything!
One of the benefits of tidying up my place (aside from, you know, having a tidy place), is that I found a boatload of stuff that I had lost. Some things that I knew were missing but I just couldn’t find and other things I totally forgot had even existed. Some of the things I found while tidying up include:
- my phone charger
- a motherload of hair elastics
- my rechargeable batteries, which were mixed up in the pile of used non-rechargeable batteries that I had sitting around waiting for me to take them for recycling5
- a receipt that I was looking for at tax time6
- three bottles of nail polish (red, silver and black) for which I’d searched high and low
- a long lost, um, toy… which clearly I’d hidden because I was having polite company and then forgot where I hid it!
Anyway, it’s nice to have a tidy place in which to live. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I get to keep living there!
- Let’s just say I have a high tolerance for clutter. Or that I’m too busy to worry about such things as “tidying.” [↩]
- I rarely fold laundry – I usually just leave clean laundry in a laundry hamper and riffle through it to find whatever item I want to wear [↩]
- probably the vast majority of such papers could be put in recycling and only a few need to be filed. One of these days I’ll have the time to sort through it all [↩]
- a bag that’s been sitting in my bedroom for months waiting for me to do so [↩]
- so glad I looked at the batteries and didn’t just sweep up my rechargables with the ones I took for recycling [↩]
- just a little medical receipt – nothing major, but so satisfying to find it and realize that it did exist (after all the searching I did for it, I was starting to wonder if I’d imagined it [↩]
Comments |4|
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Only you could lose a… oh no wait, that happened to me… was missing for at least 2 years, maybe 4.
Did you know your "toy" was lost or if you had completely forgotten about it? And don't you have a place to put it when you're not using it anyway? I mean, a place that's not the kitchen counter, or something?
From the way you talk about your cluttery apartment, I picture you literally diving into it and swimming from front door to, bedroom, to kitchen, and so on. Can’t confirm that’s the case though. I know that you tidy up when Fancy Guests are in town, so I’ve never seen your place with the full-on clutter going on.
Have you seen the TV show Hoarders?
OK, maybe I'm not quite *that* bad.
It's true that I do tidy up when Fancy Guests are in town, so you've not seen the depths of my clutteriness. But it's so nice to have this clean apartment (when I walked in the door tonight, I thought "Whose place *is* this??"), maybe I'll try becoming a neat freak.