Cleaning Out My Closet

Literally, not metaphorically.  I don’t think I have any skeletons in my closet – nothing that I’m deliberately concealing there at any rate; just the kind that are forgotten and gathering dust (like, perhaps, the time I accidentally stole a Marathon bar from my local shop when I was three years old – I wanted a sweetie but my mother wouldn’t let me have it, so I snuck it onto the conveyor and whipped it out again as soon as I thought it was through the checkout, little realising that it hadn’t been put through the till…oops…).  No.  By “Cleaning Out My Closet” I actually mean “Continuing in my Perpetual Efforts to Swab the House Down” – a task that I have been working on for several years.  And I’m still no closer to completion.

Actually, I have made significant progress over the past few weeks.  I finally replaced my bath and did up the bathroom (as chronicled in this very blog a couple of months back), I repaired the head gasket on the car (as also featured in yours truly’s blog), I’ve thrown out a frankly absurd amount of tack that has been kicking around the house for…well…ever.  Over the past six months I have made at least fifteen or twenty trips down to the local waste site, taking a not inconsiderable amount of trash down there with me.  And yet there is ever more crap to sort through and throw out.

I have, in the midst of this, decorated almost every room in the house.  The kitchen still needs a bit of work, as do the upstairs and downstairs hallways, and also my and my wife’s bedroom (which I have just started this morning).  And through it all I am getting rid of more and more rubbish.  Where in the name of God does it all come from?  Toys, books, papers, accumulated all over the place, tucked in corners, stuck under carpets, filling cupboards.  I am more than happy with my insanely large DVD collection (seriously, I think I own more titles than Blockbusters), even though the wife would be glad to lose…oh…all of them.  But I’ve still got several dozen video tapes laying around the place which I never watch.  I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of some of these films, even though the tape will never be put in a VCR again.  I must be strong and finally toss them, but then I need to find a box or a bag strong enough to toss them into.  And then what?  Do I take them down to the waste site, or should I deposit them at a charity shop, or should I just have them incinerated or put in landfill?  I can’t put them in the bin because they take up too much space, so it’s either the charity shop or the waste site, but either way it involves strong bags and a trip in the car, which is a distinct inconvenience when you’ve got masses of stuff to do around the house.

Boxes are a real problem.  You can either spend a fortune of build-your-own flat-packed boxes, or you can save up any boxes that happen to come your way.  Where else do you get them from?  When I was younger you could walk into a supermarket and just grab a few for free from the exit – I think, in retrospect, that it was a great way of recycling.  Now, of course, recycling means that all these otherwise useful boxes get cut, flattened and shoved into a recycling bin where they are no use to anyone except for the recyclers who make a killing selling exhorbitantly-priced recycled paper goods.  I JUST WANT SOME BLOODY CARDBOARD BOXES!!!

I’ve also got hundreds of old PC games, many of which won’t run on new machines with new operating systems (compatibility wizard my arse).  A few of them have installation discs on floppy, for crying out loud.  My floppy disc drive hasn’t worked in six years!  So should I throw out my old games, or is there someone out there who can use them?  My instincts tell me to just throw all this stuff out, but then there’s E-bay and Amazon – the ever-present thought, lurking somewhere near the back of your mind, that tells you that you can make some money by selling these things to people.  So you put them on Ebay or Amazon, leave them there until the listing expires (because, after all, who really wants to buy the original Zork game any more?) and then forget about them and leave them in the cupboard, gathering dust and taking up space.

And then there’s things like the Disney DVD Trivial Pursuit game I got for the kids a couple of years ago – half the cards are missing, the DVD is missing from its slip case, I’ve got three cheeses left (and they’re all pink ones), two of the characters have disappeared and I’m left with half a gameboard and a box full of leftover junk that just takes up space.  THROW IT AWAY!  But it cost twenty quid!!  What a waste of money.  But, of course, it’s completely unplayable, and therefore the money is wasted whichever way you look at it.  At least by throwing it away you’ve freed up some space.  And packaging is another one.  I got myself a GPS for the car a year ago, and I’ve still got the box.  I don’t want to throw it away because then how would I return in if it breaks?  Of course the warranty has run out now, so I can’t send it back if it breaks anyway.  But what if there’s some earth-shatteringly important information written in microscopically small print somewhere on the box that will help me fix it if it goes wrong…  You can guarantee that it’ll break within days of the binmen taking the box away, and then you’re buggered because you’ll never know if the answer was there.  And then you’ve got a hundred pound gadget that might as well be thrown away as well.  Somewhere up in my loft I still have the box to my old Super Nintendo Scope, and I traded that into Gamestation three years ago.  But the box reminds me of happy childhood days.  Sigh.  THROW IT OUT!!!

Anyway, now that I’ve had a rant I’m going to go and throw away some of the stuff I’ve been talking about.  Assuming, of course, that the children don’t see the bag of rubbish and start taking things out, which is the other thing that hapopens in this house – three black sacks full or crap gets whittled down to one-half of a black sack, and the retrieved stuff gets liberally strewn across the floor (“Daddy, daddy – you can’t thrown that out…I love that…”).  If you’re going to clear out a house of all the extraneous crud then you’ve got to take the kids out of the equation.  Sending them down to the park does the trick for a while, though I’m pretty sure that God created Gaffer Tape as the solution to the problem.

Until next time, when I shall hopefully be able to write from a much cleaner house.