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I need to give a little background on this friend. I met her in the mid 90's (I'm not exactly sure what year) when she was hired into the company I worked for. We worked closely for at least a year before I got another job and moved on. She moved to Phoenix soon after to accept a job offer there. We would take turns visiting back and forth between Phoenix and here in the years since then.
She is the type of person that would give you the shirt off of her back if you had a need and she had nothing else. It is her nature to help anyone who needs help, even if it means she goes without. This tendency has hurt her more often than not, as she attracts the kind of people that will take advantage of her, and leave nothing in return.
This was my opportunity to do something for her. I arrived on a late Friday flight, and she picked me up from the airport. She had waited to eat until I arrived, in case I hadn't eaten, even though it was already 9pm, so we stopped to eat before going to her house. When we finally got to her house, we started a load of laundry.
This is why she needed the intervention: half of her formal living room was heaped with dirty laundry, the other half was heaped with Christmas stuff. She didn't use her formal living room, as her home has a family room, and therefore there was basically just a pathway from the garage door through the room. The rest of her house looked very similar.
She gave me her bedroom to stay in, while she slept on the couch during my stay. There was no space in her room for me to set my suitcase down on the floor, so first thing (6 am) Saturday morning I started on that room. I woke her at 8 am to start cleaning out her shoes. She had well over a hundred, and many I knew she couldn't be still wearing, as she buys the same shoe in every color they release. There were plenty that were various shades of the same color.
I woke her adult son who is living with her at 9 am to start on the garage. I had decided to install shelving in her garage to house all of the Christmas stuff, but when I arrived I noticed a row of boxes along that wall stacked half-way to the ceiling. I tasked him to go through those and determine what was in them. Amazingly he found a 386 cpu tower that was almost waist tall, and the matching monitor, complete with the five separate inputs for RGB (and I'm not sure what the other 2 are). Along with that dinosaur were boxes and boxes of miscellaneous paper (mail, photos, cards, tax documents, notes, receipts, etc.).
By the end of the first day, we had purchased shelving to hang on the garage walls which her son installed, done approximately 12 loads of laundry, gotten her bedroom completely cleaned out and the spare bedroom half done, purchased shoe racks for her closet, put everything that was still in her closet in a goodwill bag, since she obviously wasn't wearing it or it wouldn't be clean!
On the second day we had purchased 4 bookshelves, 4 cd towers, and a ton of bins to store all the many things that were piled on the floor everywhere. She had more than enough books in the house to fill two of the bookshelves, and then boxes of books in the garage.
By the third day, we had made a large enough dent in the laundry to be able to sort the remainder into loads, the Christmas stuff was fully contained (gathered from every conceivable hiding place all over the house) and stored on the garage shelving, her hobbies and unfinished projects had been sorted into bins and put into appropriate spaces, and the 2-car garage was full of either recyclable trash or garage sale items. We had made a sizable dent, but I was beginning to worry that we wouldn't finish by the end of the fourth day. We still had all of her beadwork (she designs jewelry), and her office to get to.
On my final day, I sorted through boxes of paper, cleaned out closets, finished the miscellaneous unfinished projects, and did laundry. I never did get to the office or the beads, but I did set her up with instructions on how to continue! We didn't make it to goodwill, but she promised to take everything once she'd held her garage sale.
All in all, it was a very productive weekend. The best thing about the weekend is that I came home with a renewed desire to clear my own space of clutter. It is going much more slowly, but I'm doing it. Just cleaning off the bar in the kitchen has given me a tremendous sense of peace! I'm determined to have a space for everything or it is going out. In July I'll have my own garage sale and goodwill run!
All throughout the weekend, all I could think about was Peter Walsh. If you don't know who he is, he does this kind of thing for a living. Going into disastrously cluttered homes and throwing out, selling, sorting, and organizing everything into usable living space. After four straight days, all I could think was HOW DOES HE DO IT?? You have to have a real love of organizing, I think, to do this every day, for people who want to have a clean space but are unwilling to part with anything! I have to hand it to him!
2 comments:
While this doesn't sound like fun, at least she was willing to let someone help her clean it up. My Mom's house isn't as bad as this, but it's going that way. I'd be happy to help her do something like this, but she won't part with anything - she might "need" it later.
The toughest thing is to get the person willing to accept the help, and then be willing to do whatever it takes to get to a better place.
My friend's house was really beyond livable. There was absolutely no floor space visible that wasn't a walkway. She didn't really like living that way, but the idea of doing the whole thing was overwhelming.
I know how she feels. I get into the same rut. I'm happy that helping her out motivated me to do something about my own living space!
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