The sorting and cataloging of my stuff has begun. We’ve got to bring everything home from the storage unit (aka stuff I haven’t seen in 3 years) and I want to have the things currently in the house organized while it’s still manageable.
- I have a LOT of reusable bags, backpacks and totebags. 😮
- I have a lot of tschotches, which make my space feel personal and cozy, but I’m not ready to display yet.
- I have so, so many bits of paper ephemera and journals and notebooks
- We’re not even gonna talk about all my computer bits and bobs
There’s a lot more to come home from the storage unit. Mostly books, which have a clear place to go, but also toys from when I was a kid and some other things that…frankly, I don’t even remember what because it’s been too long.
To tackle this, I’m starting by sorting by category and that has me stepping back and asking what I want to have easy access to and what’s okay to shove a bit further back in the attic.
My big cabinet holds supplies for various crafting and art projects, but I’m gonna reconfigure it to hold high priority stuff in general. For example, there’s no point in having a huge box of wool in there when I can have my backup hard drives stored there instead. The big wool box will be easy enough to pull out of storage when I want to work on that kind of project, where the drives I need very regularly.
A spreadsheet would be useful for keeping an inventory, but well-labeled boxes will do just fine for now. I want to be sure the physical items are organized. Digitizing can wait. Keeping like with like for once will also help so I need to acquire some smaller boxes. The last couple of moves happened under duress so there was a lot of “just shove whatever fits into the box”. Now is the time I can refocus on measured sorting and storage. It makes the piles of boxes in my spaces feel less scary.
The end goal here is to make sure that I know what I have so I can enjoy it and use it. Just like getting a shelf for my comic book boxes, making things more accessible makes them useful and enjoyable, otherwise, why have it? The stuff I have does “spark joy” when I have access to it. Time to make that access just a bit easier.