Doing The Stuff-Shuffle

We went to the dreaded storage unit this past weekend. After fortifying ourselves with a Five Guys burger, we dove into the belly of the beast. Progress was slow, but progress was definitely made. Only about 23 more trips and we’ll have it licked.

The crazy part about all this (ok, there are lots of crazy parts) is that the storage unit is just one piece of our “stuff” puzzle. We now live in a three-garage house and we are still struggling with how to store our stuff. The main two-car garage is veeeery slooooowly taking shape, box by box. We’ve been chipping away whenever we get a minute to spend out there. But with Christmas looming, we decided we needed to devote a full day to shuffling stuff.

Door number three, as we refer to it, has been designated as the official DECOR location. All tubs of seasonal decor, Christmas, Fall, and Easter, are behind door number three. I also use that space for most of my entertaining pieces. Having previously been in the party/wedding business I have lots of centerpieces and other decor and serving items. (Though I’m leaning more and more towards parting with some of this stuff, much to my hubby’s relief.) Door number three has also become the winter home to a huge Kimberly Fern we have been nurturing for years. Billy has it on a rolling cart and pulls it out into the sunshine when the weather is warm enough. He has taken ownership in this leafy girl ever since I sent it off to winter in his office one year. They bonded over the watering can.

I must take a moment here to say that Billy has a history of fern storage. When we lived in our old farmhouse I would buy enormous Boston Ferns, as many as twenty, to hang from the front porch and surround a tree on the patio…..a not unsubstantial financial investment. They were a ton of work to keep alive in the hot summer months, needing hours and hours of watering and tending. And every year they eventually went to the landfill since tropical plants can’t survive the winter months in North Carolina. Billy was pained that we made this investment over and over, so one year, against my better judgement, he decided to store the ferns in the old root cellar under the back of the house. Of course watering them was nearly impossible without dragging them all back out. And then I started having a bad ant issue in my kitchen….at the back of the house. Needless to say, when he pulled those ferns out the next spring, they were a dead-as-a-doorknob, ant-infested mess. The great “Fern Experiment”, as I dubbed it, was a failure. I tried very hard not to say “I Told You So.” I wasn’t successful.

So, anyway, our goal for last weekend was to haul off some things in the main garage to make room for staging the Christmas boxes. Due to some much-anticipated family company coming the first week in December, we need to start decorating for Christmas as soon as the dishes are done from Thanksgiving. (I am NOT one of those people who likes to overlap their holidays by eating their turkey by the Christmas tree.). Hubby wanted to get all the boxes right by the door for easy access. Over the years he’s learned a few things about me when I get in the decorating frenzy, and he’s always looking for ways to eliminate a few steps. As long as we were hauling off, we knew there were a few things near the front of the storage unit that could also go, thus the trip to said unit.

We removed two vehicles full of stuff from that unit and barely made a dent, but somehow it felt like the wall was breached. And here is the most refreshing thing…..the longer the stuff is in there, the less I care about it, and the easier it is to part with. Ok, yes, I brought a few boxes home from there, and yes they went into the garage, but Billy also had a pickup truck full of stuff to take away for donation. Progress was made, boxes were shuffled, and at the end of the day we had less stuff in any of our storage locations than when we started. Normal people would still find all this crazy, but I never said we were normal. We are just a couple of middle-aged stuff-shufflers hoping to make a path through the garage.