They should warn you how hard it is…

…to get rid of stuff. I don’t mean “hard” in the emotional/psychological sense, mind you. People often say, “it’s hard to let go of things,” and clean out your clothes closets, declutter the cabinets, and so on. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how difficult it is to get rid of stuff even when you’re so ready to relinquish it, you long to just heap it all up in the yard and set fire to it.

Of course, that’s against the law. And so is dumping it randomly and disposing of certain materials in the wrong place. Then there are the nagging guilts about throwing away perfectly good things that someone else might be able to use, and throwing away outright trash that contributes to landfills, incinerator pollution, and America’s obscene waste stream in general. Get beyond all that, however, and you’re smack against the wall of practical barriers. It’s a hell of a lot easier to acquire stuff in this country than it is to unburden yourself from it.

Start with the good stuff: good condition, clean, perfect working order, attractive…but not quite worth selling on eBay, or even in a yard sale or flea market, because it’s just not worth the effort, and has about a 1:9 chance of selling. Donate it? Not so easy. I know from firsthand experience that many charities, shelters and so on won’t take a lot of donations. They may have access to a client base who could use them, but they don’t have the staff, storage space, or infrastructure to handle in-kind donations. Charities and non-profits want and need hard cash. I can also tell you from first hand experience that even the neediest clients aren’t all that interested in middle-class cast-offs, even in good condition. Our shelter clients turned up their noses at most donations. They may have hit rock bottom, but the one thing they still had left was their pride. They wanted new stuff. It’s middle class people and the working poor who comb the thrift shops for bargains.

Speaking of thrift shops, you can try those. Some will even take items on consignment, although in my present process I’m happy to give the business owner the stuff free and clear–if s/he can make a couple of dollars on it, I’m delighted. But thrift shops are struggling in this economy like everyone else. They have limited space, limited staffing, and they want items that will sell. A lot of small thrift shops have closed in recent years. (One local thrift store closed owing me payment for copies of Mortal Touch they sold, which I’ve written off as a bad debt.)

You can try all the “freecycle” networks, including Craig’s List. But again, I can tell you from several years’ firsthand experience that most of what gets offered on these lists goes begging. You can try, but even when you find takers, you have to arrange to transfer the items, either trusting people to come to your home, or (I did this once on Craig’s List–very successfully, but it was a PITA) delivering it to them. Often, you get a freecycle “taker” for an item and they change their mind or never show up. It ends up being a lot of work to pass on one item at a time.

The “here, take it!” method–hauling the stuff out to the street and posting a sign on or near it saying “FREE”–can work pretty well, for some things, or types of things. It does require that you live someplace where that’s permitted, and where the stuff won’t just be vandalized. I’m fortunate, I’ve gotten rid of about as many things that way as by listing them on the freecycle list, and big things, too. I just discovered today that someone took a big, heavy, ancient chaise longue frame that I was just going to leave out there until spring. I’m amazed, I didn’t think that thing was ever going to be picked up! But not everything so offered found a home, and after giving it plenty of time, I had to deal with it in other ways.

Clothes are fairly easy, at least around here, because there are huge, bright-colored donation bins for clothing all over the place. To use those, you have to be untroubled by the real fate of most of those donations, and not deluding yourself that they’re going to needy people in your area. Most of the clothes put in those bins are baled and sent to Africa and Asia where street vendors sell them in markets. That doesn’t bother me–if someone in Africa can use my clothes, they’re welcome to them! It does rack up the carbon footprint for clothing that already was manufactured (99% of the time) in Asia or Indochina and shipped to the U.S., to begin with. You can donate clothing to Salvation Army or Goodwill, but they don’t make it so easy, with limited drop-off locations and times. They’d much rather see you buying things from them than donating, and they, too, have been cutting staff to the bare minimum.

Books can go to library book sales, and there are other options, if you want to drive long distances and the books meet their criteria, which can be strict.

Then there’s the plain old junk–broken down, dirty, molding/mildewing, old, crumbling, varmint-chewed, damaged, worn out…the stuff that even if you could give it away, you’d be embarrassed to, or worried about liability because someone hurt themselves or got a disease from it. This is the boonies. The “dumps” of yesteryear are now “transfer stations” in most towns, and trash pickup is privatized, not municipal, and expensive. Here in Pepperell, we have pay-as-you-throw, which is fine, but that means I not only have to pay the town to dump my trash (except for recyclables), I have to get it to the dump-off point myself. For things that I can’t manage on my own, or can’t fit into my little Aveo hatchback, I have to pay a service to haul it away, and that runs into some bucks. Disposing of major trash requires paying fees and a lot of really hard work, or less work but much bigger fees.

All of the above is what I’ve been doing for the past month–and I can hardly believe it’s only been a month! I’ve gotten rid of so much stuff, and I’m still not done. I paid a company to haul away a whole truckload, mostly furniture. I’ve made six or seven trips to the transfer station with what they call “demo,” from two lawn mowers to random trash from the crawl space that was too big to fit in a trash bag. I’ve made at least as many trips with 33-gallon trash bags stuffed full of, well, stuff–from the crawl space, from the attic, a whole bag from the bathroom closet. I’ve freecycled stuff, put stuff out by the road, taken stuff to a local thrift shop, donated books to the library sale. I put two jam-packed 33-gallon bags of clothes in a donation bin. And I’m not done yet!

Plus, this spring, summer, and fall I did so much yard work, I’m perpetually amazed at how tidy my yard looks now. I didn’t quite get all of the monster bush I was cutting down. It got too cold, and I was worried that it would snow, and I was nervous about the safety factor of the last few branches. I called a halt, and cleaned everything up and put it away for the winter. Most of the bush is down, and what remains won’t be hanging over the side door and dropping buckets of snow down my neck (it all bends the other way). The garden is cleared (I got about four pounds of carrots), and I spread Tarpzilla over it. When the wind kept catching its corners, despite bricks and stones, I got tent stakes from my camping gear and staked Tarpzilla down. It’s not going anywhere. 🙂

None of this is looming over me anymore. I have so much space! I know exactly what the things I need and can use right now are and where they are, and I can put my hands right on them without having to climb over or dig through piles and layers of other stuff. I don’t feel that constant nagging, dragging frustration every single time I open a closet, or go into the front room, or go up to the attic for a box, or look in the crawl space for something: “gods, this place is awful, I’ve got to do something about it,” coupled with a despairing hopelessness that I’d ever have the time, or that I could manage it myself.

It’s done. And as hard as I’ve been working–very hard–none of it took a fraction of the time and effort that my pessimistic imagination always told me it would. I just had to roll up my sleeves and do it.

Sure, there’s more to do. But now, the remaining work all seems so much less daunting. Like the bush, my material burdens have been chopped down to size. I look at the work I still want to do in the yard, and my tools and equipment are neatly stowed where I can get them right out in March without a fuss. When the weather allows, I’ll just pick up where I left off. I’ll keep on going through book shelves and files and closets and whatnot, but I’ll do bits here and there whenever I have some time. The ongoing project of the moment is the bathroom sink and walls, and that just goes step-by-step as I find time to work on it. I go down into the crawl space now, or up into the attic, and I think, “wow, this looks like a space that someone cares about, that actually gets used regularly, it’s alive.” Not pristine or perfect, I’ve just been rough-sorting the keepers, but…accessible. That’s no small thing.

The cats are mostly puzzled by all this. With nearly all the furniture going, all their sleeping spots are gone, and things are still changing. I chopped up a couple of chairs and put the upholstered pieces under the kitchen table awaiting a “demo” run to the transfer station. The cats started sleeping on them! Those pieces just went to the transfer station yesterday. The biggest impact, though, is on the bunny, because his free-range days are over. He’s just too destructive and it’s not possible to “bunny-proof” the whole house. I put a baby gate in the kitchen/living room doorway and he can run around the kitchen and laundry room, but he’s definitely not happy.

This frees up all my energy and resources for creative work. Speaking of which, while I was doing all this clean-out, I was also editing and typesetting Applewood, whose ARCs will be going out any second now. 🙂

This whole process of jettisoning the unnecessary ballast is starting to extend past the realm of dry goods and into networking and personal realms, but that’s another story.