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January 31, 2005
"The Pile"
By Manhattan standards, I probably have a reasonably large apartment. Nevertheless I constantly find myself drowning in ever multiplying piles of stuff. Junk that suburban dwellers take for granted because they have the space to hide things. (Multiple closets, whole rooms, basements, garages, rental facilities... devoted entirely and filled to the brim with the daily bric-a-brac they don't want to deal with.) Maybe it's human nature. Maybe I hate to throw stuff away.
In my NYC apartment where every ounce of space has to be optimized for maximum usage potential these random piles are not just a nuisance, they frequently annoy the hell out of me. In the spirit of rebirth and to celebrate the coming February I've begun a new category in my blog and will be sharing my journey publicly in the hopes that I can at last eliminate "The Pile" and restore order to my home.
In a moment of brilliance inspired by the work of others (It's pretty interesting how many people are documenting their attempts to organize recently...), I created a Flickr account so that I could document the journey, and hopefully inspire myself to get rid of all this crap.
Here's how it's gonna work. I've taken all of the miscellaneous little piles and created one large pile. We'll call this the "Staging Area". The concept is to make the rest of my apartment more liveable by putting all of the chaos into one clearly defined area. As you'll note on my Flickr site (they have a cool mouse over feature where you add notes to photos...), I've broken "The Pile" into different sections...
Miscellaneous Papers - I have no idea what the hell is in here.
Old Clothes - Goal: Either take these to the local church clothes drop-off site, or take em to Brooklyn to the cool clothes store and trade em in for undersize vintage t-shirts and trucker hats, in noble attempt to look like Williamsburg hipster.
Books I don't want anymore - Goal: Either Sell em (The bastards at the Strand didn't seem to be interested when I read the titles I had to offer over the phone... it's like someone saying "Hah, what the hell were you thinking buying those titles?"), E-bay em (Is it worth the hassle?), or give em away.
Assorted CD's. - The thing about having a CD Burner is that one seems to acquire a ton of CDR's. What the hell to do with them?
Old Notebooks - Not sure what's in em, but afraid to throw em out, and don't know where to file them.
Assorted Cassettes & Videotapes - Analog takes up so much space.
Here's a "before" picture of the "The Pile"...
I figure if I keep tripping over the damn thing it will inspire me to take it apart piece by piece. I'm also hoping find a method of containment for all this crap to use once "The Pile" has been eliminated. Stay tuned!
Posted by Thomas at January 31, 2005 01:05 PM
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