Greg Freeman: Preparing For Move Is A Sorted Affair: What To Keep, Toss? StL P-D 4/4/2002

Headline: PREPARING FOR MOVE IS A SORTED AFFAIR: WHAT TO KEEP, TOSS?
Reporter: By Greg Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Thu., Apr. 4, 2002
Section: METRO,Page: B1, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

A little piece of advice for those of you who are thinking about moving: Don't do it.
   After living in our house for 17 years, my wife and I are planning to move. We love our house, so it wasn't an easy decision, but once we made it, we were faced with a major challenge.
   We had to clean house. That sounds simple. A little sweeping here, a little mopping there, a little dusting all around.
   Ah, but if it were that easy.

Getting ready for a move requires more than the usual cleaning. It also means packing and going through things that you haven't paid attention to in years.
And it's easy to collect lots of stuff in 17 years. We have a roomy, two-story house, plus a full basement.
When we decided to sell, we realized that all three of us are pack rats.

Actually, I should have realized it long before, just by looking at my desk at the newspaper. On any given day, you'll find it covered with books, newspapers, clips of stories that I find interesting, letters that I want to follow up on. You name it, I've got it.
When our newsroom was remodeled a couple of years ago and we all had to move our desks, I discovered a Newsweek with a cover story about the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II from the 1980s, a newspaper with a front-page headline announcing that President Jimmy Carter had been defeated for re-election by Ronald Reagan, a story about the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, and a campaign button from the 1983 race for president of the Board of Aldermen.

It was more of the same as my wife and I worked on the house.
Our son's room was in perhaps the worst shape, with posters, signs and pictures covering every inch of his bedroom wall and door, coupled with a few things hanging from the ceiling. Then he placed a call to us from college asking us not to throw anything away until he could get here to go through his belongings.
That alone posed a challenge. Ultimately, we ended up bagging everything in his room and letting him sort through it all to decide what he wanted to keep and what he wanted to pitch.

It probably would have been easier for us had we simply moved out and then gone through the cleaning and throwing away process. But since we haven't picked out a new home yet, we're still living in our house.
That causes problems in itself. The minute we get an area cleaned and cleared, we tend to put other things there or save new items, once again causing the problem we had tried to address.
Meanwhile, there are all sorts of decisions to make about what stays and what goes. Should I save this magazine story about "What the 1990s Holds for Us"? A copy of my son's geography term paper from junior high school? Pictures of the cat we had when we first got married?

Closets posed another challenge. When I went through mine, I found ties from the 1980s -- remember when bright, colorful ties were all the rage? I found shorts from the late '70s that would raise a few eyebrows if I were to wear them today (yes, men wear short pants considerably longer than they did then). I found T-shirts advertising all sorts of groups, including some that are now defunct.
Ultimately, I set a simple criterion for whether I would keep clothes or pitch them. If it was something that I'd worn in the last couple of years, I would keep it. If it was something that I had worn much longer ago than that, I threw it away. Sort of an arbitrary process, I know, but it worked.
My wife, on the other hand, is more select with her clothing. That's why her closet is still bulging and why it will take her much longer to clean it out.

Ultimately, I've concluded that moving isn't that difficult.
It's the cleaning up that's the hard part.

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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