Household Tides

After nearly ten years in this house, we and our stuff have gotten rather set in our ways.

If you've spent a length of time in one location, you can guess how it goes. Things pile up, and after the initial arrangements, one rearranges every so often. Sometimes one has had to rig up temporary solutions to permanent problems or rearrange a new version of what we think we want and can get away with. After a few years, they become what passes for a permanent situation (not always happily, but that's another story). Next thing you know, years have gone by, and it's all cobbled together and who knows what is really necessary.

Well, I'm finding that a little kitchen redo is a good excuse to rethink everything. Now that I have a small portion of something like permanent storage, I can reshuffle. Or at least, reshuffle and reorganize temporarily. Ha.

I moved items out of old storage into new storage. Things like baking ingredients and mixing bowls, herbs and oils, canned goods and food storage containers.

I move some items out of old storage into temporary storage. Things like teas and mugs and baking dishes.

I move some items out of very temporary storage into new temporary storage. Things like pasta and dried beans and aluminum foil.


Why all these temporary locations? I don't have all my permanent storage yet! But it's been very interesting, in all my rearranging, resorting and resettling, inadvertently finding out what is important and necessary, and what is relatively irrelevant.



I wrestled the large blue (heavy!) tub of items that used to be in the wire shelving UP, from the basement, and retrieved some important food stuffs from that very temporary location and put them where I can get them. Which is relatively temporary, because when the electricians will come in and finish up the new outlets, I'l be moving it all aside. At least temporarily!

More to the point, now that I've retrieved my "important" things, and even more importantly, put them in prime locations, I'm interested to note what is left. A variety of very nutritious but little used dried seaweeds. A jar with the remains of bulk chili mix. A hanging wire basket for root vegetables. Storage jars.

Does it all need a place? Or do I even need them at all any more? Some items sit in semi-permanent temporary storage. Does that need to be moved to a more accessible spot? Or just permanently thrown away? Hehe, well that's the question, isn't it?

It's an interesting exercise for nearly anything: lovingly arrange what is truly important and look very critically at the rest. What do you really need and love?

This is how I finally realized that we could get rid of that second set of old knives.

And then there is the small room's worth of stuff that we hurriedly yanked out of what was to become the baby's room. It's all still floating about the house like the trash island of the Pacific, except in smaller clumps.

Nothing is permanently tied down just yet, but.... the tides of the household are shifting around. It'll be interesting to see what ends up where, and what is left washed up and abandoned. Every week, I start another trash bag of items to throw away and another box of items to give away. Nope! Don't need that!
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