Creatrope

This is going to be a tough one.

I’ve already brought 60+ boardgames to my son’s school, and donated perhaps half that amount to Goodwill. I’ve still got nearly 200+ games in two rooms, of which I played perhaps thirty in the last two years. The number is rising as my son is now able to play all but the most sophisticated, but we still don’t have many opportunities to play 3+ player games.

I like werewolf a lot better than 99.9% of these games anyway and all it takes is a few slips of paper (but 11+ friends!)

Since I’ve already purged many the awkward, cheap, mass-produced games, what I’m left with is the good (and collectible) ones, but ones I will likely never play again (SPI, Avalon Hill, Games Workshop, RPGs). Computer games are just much easier to setup, tear down, and I have instant opponents on things like BrettSpielWelt.

So the games have to go. I’m targeting to keep 10% of what I have and actually play. The space I free up will dwarf what I’ve gained from book & paper purging.

I’ve contacted a local gaming group to see if they have a some efficient way to conduct transactions in bulk. Ebaying these things would maximize the income, but a be time-consuming and unpleasant.

I’ve received several questions from family and friends about how one values an item to make a reasonable decision on whether its worth trying to sell an item or just give it away.

I’ve written several entries on this that might be useful.

* 10-10 Rule
* Collectibles That Never Are
* Valuing Items For Sale, Donation or Junk

Can you make a sound judgement you’ll feel ok about in ten years whether something will ever be worth collecting?

There’s a free Community Shred tomorrow (May 11th) sponsored by the AARP at the Tacoma Elks Club at 1965 South Union, Tacoma 98045 from 10am-2PM.

You can bring up 4 banker boxes (12”x11”x16”) or two medium garbage bags.

Today I went both high-tech and low-tech. I identified three obsolete computers I was saving ranging in power from PII-350 and PIII-700. I decided they had to go under the 10-10 Rule. While the PIII-700 could possibly squeak by as useful, and at one time served as a media-server/game box/webcam host it was not actually being used and had no immediate hope of being used and didn’t make me happy. So it met none of the criteria in twenty books for Goodwill.

A good day today. I struggled with what to with a $250 electric scooter that needed two batteries (again), had a flat and never worked all that well. Probably with a few hours work, someone with more mechanical inclination toward tuning, some ebay shopping, it could have been brought back to life, but the Segway did everything the scooter could and more.

A ‘free’ sign on the street seemed tacky, it was too big (as well as broken) for Goodwill. A neighbor suggested Craigslist. Within five minutes of posting a candid assessment of it and listing it as free, it had been claimed (with ten folks fast behind the winner). The person who picked it up had a different idea on their time/value proposition.

A nice big space cleared in the garage.

Next, I took about a half dozen 2.25 cubic foot boxes of stuff to goodwill. Looking at the picture, it’s painful to think this was in my house… Mostly old Halloween stuff. Following the advice in Clutters Last Stand I decided it was most fun and easier to reacquire it then to detangle the ever more tired same Halloween decorations. Off it went!

I rstarted by reading various clutter-reduction books, but limited my initial search to undesirable objects in the home that were heavy, outsized, or awkward. My theory was that the ‘return on investment’ for getting rid of these items was much better than the smaller items.

My guiding principle is the 10-10 Rule.

Books - At this point, I feel that seven or eight large bookshelves is enough physical books. With digital books, access to libraries, cheap books on Amazon & Ebay, my need to actually own a lot of physical books is reduced. More on this later on how I selected and removed books.

Board Games - I had a large collection (200+) and yet very few were played with any regularity. I checked through Ebay and found nearly sixty that were low-value and took up a lot of space. They were not worth enough to resell so they went to Goodwill.

Broken/Unneeded Appliances - I had two (originally expensive) Fantom vacuums, both needing some love and drive belts. But they were older, unneeded and not worth a lot used.

Not a bad day - nearly 150 lbs out of the house!

One of the first phases of decluttering is the ‘collection’ phase. In ‘collection’ the goal is to bring together all the stuff, usually in a room or group of rooms and decide whether the items in the room belong there or belong elsewhere. Setting up plastic storage tubs labeled for ‘donation’, ‘elsewhere’, ‘junk’ etc is a good start.

I started in a relatively cluttered room filled with old papers, etc. In here were a lot of photographs, papers, etc. I purchased an inexpensive duplex scanner, the Fujitsu ScanSnap with the intention of scanning in papers (and tossing the originals where I could) and photos (making them more accessible to me).

But first I had to junk a lot of old papers.

I was merciless, ending up with six boxes of papers and perhaps the equivalent to keep. Not a bad start, 50%, and about 30 lbs of papers of shred.

It’s spring and it’s time for stuff to leave the house en-masse. After years of garage sales and general accumulation, I’ve decided that it’s time to make some extra space. I think my house is generally ok, it’s not cluttered by any typical standard, but as they say, less is more.

I’ve chosen a path that uses the materials from many popular books on decluttering, plus a few off-beat ones. That material is all over the web and in print, so I’m adding a liberal dose of flavor to it by including special methods of decluttering that will appeal to geeks as well as addressing their special considerations.

With that, let’s start getting rid of stuff!