Extremely observant readers of this blog may have noticed a preponderance of posts about ancient, random stuff over the past few months — and the reason is the above.
I’ve been living in this apartment for almost twenty years now. In the beginning, I kept this loft storage space somewhat well organised. It’s nice to have a place where you can dump stuff you’re not quite sure whether you’re going to use again or not, right? You can just put it somewhere out of sight and let it “mature” for a while: If you haven’t had any use for something in, say, five years, you’re typically not going to ever use it.
But… that means that you eventually have to do some triage and actually get rid of the junk. And that’s boring! Booooring! So boring.
So I’ve ended up with the situation above, where I’ve just dumped so much junk up there that I can’t even use it any more. And so my “temporary sorta-junk maturing area” has extended to my “home office”, too, and it was just getting kinda ridiculous.
This spring, I decided to finally tackle the loft storage area, and it’s taken me… it’s almost September now? And I see from the date on the pics above that they were snapped in May, so it’s taken me four months, but now:
Tada!!!
Behold! You can see the floor! Stuff’s sorted! I’ve gotten plastic boxes with things sorted inside! With labels on the outside!
I mean, when I say “four months”, it’s not like I’ve been putting in 120 Days of Loft, but every few days, I’ve been going up there, carrying things down, and then doing triage.
(And like projects like this tends to do, it expanded to also include various closets and the dreaded “drawers of miscellany”.)
Triage: First of all decide whether I want to keep it. If I do, it gets carried back up and sorted into the correct box/shelf.
But if not, there’s five different piles:
- Junk to be thrown out.
- Junk to go to the recycling.
- Generally useful stuff that have little value go to the Reuse Tent. (You just pop things onto the shelves and then other people take what they want.)
- More specialised things (electronics, etc.) or bulky stuff gets given away on a web site designed for that (so I’ve had dozens and dozens of people coming to take stuff).
- Valuable stuff I’ve sold on a different site, and that’s been kinda amusing.
And now all those things are done — I’ve got a handful more things to sell, but it’s basically over.
Except that I had a number of boxes with old papers (university things, notes from old games, etc), and I just couldn’t make myself throw them away. I mean, I’ll never actually look at them, but… If I could scan the papers, I’d have the PDFs I’ll never actually look at, and that’ll take less space!
So I went ahead and bought me a Brother MFC-L2960DW: It’s a mono laser printer with a double sided sheet feed scanner. It’s something I’ve always wanted to have, but I’ve just always thought it would be kinda silly to have it since I basically just print out something once a year, and….
I’ve had an inkjet printer for that, but you know inkjet — every time I used it, the inkjet cartridges have dried up, and I have to buy new ones. Just to print out that single page. Looking at the prices of the inkjet cartridges, I estimate that over the years I’ve used more money on the inkjet cartridges than this printer cost me now. *sigh* I should have bought this thing a decade ago — laser printers are forever.
(Micro review of the Brother’s scanning function: The feeder works very well — a couple of paper jams with very thin or shiny paper, but nothing major. The stupid thing about it is if you put in too many pages, it’ll scan them all… but then the resulting PDF just doesn’t happen. The scanner has 256MB RAM, so if the PDF is bigger than that, it just fails silently. With colour scanning, 200DPI, that’s about 50 double page sheets, so that’s annoying…)
But with the papers triaged (I kept postcards and stuff like that and scanned and threw away the rest), the attic is now functional. It’s about two thirds full, I guess, so now I can start dumping new stuff up there with impunity! Mua ha ha!
While I’m at it, perhaps I should take a look at the cellar storage unit, too. I’m sure everything is perfectly spic and span there.
Tu plaisantes ! Quelle horreur !
Oh well… Good to know that I have a project for next year, too, I guess?
I GUESS!??