Tag: Hoarding

Tetris and other block puzzles

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You know those games (physical or digital) where you have to get a ball from one end of the board/screen to the other by moving blocks around so you can slowly work the ball through the path?  I’m terrible at them.  It always takes me ages.

That’s how I’ve felt about working on the new house for most of the last week.

The current project is to get everything into its correct room, if not its correct place.  What this means is I’m just constantly moving boxes around, trying to clear paths for other things to be moved through, filling one room and then another in an attempt just to have some tiny space to manoeuvre stuff.  It’s really tiring, and I feel like I’m going round in circles.

A big part of the problem is that there’s so much stuff that doesn’t have a place yet.  We’re going to be building new wall shelves out of our old Ikea Billy bookshelves to house the DVDs, videogames and some of the books, and I’ve designed a wall of Ikea Kallax units for the boardgame collection.  As such, until these units are in place, our books, DVDs, videogames and boardgames have to stay in boxes, and there’s a lot of them.

I know, logically, I am making headway.  I’ve spent today making rows of all the boxes that go in different areas, so once Geth gets home tonight and helps me with a couple of heavy lifting jobs, I’ll be able to fill the study with all the Stuff That Goes In The Study (as opposed to the all-kinds-of-everything totally random stuff that was in there before) and use that as a dumping ground to help me sort out other rooms.  After that, over the next couple of days, I can move my magazine Kallax upstairs, then move all the boardgame boxes to the space where their Kallax storage is going to live, and that will mean there’s a bit more breathing room around the piles of boxes of books and DVDs that are currently having to stay in the living room.

The whole thing really is doing wonders for my hoarding habit though.  I can’t wait to start sorting through things properly and getting rid of stuff.

One step at a time.  It’s just frustrating when there are so many steps.

Our new house…

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…is gradually, very gradually, starting to feel like home.  Sort of.

I spent most of today dismantling the old Ikea Billy bookshelves that we don’t have space for anymore.  The plan is to make new ones out of them, but I’ll get my dad’s advice on that when he’s visiting later this week.  I also put one Billy up in the living room as temporary shelving next to the TV.  If I like the way it looks long-term it may get a reprieve.  It’s currently holding all our ornaments, which sounds frivolous but actually has the useful function of giving us some time to work out which ones we like looking at enough to keep.

Boxes are also getting unpacked a bit quicker than expected.  This is mainly because twice a day I realise that I need something, but don’t know which exact box it’s in, so I have to go through a few before I find the thing.  There’s not really anywhere for the stuff to go yet, but I am finding a lot of temporary solutions.

This week should be a real breakthrough, as once my parents have visited, we will have the walls painted upstairs, meaning that we can get the furniture finalised up there, meaning that I can get all our clothes and accessories put away.  Well, in my case, about 40% of them.  Dear God, I have far too many clothes.  The amount I’ve pulled out of boxes this week has been enough to send anyone screaming into the night.  The main reason I’m so impatient to get to my target weight is that I can’t wait for the giant trying-everything-on-and-then-getting-rid-of-most-of-it session that I’m not allowed to have until then.  You never know what might suddenly look awesome at target, so I’m not allowed to chuck anything out till then, no matter how old and scraggy it is.

(I realised yesterday that one of my current-rotation bras is about twenty years old, judging by the style of the M&S label.  Somehow, I don’t think it will survive the cull.)

Another packing update

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Six days till moving day!  And we still have a lot to pack.  And I have a lot of work getting in the way this week, grgh.

Geth did the bulk of the kitchen stuff today, and I was on track to get all of the living room ornaments done…until I ran out of bubble wrap.  We have no time to go into town to get more, so we’ll be buying a lot of newspapers over the next few days.

It doesn’t feel real yet that in two weeks time we’ll have finished the move and will no longer be living here.  We’ve been in this house for three years exactly – longer than any place since our flat in Edinburgh where we lived for nearly four years – and it’s been a lovely, spacious place to live, even if it’s never exactly felt finished.  This is largely because I’ve been a terrible procrastinator in terms of a) putting stuff up on the walls and b) unpacking all the boxes of my stuff that I’ve had my parents bring down from Edinburgh in order to give them some more space.  This is a habit I’m going to be very strict about changing when we’re in the new place, because we’re going to be there for the rest of however long we end up living in Newcastle (I hate moving.  I may have mentioned this once or twice) and I want it to look nice.  It’s probably going to be an ongoing project (an expensive ongoing project) but I’m fed up of living among boxes of stuff, so this year I at least want to find a place for everything I’m keeping and get rid of the stuff I’m not.

The last part will be easier said than done.  Hoarding tendencies are a bitch.

Beermats

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When I was a kid in the ’80s and ’90s, I spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time in the back of a car, travelling around the UK to visit family, who lived all over the place.  My dad likes to take a lot of driving breaks, and so while we visited a lot of motorway service stations, when we were out on more remote roads our pit stop of choice was always some random country pub.

Country pub in 1988
Country pub, 1988, with my mum and younger brother. Pub drinking starts early in my family.

I don’t know where my hoarding/collecting/general possessiveness tendencies come from (some family members have suggested it’s genetic, as a lot of us are like that), but they’ve always been there, and so as a small child I soon started to notice the brightly coloured and highly collectible bits of cardboard that were always sitting there on the pub tables, preventing my glass of Diet Coke from leaving an unsightly ring.  I think you all know where this is going.

Beermat collection
A small fraction of my extensive beermat collection.

As an adult, I’ve turned part of my large beermat collection (i.e. as many as will fit on the above corkboard) into a slightly dubious-quality ‘piece of art’ that hangs in our hallway.  The display is an exercise in nostalgia as much as anything else – I often pause in the hallway and marvel at the way that some of them are painfully of their time.  The Furstenburg one in the top-left corner is absolutely classic ’80s advert styling, the competition advertised on the Martini one in the third row has a closing date sometime in 1986, and the ‘Head Out To Marlboro Country’ one in the second row brings back memories of an impossibly long-ago century when you were actually allowed to advertise smoking as cool and adventurous with only a tiny, hard-to-read government warning along the bottom edge.

At the same time, some drinks are so classic that I don’t think they’ve updated their beermat design in the intervening 20-30 years (Strongbow and Newcastle Brown, I’m looking at you) and I still see identical ones in the pubs of today.

I stopped collecting beermats around the point in my mid-teens that the alcohol itself became more interesting, but I’ll always have a soft spot for this particular hoard.

New (old) glasses

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Since I got my latest pair of glasses in summer 2017, I’ve been wearing my previous pair for cardio exercise, a) to keep my new ones nice and b) because the arms of my new ones are too thin to fit into my Croakies.  This was okay for a while, but recently my old pair have really been starting to hurt my nose (they have those twiddly plastic nubs on wire that rest either side of your nose rather than a moulded plastic bit of the frame – I could probably look up the technical terms, but glasses-wearers will know what I mean), and so tonight I went through all my ancient pairs to see if I could find a better option for exercise glasses.

Glasses collection
My glasses, 2000-present. The fact that a lot of them have broken arms and/or loose lenses perhaps indicates I’m a bit harder on glasses than I should be.

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was fifteen, but a lot of my old pairs are broken.  Yes, I keep them around anyway – I’ve taken steps to curb my hoarding tendencies in recent years, but when a complete collection is involved the lure of eventually running a crazy old lady museum where I can show terrified visitors my Complete! Unbroken! Line! of glasses going back to 2000 is too great, and so the stuff stays in my possession.  I have some issues.

Anyway, other than my current ones and my now-uncomfortable pair, I only have two unbroken pairs in my collection, and one of them a) is my very first pair and hence far too ancient a prescription, b) has similar discomfort issues from what I remember, and c) has thin wire frames like my current pair, so would have the same Croakies issue.  That leaves a grand total of one option, which I’ve been wearing tonight to see if the feel is okay.  As you might expect from an older pair of glasses, the prescription does feel a bit off, but for cardio that doesn’t matter too much – it’s really just to keep me from being so blind I’m bumping into people.  One of the lenses also looks slightly warped in the frame, but after some experimental fiddling I reckon it’s lodged in there pretty firmly and probably not at risk of coming loose.  As such, I think they’ll do.

I probably should just buy another pair for exercise at some point, but due to a new house and car, 2018 is definitely not going to be a spendy year, so that may be a 2019 project.