Organizing the Apartment: An Initial Survey

About 4 weeks ago, the Washington Post began a series of articles called "Organizing the Attic." The articles follow the Post's deputy editor for the Home section as she embarks on controlling the chaos on her top floor. I've been religiously reading the weekly entries and anxiously awaiting the teaser lines for the next week's topic. Last week, organizing holiday decorations, was not very useful since I don't really have any in our tiny apartment. However, this week's post about organizing books could not have been more timely.

Given that we only have 56 more days until lift off, last weekend Jesse and I decided to start unravelling the chaos of stored items in the apartment. The idea of packing up all of our stuff was a little overwhelming, so we decided we had to start somewhere. We couldn't know what to toss and what to keep if we had no clue what was stored in the depths of our "organization." So we decided to divide and conquer. Jesse burrowed into our walk-in closet and I got started on the books. Like the editor of the Washington Post articles, I'd like to be able to easily use my husband as a scapegoat for the shelves of books around our home, but alas, I too came into this relationship with a lot of book baggage. And since we both contributed to the problem, we both had to make decisions about which books we thought we might actually use again. It felt good to go through the titles that we hadn't read in a while, and to stumble on the total head-scratchers like the duplicate copies of three different volumes of Foucault.

Most of my Saturday afternoon was spent flipping through dusty pages, assessing their condition, and posting them on Amazon's Marketplace. I was astonished how many we sold in just 24 hours (this photo shows only half of what I sent out this week). We both wondered why we hadn't done this a long time ago, but then realized that we probably would have spent the cash on gadgets or beer. So, the moral of the story is that hoarding actually worked in our favor this time. All of those books that were just collecting dust might actually pay for one of our plane tickets to Portland. Sweet!

Next step: the CD collection (insert evil laugh). I liked The Crane Wife's post Wednesday about taming the wild music beast, but I imagine I'd incite an all-out mutiny on Columbia Road if I advocated the philosophy of "in with the old." And, to Jesse's credit, he does purge the collection occasionally. So, for now, I'm hoping for a system of storage that doesn't include the double-deep layering thing that makes it nearly impossible to access entire letters of the alphabet!