Time - Who's Got It?

Cleaning. Who wants to clean?

Does it add to one's enjoyment in life?

Does it put food on the table?

Ok, this is only week number 2 and I'm having trouble following through. There are so many more important things in life to handle. Things that put food on the table. Things like reading emails, job hunting, gardening (literally putting food on the table - I couldn't resist that one).

So really, why bother cleaning?

I have an answer to that.

When my cousin Alison moved from Texas to New York, she shipped her worldly possessions in a moving truck. Since I only had a small apartment in the city, all of her things were not going to fit with all of my things. So we put most of her stuff and some of my stuff in storage. After a while we realized that spending that money every month wasn't the best, so we got rid of things, moved things around and put the rest over at my dad's. But unfortunately, dad's shed isn't moisture or mouse proof and Alison lost the queen size mattress to mold and things got eaten.

When Sheila's mom passed away and her step-father moved out of this house, we helped him move his stuff to storage. When he moved to Texas he took a few of his prized possessions and, being that most of the stuff he had in storage was originally his wife's, he gave that to her daughter, Sheila, along with the other stuff they had in storage prior to them moving into this house. So we inherited two storage spaces worth of their stuff.

I knew from moving Alison into my apartment, out of my apartment, into another apartment, moving my brother into NYC, moving both separately my apartment and Sheila's apartment from Hell's Kitchen to Jackson Heights, and moving various other friends in New York, all in the time of four years that moving to Connecticut was going to be a big task. So each weekend, as we were house hunting, which lasted six months, we moved boxes into one of the storage spaces left to us by Sheila's step-father.

When it came time to finally move we hired movers. I didn't want to lose friends by asking them yet again to help me move, plus we were going to take a whole week day off from work to do it. The guys I found were really good at packing little items into every space of that truck. I hired them for four hours. And extended it another two. And extended it another two. These guys packed every tiny item from our apartment into that 18' Penske truck. I know how to pack things pretty good after living in New York City for 13+ years and even I was impressed with how much they got in there. It took the two of them, Sheila and I eight solid hours of packing. Now, I'm only talking about moving things to the van and loading them in the van. Sheila and I had taken the day before to pack things into boxes. We knew enough not to leave it to the day of the move. And our mini-van was packed tight too. And still we had to throw things away. Eight full hours of loading, and Sheila and I worked another two hours after that. Plus the full day of packing the day before.

When we left that night, the Penske truck swayed from side to side as I drove up I95. There was so much weight from the contents that the truck could have tipped over. I couldn't go over 40 miles an hour. What does it cost to replace a moving truck? I'm glad I didn't have to find out.

While it was nice that Sheila recovered some of her childhood possessions, we didn't need the expense of two storage spaces. So over the next eight months, we condensed one of the storage spaces into the other. After getting repair work done in the basement and throwing out half of the contents from there, we decided to get rid of the expense of the second storage space. I again hired movers to help. There were over 100 boxes in storage. It's now all in our basement. Using the packing skills learned in NYC, I've piled the boxes floor to ceiling and now there's only a goat path through the basement. You can get to the electric box, boiler and water heater and that's it, as you can see from the pictures in Sheila's post.

There's a cost. For the space to store this stuff – either a storage space in the form of monthly rent, or at dad's house or our house in the form of a mortgage. You wouldn't buy a house so you could have more stuff. But you might not feel like you need to buy a bigger house, which costs more, if you didn't have so much stuff. There's the dollar cost of moving the stuff and the time cost. There's a cost on keeping the stuff in decent condition with heating and air conditioning. There's the time cost spent sorting through the stuff looking for something you can't find since you've got so many boxes to look through or your organization of the stuff is lacking. And the time spent trying to manage it all; piling boxes, moving them around, planning, organizing, hiring, renting, etc.

So why bother cleaning? Are you willing to pay these costs? Ok, I answered a question with a question, but the answer to the first lies in the answer of the second.