Cleaning up my storage
January 6th, 2008
The holiday dinners are over, all the dishes are put away, and we are looking for places to store our decorations and opened presents. This is the time of year we make room for the new by cleaning house. We review all the things we have accumulated over the past year. We find things that we stuffed away in corners or on top of cabinets when we were too busy to store things away properly. There are huge economy size COSTO packages of dog food and toilette paper filling our closets and pantries which we hope to us over time. We find duplicates of things that we bought because we forgot or could not find the original. There are items that we bought but never use like a kennel for a dog that was supposed to live outside, but now sleeps in the family room. I must have 10 pounds of nails and screws of assorted sizes, but I never find the one I need when I want to replace a screw in the garage door or hang a picture. I need to throw out a lot of things because of limited floor space and I am not looking to move to a bigger house. I find that disposing of old electrical gear is costly now due to hazardous waste disposal fees. The big questions are what do we discard and what do we keep, and if we keep it, where do we store it so that we can find it again.
While we go through this process in our household, I also do this at work. The first short week after New Years, I spent cleaning out my desktop. Fortunately the task here is much easier. There are tons of reports and periodicals that I discard, because I can always recovery them on the web or Sharepoint. I delete whole months of email and PST files and my mail box is now down to a reasonable size again without the fear of losing critical data. Fortunately we have archiving tools which remove in active data from my desktop. Thanks to web links, Sharepoint, archiving, and search tools, it makes it a lot easier to clean out my desk top than it is to clean out my home storage.
Eventually I may have to do what my parents did with their home storage, leave it to the kids as an inheritance.
