Bags and Bins and Drawers

Today I am cleaning *that* room. The "just toss it in the pink room" abandoned bedroom that comes along when the older kids have long-past moved out. In Hogwarts they have The Room of Requirement. We have The Pink Room. This will easily take all day.

It's not just the obvious piles of carnival plush animals, doll clothes, books judged wrongly by their covers, it-was-a-birthday-present trinkets, outgrown shoes, and does-this-still-fit, have-you-grown-into-this, will-you-ever-wear-it fashions. That's the easy part. What really gets you are the dreaded drawers and boxes filled with every paper, bead, Happy Meal toy, pencil eraser and stray Fashion Polly shoe a kid ever decided needed to be stuffed safely out of range of a room cleaning.

The quick solution would be to not even look; to just dump contents into trash bag and move on. But that's not the way I roll. No. My wiring requires that I examine each object and run a complicated cost-benefit analysis. This includes things like weighing preservation of childhood memories -- because we all tell the story of what we used to have but then Mom threw it away -- against current resale value and associated effort of listing it on e-bay, and even crazy contemplation of having the time and energy to hold a yard sale. Would a thrift store even want it? Don't forget possible future grandchildren's needs -- who doesn't remember that cool bin of magical old toys in Grammy's closet? Take the square root of "how handy would this be in a post-apocalyptic world?" and divide that by how much space is left in the attic to get your decision. Sounds complex, but I can run that formula so quickly it would make your head spin. This whole process would still be reasonably efficient, but for the wildcard. My one remaining child  at home, the teenage daughter, will be helping.

I use the term "helping" very loosely. More accurate would be "in the role of court appointed guardian of the emotional attachment to items she forgot she ever laid eyes on." This is why your teachers in school assign group work -- teaching you to work with others, to influence and manipulate for the results you want, and to look at the finished job and be proud of it at the end of the day. You probably had thought it was just sadism on the part of the teachers, or a clever ploy to have less work to grade. Or maybe you thought it was for your future employment success. Nope. It was so that you could clean a room with your kids without inflicting or incurring emotional injury.

And no, we don't have to do it this way. We choose to. I bought bins for the treasures, and bags for the giveaways and trash. Let's do this thing!