Find a new life for ourselves… and our possessions

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There is nothing glamorous about clearing clutter. It involves heavy lifting, hard work, and it’s extremely emotional (more on that in my next column), especially if you’ve been in a space for an extended period of time and are dealing with memories of a lifetime. Hiring a professional organizer (with the ability to call team members from her as needed) to accomplish our goals at an accelerated pace, while she guided us and kept us on track, was invaluable.

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Tracy Marsh, founder of House ‘n Order, had agreed to what I thought was an impossible six-week schedule where we would sort, organize, and begin packing up the contents of our basement, master bedroom storage area, attic, the garage and the pool shed. , as well as all the cabinets and closets before including our house in Collingwood in mid-June. A process complicated by the fact that we would be navigating around Rick Dodd Custom Painting’s fabulous and flexible four-person team.

“You eat the frog first,” Tracy said in response to my question as to why we started in the basement. She added that this memorably named productivity method involves tackling and completing the biggest, most difficult work before moving on to other tasks. And as we surveyed the space littered with the contents of an old condo, office, and the detritus of our daughters’ youth, there was no question that this was indeed our “frog.”

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Tracy explained that we would edit items by categorizing them into throw away, recycle, keep, donate, sell, and maybe piles. We also designated Memory Boxes for our daughters, my husband and I, medium sized bags instead of the giant ones she had been looking for, a case where Tracy’s assertiveness came into play. After editing, we would group items into specific categories and place them in labeled bins, arranging them in the space, completing each room before moving on to the next area, and repeating the entire process.

Another great benefit of having Tracy’s expertise was that she made it easy to dispose, donate, and sell our possessions. My husband and I were determined to find a more environmentally responsible solution than dumping the unwanted but functional contents of our house in our local landfill, especially since ours is already at a crisis point and is expected to close in 2023. Or also problematic, that we would waste our time packing and paying a company to transport unnecessary clutter like we did on previous moves.

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Tracy obtained quotes for various moving services and in the end we determined that it would be more economical for us to use our trailer to make trips to the landfill, allowing us to sort and divert items such as recyclables, textiles, electronics, metal, wood and hazardous items.

We then began the intricate dance of redistributing the contents of our house, which became especially challenging as charities that had suspended deliveries during COVID were inundated with donations. We also quickly realized that hosting our own yard sale would be too onerous and thought a community yard sale would be the answer to our prayers until we pulled up with a trailer full of household items only to find they had closed prematurely after be overwhelmed by donations. .

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Tracy was extremely innovative about diverting “our stuff” and would leave most nights with a van full of donations for various deliveries; Two of our favorites are Beaver Valley Outreach, a charity that provides quality programs and services to improve wellness. of people in the community and The Net Shed, a volunteer-run used bookstore that donates its profits to the Meaford Public Library.

Another effective strategy was to put things that were difficult to transport at our curb, and most were picked up in a matter of minutes or hours, and on one lucky day, a man who arrived with many items that we had left and those in our trailer They were picked up by a flatbed truck. Tracy also had a myriad of tricks up her sleeve in terms of buyers, including private sales, specialty stores, consignment stores, and sometime imminent in our future… an auction.

So in the end, while ideally we would have been more mindful of what we brought into our home in the first place, my husband and I, with some great creativity on Tracy’s part, were able to give our formerly loved but no longer in need of items a new life.

Since beginning her writing career as a travel journalist over a decade ago, Dee-Anne Wessel has broadened her focus to include research and writing about ways to lead a full and engaged life.