Day to Day

We did it. We made it through the books category without killing each other or ourselves. (Or having the kids kill us.)

TW went through all of the cookbooks last night. I went through them after her — twice. Elly indicated she wanted to go through them and then she didn’t. Turns out she wasn’t attached to any specific cookbook (though she probably is and we were smart enough to feel joy for those anyway) but was attached to the idea of all the cookbooks, always and forever, amen.

Which is pretty much how we feel about all of our books, which is why we really did need to take each one off of the shelf and hold each one in our hands and THEN make a decision about a book.

It worked well and here’s our final talley:

We have a total of eight full-size billy bookcases. Five have height extenders. We also have two corner Billys with height extenders. There are five small bookcases upstairs in the girls rooms. Before we started, all of the shelves were full plus we had books stacked in other locations around the house. And, a big rubbermaid bin full of books.

Now, we have 13 full-size Billy shelves that are completely empty. There are four corner Billy shelves that are empty. The bookcases in the girls rooms upstairs are mostly empty. There are no piles of books anywhere (except in boxes and bags to donate, lol) and the rubbermaid bin is empty of books. I have one stack of magazines that bring me joy.

The donation pile/recycle pile looks like this.

5 kitchen-sized garbage bags were recycled.
33 grocery shipping bags were filled.
14 boxes full of books (most are UHaul book boxes but some are amazon boxes of different shapes and sizes, a box for copy paper, and a flat for some sort of fruit or veggies from Costco.

I’m really pleased with how well we did. I also think we’ll be able to discard some more when we pack out next year. I don’t think we’ll discard a lot, at that point — but some more things will go.

One other note — there are 12 shelves of OLD books/series that mostly bring us joy. They’re sentimental favorites and so we did not really touch them at all during this phase of KonMari. We will revisit them at the very end of the process, though I suspect most, if not all, will bring us joy.

We’re pretty much through all of the books and magazines — though I’m very sure there are some lurking in corners and drawers and all the places that we will stumble upon later — and I’ve learned a lot from this exhausting process.

There are some things that bring us joy, things we just cannot let go.

Children’s books, obviously. We knew that going in. I, however, was more ready to let go of children’s books than TW was. I was more likely to keep books that I knew my children loved, because they’ve said so or because I have strong memories of them reading those books (or asking me to read them aloud.) TW was more likely to keep children’s books that brought her joy… whether they brought the children joy, or not. I let go of a whole lot of Newberry winners that brought ME joy but never brought my kids any joy at all. TW retrieved them from the discard pile because they brought her joy. I get it. That was me the last time we discarded a lot of books. lol

I had trouble letting go of orange books… but not nearly as much as I’d expected. I love orange. I love Penguin books. Turns out I was ok letting go of a whole lot of orange that really didn’t bring me joy except that they were orange and they were Penguins. Hah. I can always buy more Penguins later. 😉

We both had a whole lot of trouble letting go of non-fiction. Anything about women or children or minorities in general, we seemed to keep. Anything American history related, we seemed to keep. TW has a fondness for math and science books — me, not to much lol. Children’s non-fiction, oy. Don’t even get me started. I think we’re going to have to weed some more of those out later. How many visual dictionaries do we need?

Poetry. I was more likely to discard poetry anthologies but TW plucked them right back off of the discard pile. We have all the poetry in the world. If you need it, we have it.

Last, but not least, lesbian fiction. The good, the bad, the ugly — we have it and we are keeping it. It’s hard to let that go. You never really know if a library will have lesbian fiction, and certainly not old lesbian fiction. There’s also the question of what would happen to those books after we donated them. I’m ok with the fact that once books are donated, anything might happen to them. They might be recycled, they might not. I just don’t want to think about all of these lesbian novels landing in a recycle bin or worse. All of the Naiads, oh the Naiads. Sometimes you just want to read lesbian fiction. Sometimes you just NEED to read bad lesbian fiction.

There you go, a look into which books bring us joy… and why.

I’ve decided Marie Kondo is right, you should really KonMari your house all at once, rather than doing a little bit at a time.

I said I was going to do like one bookshelf a day and that started off well but I found myself with a half a bag of books to discard and felt the need to just fill the bag, so I moved to another shelf. Which led to having another not full bag and so it went.

Before I knew it, we had done all of the bookshelves in the office! That was a lot of books and we got it done in just a couple of days. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough grocery bags to pack them all up. I never thought I’d reach a point in my life where I did not have enough grocery bags. That’s just nuts.

We’ve got 24 bags of books ready to go. I have enough for another three or four bags full stacked up on the dining room table, because I think I can scratch up enough bags for those. Then, we’ve got a flat box that came from our last Costco visit filled with books — that’s probably another three or four bags worth of books.

This leaves us with 2 Billys (no height extenders) full of non-fiction books and another Billy (no height extender) of cookbooks plus another two or three stacks of mostly cookbooks to go through. I’m trying to hold off on doing those because we have no bags to put the discards in but I’m feeling the urge to just do it. And, I know TW is also feeling the urge.

Maybe I can hold off a bit by jumping to magazines, though I’d kind of thought about doing magazines on Friday when I have a day off of work. That would be fun for me to just relax in bed with a huge stack of magazines…

Who knows… I just keep changing my mind, lol.

I’ve changed my mind about the books again.

Last weekend, the little girls went through all of the books that were upstairs in their room and in “Michelle’s room” and that was freaking interesting as hell.

RJ has always been a heavy reader. She’s like her mom and me and always had her nose in a book. Always. She wanted to bring her book to the dinner table. She didn’t want to go anywhere or watch TV, she just wanted to read.

Elly read but not like that. I’ve rarely seen her with a book in her hand unless someone was reading a book to her. Turns out, she’s a sneaky reader.

When we were going through her first shelf of books, she swore that she loved all of her books and they all brought her joy. I found that unlikely because I was pretty sure she hadn’t read most of them. Turns out, we were both wrong.

The third book on her shelf, she wanted to get rid of. And all sorts of books I had no idea she’d read — she had. She’s been a closet reader all her life and I didn’t realize the extent of that reading life until we went through about 500 books.

She’s also very much like me and found it hard to discard books she enjoyed reading. She may never read them again but those books bring her joy — so we kept them.

RJ, on the other hand, discarded almost everything. I had to almost beg her to keep some books that I know she loves. I think she was having trouble with the whole keep the things you love part because she’s also heard her parents talk about not storing her stuff in our homes after she’s grown. I thought she understood that while WE (at least) won’t store every piece of crap in her room, we will absolutely store the things she truly loves if she isn’t able to take them with her immediately. But no, I don’t think she grokked that.

So upstairs there are piles and piles of books to discard. I took one bag to the Friends of the Library this week (adult books that were upstairs) but the majority of those books are children’s books. We’d rather donate them to Bernie’s Book Bank and I don’t really want to have to try and just take a couple of bags any time we might drive down the closest drop-off spot. Instead, I’d like to just load up the car and take them all to the main drop-off location and get it done.

So, that’s my new plan. TW and I will go through just the children’s books this weekend and next week when we go to the Navy base, we’ll swing past the donation point on the way.

And, once we finish children’s books, we’ll move to magazines and then we’ll jump to paper while also looking for joy among the adult book shelves over the next month or two.

I’m hoping we have clothes, books, paper and dvds/cds/videos completely done by the end of July… I think we can do it.