I’ve felt for a couple months that I wanted to get in the back room of my house–a ‘storage pit’ we call ‘the fire swamp’ if that’s any indication of its normal state–and clean it out. 5-10 years ago it was my home office, when I was doing programming and project management for a living. The last 5, since I switched to a ‘corporate’ job, its become the overstuff broom closet of the house.
The whole house needs massive purging, followed by spring cleaning. I don’t just have a realization of this intellectually, but a growing sense of physical dissatisfaction, as if I can FEEL it. Feel the mess in the drawers of my captain’s bed, feel the chaos of the back room, as if my psyche is mapped to my house somehow.
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Last week I moved this tall wooden chest of drawers from the back room into my bedroom, where it began 10 years ago. It can’t stay here, or at least, something must change if it does. There is no room for it in the current layout, 4 of the 6 drawers will not open because the bed is in the way. My room (this is an old house) has a wood floor, wooden hall and closet doors, wooden frames around doors and window, two small wooden end-table things, a wooden slant-desk, a wooden bookcase headboard and a queen size double-layer wooden captain’s bunk. I think I’ve got the wood element pretty well covered for sure. The last thing this room needs, in my opinion, is anything else made of wood… it’s only about 10’x11′ or so. But I needed to get the drawers out of the fire swamp, in order to facilitate some other prep work back there which I planned to continue this weekend.
That whole corner of my bedroom where I put it–unlike the rest of the room which is utterly stuffed with heavy wood stuff–is completely empty. Has been for a long time. This is simply because there isn’t so much room for anything so if you want to be able to walk around the end of the bed and along the other side, between bed and window, you have to keep that open. Now all the sudden there is this tall heavy wooden anchor of sorts there.
I was lying in bed, the night we moved the drawers in here, feeling unreasonably content. So much moreso than usual–in my last sleep-deprived 9 weeks of working 110-150+ hours (usually the top-end)–that I actually noticed it and started thinking about why.
After a short time of ‘feeling out the feelings’, I realized the source: the dresser. As irrational as this sounds to my conscious mind, my body felt reassured and calmed and safe, in a way it did not feel without it there. It had what I can only vaguely compare to a ‘parental’ effect, psychologically.
I don’t know why. The only thing I know about feng shui is what I read in a book, and that sometimes when I am getting “intuitive insights,” things like feng shui and astrology sometimes slip in like ‘models’. But it has made such a difference in how I feel this whole week, I can see I need to find a way to maintain this feeling. I don’t know if it is the relationship of it to my bed/body, or the placement of it in the room. (I suspect the latter, oddly.)
It occurred to me that the room was stuffed with heavy things and then, in the ‘wealth’ corner, was starkly empty. Huh. Bit of a parallel to my own situation lately. Aside from that, if you really divide my structure properly, that area is actually part of the wealth sector of the structure too, as that area of structure extends about 4 feet into my room.
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The whole Fire Swamp is the Wealth section of the house. So if ever a miserable life situation needed symbolic help, this is it.
Today I had my friend (whom I pay for housekeeping help) come spend about 7 hours helping me start on the back room. Just start on, mind you, it’s that bad. We got a lot more done than I expected though. About 4-5 of those huge 39 gallon trashbags of stuff to toss, another half dozen of those, of stuff to give away. My friend takes it all back to her tiny rural town, it’s like a free flea market day, and then whatever is left, she takes to the thrift store. Works for me.
The teens — her boy and girl and my girl — have been hanging out in that room for a long time. They regularly ‘clean’ it, usually after a couple months of tearing it apart. So the number of things which were disgusting, broken, pure trash, sticky with food/candy/gum, containing bizarre crap instead of the nice crap that used to be contained therein, was endless.
I was really in the get-rid-of-this-crap mode. A VCR, two DVD players, a CD/tape/radio box, a hot/cold water dispenser (the sort you put a bottle on top of), and some misc. tools that were dupe if not triplicates of other stuff I have. Extra blankets and pillows and sheets and various curtains. We found a big cache of pictures and I went through every one, fast as I could, and got rid of about 80% of them. (I found pics of my wedding to my now-ex, from 1995, and lots from when Ry, now 14, was an infant and to about a year old, and a few old pics of me around 17-18 and ~23.)
A lot of stuff merely moved, some temporarily, to living room or garage so we could make room in there, such as the old Takamine 12 string guitar, couple ukelele’s which were the ex’s and the kid’s, several recorders from soprano to bass, a drum practice pad. I put my tiny Cube-30 amp and a couple guitar things under my desk, in the bizarre idea I might consider using them, just with the pickup on my primary 6 string, not with my electric (an old Gibson Les Paul) which my dad has, since he uses it for regular gigs. That would be novel, if I did.
It looks very nice and neat and clean in there now. This room came with dark red carpet. Seriously. I had the ceiling and a 12″ ‘cap’ painted light violet ten years ago to sort of compensate for that. So it’s a real ‘chakra’ room you might say. Purple is a color in that FS sector, although not really the pastel, but it was the best I could do. I will find something deep purple to put in there, later.
I have two things left to do for the room, and they are far more massive a job than it might seem. First: the drawers. I designed that room for storage five years ago, taking what I had elsewhere and compiling it there… and now, about 80 stackable semi-clear-front plastic drawers, about 12″w x 16″d x 8″h, literally cover one full wall, from floor to about six foot up. I actually had organized about half of these some years ago, but then we ran out of time, space and energy, and just used the other half to stuff everything randomly into that I didn’t want to get rid of at that moment. Since then, all of them have been used this way. So it’s a big job.
In the tiny closet there are fairly thin shelves from floor to where the hanging rod is. This is stuffed with everything, but originally the idea was, it’s for everything in the “tools” category. 2-to-3-prong plug adapters, duct tape, batteries, basically everything industrious or tool like which is not a liquid cleaner (goes under sink in kitchen) or a major power tool (goes in one of the tool boxes of which there are MANY… someday, I tell myself, I will have a small woodshop). We cleaned out the closet but not the shelves yet.
As for the drawers and shelves, never mind the obvious: “plastic” does not have a place in the feng shui map. 😉
I actually hope, as unlikely as it may be, to get all the drawers and shelves gone through today, as my friend will be back today for her normal housecleaning help and it’s an ideal time for help getting rid of stuff.
When I am done, I want the closet to be only tools-etc., the drawers to be only neatly organized storage of things fairly important to me or very useful, and whatever instruments I still have to be for now neatly stacked on top of the drawers but soon, probably given away or sold, aside from my primary guitar.
I don’t want to ‘hoard’ things I am not using. I feel like there is some wrongness in this. Like it is injust to the things in question. As if every-thing has a destiny of sorts.
Much of the room will be my working office again. I have a desk I may change out when I have funds.
The other side of the room will then be open. I got this gigantic tapestry/bedspread of the River of Sky (the asian-ish flying dragon) for Christmas from my best friend, and I think I might put it up on that wall. The wall needs repainting anyway and is wide open. I would like to find two super long wooden dowels that I could use to wind it around at the top and bottom so it would hang more like a tapestry.
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In my living room, the front 1/3 is the ‘wisdom’ sector of the house (the front covered porch is the rest of that). At the far side, the door actually falls into the ‘helpful people and travel’ sector. I have moved two black bookcases to either side of the window, to match the black pseudo-suede curtains (they have gold sheers behind them), and I moved one of the beautiful long runner-like black rugs with the golden river-of-sky creature on it, to go right between the shelves, against the wall running under the window. We have a b&w, black-framed photo of the Eiffel Tower in France that Ry bought one day, on top of the shelf that is right next to the door, and another b&w photo she bought, of a long open path lined with trees and with these wrought-iron black benches down it, on top of the other shelf. It looks great! I feel as if that sector of the house worked out amazingly well. I should be getting Wiser any day now, haha.
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