The boxes are (almost) done...

The silence you've enjoyed since 17 August was partly me being painfully ill (is there any other kind of ill?) and me working feverishly to migrate stuff to the standard letter/legal storage boxes.

First, I love the Staples boxes. You can purchase them online and have them delivered to your door for only $18.99 for 10 boxes - at $1.90 per box, that's cheaper than anything else I can find. Plus, you can go to a store and get the same boxes for only $14.99 for 10 boxes - $1.50 apiece. They've undergone a minor design update in the last month and are now even easier to put together, IMO.

So now all my holdings are in these standard boxes, labeled, with the location of each box noted. I took a few videos over the transformation from embarrassing "before" state to organized "after" state. Video footage to be posted later (today?).

Part of the reason for the "feverish" effort was the availability of my college-aged daughter and two friends willing to trade hours of their lives for money I would have wanted to give them anyway to tide them over hard times. Win win all around.

I was close in estimating the amount at 300 boxes. I've got 295 boxes labeled, with 10 boxes of books yet to be labeled and about 6 boxes of games I'd forgotten my husband had in the attic. By the time I post video, I should know the total number of boxes we have currently. At that point the boxes go under "configuration management," and we can determine the baseline against which reductions in holdings will officially be measured.

Last night my friends came over, and we scanned books for 4 boxes and sorted "electronics." I now have a crate of old cables for "Keeping it Green" Computer Recycling. Plus we donated a large bag of stuff to whichever charity was driving around for pick-ups this morning. We have about 5 charities that call periodically asking to come to our house to pick up donations - how sweet is that?

I had been prioritizing boxes as:

1 - urgent
2 - easy to go through but not urgent
3 - hard to go through and not urgent

Once I had the list in front of me, I determined that:

2/3 of the urgent boxes will probably be able to disappear
5/6 of the "hard to go through" boxes will probably be able to disappear
1/6 of the "easy to go through" boxes will likely go away

So after all this is done, I'll probably still have 150 boxes. Bummer. At least I'll be able to find the stuff I've decided to keep!