What has two thumbs and likes to de-clutter?

As I mentioned in my last post, I did a little bit of re-organizing this week in order to free up some space for Zelda the Pig.

I had these cookbooks in a cart in the bay window area, and as you can see in the picture, it was kind of a messy situation.

Not great.  In moving the cart out in order to clear space for Zelda, I had to find a new spot for the cookbooks that were there.  I happened to have this IKEA hutch on the other side of the couch that has housed this ancient stereo ever since I moved in here 7 years ago.  (And I don't even want to know how many years before that, when it was in my parents' house!)

Cassette player - I know!  OLD!!

It got even worse recently when I started clearing out my VHS tape collection.  I had probably at least a hundred of them stored in my big white bookcase in the living room until several months ago, and then decided to clear them out of there and update my media to something *not* from the last century.  (Honestly, though, I think this was actually a 2013 New Year's resolution, so when I say "recently" that's really just to cover for my embarrassingly slow progress on this work.)

Knowing that I was most likely just going to trash most of them, I thought it would be actually helpful to not have another storage place to put them, and to just keep them kind of stacked around - you know, as a reminder to do something about them.  This approach sounds sort of weird, but it's worked for me before; if I just make myself crazy enough with a particular mess, eventually I'll be motivated enough to do something about it.

And in this case it worked!  Although clearly it took a looooooooong time.  I tried a bunch of different things to dispose of the VHS tapes.  First, I tried selling the Disney ones online through Amazon.  I sold a couple, but it actually cost me money to do it because of the high shipping costs.  So there was that.  A huge number of the commercial movies I had I donated to a nursing home run by the husband of a friend of mine.  Apparently the old folks really dig my taste in movies :)  There was a third group of tapes that were old Berg home movies - mostly dance videos - and I couldn't bear to throw those out.  And let's be honest, the world would probably be a worse place without those things floating around.  So this morning, I took action.

That's right, I got rid of ALL of it.  I took the stereo to an electronics recycling location, and dropped it off.  And the home dance movies I took to UPS to ship them off to this website which will digitize them for me and put them on DVDs.  The result is freeing up an amazing amount of space, both in and around the hutch. 

That corner feels so much more open than it did before.  I think eventually I'm going to get an iPhone or iPod dock with a CD player to put on top of the hutch, so that I can still have some kind of music-playing device with better speakers than my computer.

But for the time being, I'm just delighted to have finally been able to check a few major items off a longstanding to-do list.  Productivity rules!