Saturday, August 12, 2006

I Should be Working on it NOW


Yeah, this cleaning up thing is taking a life of its own. The pile of books shown here represents about half of the ones I'm going to give away. Most are probably useless because they are so obsolete. Some are good, standard references. If I ever need to know any of this again, I'll find the info somehow.

Every time we drive into the garage now, FFP says how its (relatively) cleaned out look gives him pleasure. We plan to spiff it up with paint and sheetrock and some attractive cabinets or shelves. We think a big functional garage is a selling point for a house. But only if it's pretty uncluttered.

Behind our garage is a 'storage room.' We perched FFP's office above this area when we remodeled. We have a laundry room there and shelves, storage cabinets, old file cabinets, a closet under the stairs, a closet we call our 'wine cellar.' FFP is set up there to paint with a drop cloth, easel, etc. although the first and last paintings he completed were done on the floor of the garage when we remodeled the bedroom. There is also an enormous 'rack' of wood and pipe that held oversized file folders for negatives and PMTs and pasted-up art. Back in the day when such were necessary to produce ads. Now we don't produce ads, mostly, and if we do they are just pixels until they are realized in print. We actually offered the filing cabinets on Freecycle and had a pickup set but the people never showed up. FFP and I are discussing what we might use to 'furnish' a storage unit. Should we actually save the enormous beat-up filing cabinets? I think storage units are so expensive that we might reconsider even having one. But I find it hard to see how to do without it. We are definitely going to have the handyman dismantle the giant rack. We've disposed of most of the ancient adverstising stuff.

While I write this, I should be looking through a pile of magazines I just uncovered in my office. I'm feeling better about discarding copies of The New Yorker since they have announced the upgrade of the complete DVD set. I think this is the way of the future, mine anyway. Where you discard the magazines and have the archive available. Ideally it would be on the WEB, but this is certainly more compact. I no longer really want to own movies either. And I'm going through old cassette tapes. One criteria for discarding them is 'do we have the CD?' Another is 'are the tunes available on Rhapsody?' If we could listen on our computers or download the tunes if we wanted them, that would be great. We aren't even talking about the CD collection yet. I'm thinking that when we go to the condo we might have the collection ripped to a hard drive.

What was that tag line for VW back in the sixties? Think small! Yeah, that's it.

2 comments:

Annie in Austin said...

If only your books matched and were covered in neutral, classic colors - then you could sell them for shelf fillers. There have been a few decorating and home styles articles about how important it is to have all the books color coordinated, but apparently no one gives a hoot what is inside the covers since they're not going to read the books anyway.

That's a nice photo of your dad and sister in the August 19th post. Does she have any memories from that time of separation? Or maybe she was too young to remember it.

Annie

Linda Ball said...

I think books make good decoration but NOT when they all match. Now I've got to ditch all those books before I have company!

I'm not sure my sister remembers back then. I know she remembers a couple of years later when she got a baby sister.