CLEAR THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR HOUSE EVERY FIVE YEARS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Obviously, I send stuff to the bins on a regular basis. There’s another mountain of cardboard stashed in the bin this week, and it appeared out of nowhere just after I demolished the last one. The recycling of plastic bottles is endless. Some stuff can only go to rubbish instead of recycling. So…off it goes.
   Rarely, I’ll have to take steps over more specialised waste. Pharmacies still take dead batteries. The only paper I don’t recycle is shredded paper that goes into used paint tins, destroying the last of the moisture in there before responsible disposal can occur.
   Every five years or so, I go for the big clearout. There are big clearouts annually. But after half a decade, it is time to revisit the same old problem. Not enough space. And that’s in a place where I’ve made the most out of the atoms available.
   I’ve been told I’m living as though I am in Tokyo, cramming every possible thing in the universe into a hallway that was in disguise on the property market as a Japanese house. I didn’t know how crammed all the cramming was until earlier this month.
   My old chair died. I replaced it with a new chair. And that chair – the one I am sitting in as I type – is every bit as good a chair. However, it is a teeny tiny wee bit smaller. Suddenly, I feel that I have room to breathe.
   I overcame the temptation to reclaim the extra space in the name of five storage units and a small table. The extra space makes it easier to get to things around the new chair. How stuffed is this place? You know you’ve packed a lot in when rooms have extra lights.
   A reasonable person will place storage units around the walls, and not allow them to project into the room – cutting off light from the central bulb. And a more reasonable person will turn the room into a meandering path through storage, with miniature streetlamps dotted throughout the forest trail. Yes, it is that dim in there. And here. I’m typing under one of those lights right now.
   Every five years or so, it’s time to do battle. This is 2025, ending in 5, and so, for convenience, here we fucking go. I’m late blogging this month, from all the clearing I’ve arranged over the past week.
   Yes, I had a big clearout last year. Wasn’t ruthless enough. That carried over into this year. And…
   This year, I decided I must be more ruthless.
   What stays? Toilets. That’s a legal thing. Also, for my convenience. What goes? Things that lose relevance. You open a drawer and find all the instruction booklets there. How to care for your washing machine. That washing machine left the house three years ago. Why didn’t the pamphlet go to paper recycling when the machine went to recycling?
   One isolated pamphlet. But there are many drawers, and loads of similar things scattered around rooms, across floors, and in the loft. At least the loft is always in motion. At one time it was a static affair. But that takes you to a solid point…
   The solid point is…the loft is packed solid, and I can barely get in there or across it. That’s when I made the loft into temporary storage. Things go there out of the way. Then I arrange for items in the loft to go all the way away.
   They go to Recycleton-by-the-Sea. All of those items are down the local pub having a pint. How do you tackle a massive clearout? In small stages. By that, I mean one large stage at a time. Drawing things out of a room sends them cascading down many hallways that are instantly difficult to navigate.
   You can’t get rid of things when you decide to get rid of things. The big struggle is to extract them from a puzzle of a room. Hallways fill up as you create islands of temporary storage. The goal is the garden. From there all roads lead to Recycling. And possibly to Rome.
   When a cumbersome thing goes into a room and stays there, that’s okay. But when you pack more things in along the route back out, you realise getting a cumbersome item out again is a task beyond mere mortals.
   My advice is never to construct storage inside the room that it stays in. Build the damned thing downstairs. Then wind your way along the tricky path to the final resting-place of this bulky unit or that stately bookcase.
   Foolishly, when there was space in rooms, I did assemble storage inside the room. During this massive clearout, I had to pension off a shaky bookcase. And by fuck, it was a million times easier going in than it was coming back out. That was just going from its spot next to the door….through the door.
   Ideally, certain units are supported by walls. Wall, bookcase, bookcase, bookcase, wall. Thus spake the Lawgivers, and the giving of the law was good, right, just, and proper. Rooms, sadly, have a flaw. Pesky things called doors.
   There’s no way around doors, but there is a way through them. Wall, bookcase, bookcase, space for door. The bookcase shuttered in? Is fine. But the one with an unsupported side will bow out over the passing of the centuries as dust the size of books gathers on top of books the size of books.
   If the individual shelves are screwed in, that’s easier to take. But if floating shelves sit on pins and the shelves bow down with weight as the side panels bow out…thump. A shelf lands on the books below, deep into the night, years after you added that storage to the room.
   When you walk past in the cold light of day – supplemented by light from bonus lamps – you must take a closer look at the disaster-in-the-making. Then you see the side panels are at the limit. Beyond saving, if it’s one of those units that you can’t disassemble without destroying them.
   And so, after years of service under heavy loads, a shaky bookcase had to go. Yes, a unit I foolishly assembled in the room for so-called convenience. Somehow, I managed to use my meagre mountaineering skills to manoeuvre this colossus out from behind the door and through the doorway to a very cramped landing which was now home to three bookcases that weren’t there before. I’d strewn the path with thorns of my own making.
   Made it to the stairs.
   If the whole construction slides out from under me going downstairs, I don’t care. The technique is always the same. I am more important than the rubbish I am removing from the building. If the unit collapses at the bottom of the stairs on being dropped…that is better than my own collapse under the unit at the bottom of the stairs.
   I’ve never surfed a piece of furniture to the lower landing, and I am not about to surf now.
   Making space is good. But after several years of furniture purchasing, the space is so limiting that you must first make space to make more space. Right now I have more space behind that door, right? The shaky bookcase is gone. I’m awaiting the arrival of two units to fill that space.
   But I filled that space with loads of things that came off the bookcase. Those are on other shelves, on the floor, piled on boxes and crates, you name it. I have to clear the space to put units in there and then fill those units. It’s going to be close.
   Meanwhile, waiting, I am making that easier by employing ruthlessness. What, in that room, can I remove? I created a cardboard mountain by ditching this box here and that box there. Easy.
   I turned a bookcase sideways, giving me less-easy access. But that allowed me to reposition the weighty drawer unit with the weightier laser printer atop it. When the new units come in, I’ll have the same storage space but more room to get by.
   Yes, I reached that point. I can only add a bookcase if I take a bookcase away. Dying units are sent to a Swiss Clinic. What else goes? Charity items. Physical media changes. With the advent of 4K movies and TV shows, the bulkiness goes away.
   Simply moving from a DVD set of The Sopranos to Blu-ray saved me an entire shelf. If someone in a charity shop is happy with their purchase, I am happy to ease the space constrictions on my movie storage shelves.
   Physical media is still a thing. If I want to watch the first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child, I can pop the disc in. Hell, I can even watch the unaired pilot as a special feature. There’s a dispute over the rights to the episode.
   Yes, the BBC has many episodes available to watch. Not the first one, though. Internet remedies to this problem are unsatisfactory. My best bet is to rely on physical media and pop the disc in. Far better quality than going online. For separate legal reasons, an episode can vanish from the BBC so that it is updated. In light of a scandal, say.
   Streaming comes with these complications. What if your favourite show is only your favourite show and the streaming company makes room for something else? That’s just too bad. Your show went away. Still, you’ll always have Paris.
   The 4K collections move in. And my trips to the charity shops become part of the massive clearout. Recycling plays a large part in this. A cardboard mountain may be a dreadful thing, but it is a recyclable thing.
   Polystyrene, on the other hand, is purely the Devil’s Work. Woe unto ye who doth truck with the idolatry of amassing a mountain of polystyrene, for this will not go well with ye. It’s the worst.
   The main plan is to gather it in one place, instead of having isolated pockets of the menace. I fear if it resides in the one spot for too long that the behemoth will form arms and legs and march upon a major city. This would get it out of the house, but it’s hardly ideal.
   I am missing a whole bunch of books. They didn’t come off the shaky bookcase. I went looking for them, and they’d moved. Knowing me, I preserved each shelf somewhere else. On another bookcase. Rooms are in tatters on the floor, and I can’t get to some places without going on an expedition.
   The good news is that once it’s all back on shelves, the whole place will have more space in it. Alchemy. Sorcery. Call that act what you will. I endure chaos in the pursuit of less chaos. Not the pursuit of order. I’m not deranged. Just slightly mad. About books. Ah, yes, that’s it.
   So far, I haven’t injured myself in getting rid of stuff. A miracle. The heavy-duty boots go on for furniture removal. Gloves prevent cardboard cuts when breaking up hefty boxes. Coffee soothes the troubled brow between stints of hefting and heaving large objects through tiny doors.
   What used to be stored for eternity is now up for renegotiation. What is that, there? Why do I have it? How did it get here? Why would I keep it? How do I move it to the bins? Must I use specialised disposal methods?
   Nostalgia has its place. And that place is now in the recycling bins. I keep an old computer in case this computer dies. Yes, I have an emergency laptop. That could die, too. The most levels of computer fuckery I’ve had to deal with? Two machines, dying one after the other in quick succession. So, yes, the spare died and I was very nearly out of commission.
   Since then, I’ve made sure I can temporarily rely on past machines. They are stored out of the way. As their operating systems cease being supported, they are killed off. There’s emergency provision, up to a point. I don’t get nostalgic about old computers.
   Cables. Why the fuck do I have so many cables? How many can I ditch? Loads, as it turns out. I still have loads of active cables, despite owning wireless machines. There is no nostalgia for the cables of yesteryear. And no space for them.
   Desks? My desk is a fixture. No wiggle room. It is solid, and needn’t be replaced. If I had to replace it, I’d require very precise measurements. The office shredder is under there, and it is the largest shredder I’ve ever owned. As long as the desk holds together, I see no problem. Which is why I periodically check furniture for signs of impending collapse.
   I’m looking around at curious things. You never know when you are going to need…and you realise, during the next clearout, that you never used that thing that you never know...and so it goes in a puff of flame, or leaves in a cardboard box, or it just flops into a bin almost by itself. But was it pushed off the cliff? Yes, yes, it was.
   Occasionally I contemplate removing a door from a room. This is a fire-risk, though, and I come to my senses. What would a door do for me if it became an empty doorway? Let me calculate…
   I’d get a tall bookcase in here, obstructing more light. In my library, a lack of door would do nothing, based on its positioning. There’s a room where I’d sneak in a small bookcase. Not much use. Better to have barriers impeding the advance of smoke in an emergency.
   Am I not ditching books? A few went to recycling. Hell, I never throw digital books out. I’m not THAT pressed for space, just yet.