Clean House

Some friends of ours gave us the perfect baby gift a few months ago: 12 hours with a professional organizer. (If the organizer wants more time with us, they might up the number of hours.)

Sadly, anyone who knows us knows that this gift is long overdue. We aren't at the level of needing to be condemned, though we are at the level of piles of mail, stacks of laundry, mountains of junk, and overflowing closets, basement and storage shed.

I like to think that it is simply due to the merging of two houses, but sadly, I know it is more than that. Both of us have an inability to get rid of anything. For me, it is because I am afraid that I might need it again, and I hate to think about the money wasted by purchasing something new. I am much happier getting rid of stuff now that I know about Freecycle. Dyke Two, on the other hand, refuses to get rid of things because she can't shake the scars of growing up with nothing that belonged to her. Living in poverty will do that to you. Too many times of getting evicted and losing your belongings will make anyone hold on to even the strangest of items.

Dyke Two also thinks that someday, people will want to go to the Dyke Two Museum. She is saving her report cards, her high school basketball uniform, her baby booties, and (my personal favorite) her dreads for inclusion in the museum. (She also thinks we should save the vials the sperm came in, the plastic speculum we used for the insemination, the eye droppers and oral syringes from Bigfella-making.)

By the middle of August, we want to have two functional bedrooms upstairs, a playroom and office area downstairs, and a basement and shed that have room for the basementy and sheddy items like lawnmowers, power tools, Hannukah decorations, and outgrown baby gear (for number 2, don't you know??) instead of the old dishes, two microwaves, an extra kitchen table, a moldy futon and boxes and boxes of my teaching crap that currently have taken over our storage areas.

I don't know how many of you get the Style Network, but we are hoping our organizer is more Neicy Nash than Martha Stewart.