My enthusiasm and stamina for de-lofting is wavering.
It's physically quite hard work, even without the added challenge of the below chest height beams. DH has removed some of the Ikea shelving which had been making access to one area almost impossible. I did my glutes in trying to extract a heavy box, and that box was only at floor level.
The first aisle is now mostly waiting for DH to go through stuff, and I'm happy with that.
The stuff in the middle aisle has mostly been sorted through. Crates are on shelves and stacked on the floor, not necessarily in their final place in the eventually-sorted loft, but out of the way.
The third aisle has extra Ikea racking (even with DH haveing removed stuff), and this still holds quite a lot of stuff that was "I can't think about this yet" stuff as we sorted. INitially it was packed with stuff, but I've dealt drastically with loads of it. It won't take long to sort the remaining bits, once the rest of the loft is done.
There are eaves on one side which need to be gone through, but I've decided to wait until my now-limited enthusiasm returns before I start tackling that.
If I run out of enthusiasm, I want to leave the loft in a way where it will be easy to pick up again later.
My strategy for doing that is I am now doing soimething in the loft every day, but only a (relatively) small something.
I write a list of the small somethings each night for the following day. This has worked out well, although some things turned out to be less small than I expected. Others were fantastic.
I found a few things in there that I didn't remember at all, so they went. And lots of things that brought me much joy.
I shared photos os some of the items with relevant people so they could have that warm memory too.
Another small something was "empty 2 box files of paperwork". The previous couple of weeks I had sorted the paperwork into separate box files. I didn't need it, but I didn't want to throw it away. I also didn't want the kids to have to deal with it, so my plan was to write on the box that it could be destroyed so they didn't have to go through it.
I realised that (for some of the boxes) it wasn't really worth keeping them. As a compromise, I decided I would make sure that everything in the boxes had been scanned, and then I'd destroy the originals. That worked well with one box file, but then it wasn't that easy.
Several of the boxfiles contained booklets of personal information. At the time I'd received them, I'd scanned the most important pages, I'd had to use a flatbed scanner so the quality wasn't great. I decided I'd slice the booklets so I could then use my normal scanner to scan everything. This meant that every booklet had to be taken apart and trimmed, then scanned, then added to the pile of stuff to shred or burn.
It took a while.
Another box file contained pension history. This was a mix of booklets and data. I went through everythin, item by item, to see whether I had a scanned copy. Some bits I hadn't scanned (I presume I scanned them and then didn't file the scan properly). Some items were too big for the scanner so I had to tackle apart, trim and scan. I did keep some of the paperwork for this, but I was so ruthless that I'm happy with what I've done.
It took quite a while.
Some of the small tasks are peripheral. The large filing cabinet in the loft is going to go (that will be fun!). I'm going to put a small filing cabinet up there, one of the two that are in daily use. They are being replaced with a sidefiler. One of the small tasks was "empty filing cabinets into temporary crates". Another task for a different day was "bring fc1 downstairs" (fc1 = filing cabinet1)
As my enthusiasm wanes, some tasks are very small indeed , such as "print labels for record boxes and stick on". "bring wedding china downstairs and stack in crates" (no stressing myself out my making myself do assomething with it, yet)
I've already decided where my likely hiatus point will be, and I'm really just trying to make sure I get to that.
Not long now.
