Caught in the flow

My folks are coming to visit at the end of the week, a prospect that always lights a fire under our simmering urge to make our home more livable. (Yes, Mom and Dad, it does get worse than what you see!) Noel has ambitions to organize our extensive collection of games and to pass books the kids have outgrown on to new owners.

He's calling this "de-hoardifying" the house, the idea being to make our home less like one of the places profiled on A&E's Hoarders. Not that we qualify for the show. We have teetering stacks of DVDs covering every available flat surface, yes, but we don't have psychological issues that prevent us from getting rid of them. Instead we have logistical and physical issues getting rid of them. You see, they just keep coming. A dozen a day, most days. I counted once while Noel was out of town; 60 DVDs or sets of DVDs arrived in one week. If you're not actively pushing them back out the door at the same rate, they quickly become an organizational nightmare.

And how do you push them out the door? We're not going to send them to the landfill. They're actually worth something to someone, if you can make the effort it takes to find that someone (a reseller or an end consumer). Again, though, at 250 flowing in a month, just making that effort to redirect them back out again is costly in terms of time and energy.

Every few months Noel makes a big dent in the DVDs, CDs and comics (notice how I didn't even mention the last two) by hauling them to a store or sending them to a reseller. But we haven't been down to level zero -- that is, only having in the house the media we actually want to keep -- in many years. If we ever manage to get back there, I might not recognize the place.