Stuff. It's such a catch-all word. It can mean many things in many contexts. "Did you get that stuff, I sent you?" "Did you see that stuff on the floor" "When are you going to get rid of that stuff". The word "stuff" can mean anything from virtual documents or photos to the concrete objects of our world.
Today, I'm looking at "stuff" in the sense of the things that we buy - concrete physical objects that inhabit our home or yard. We all buy stuff at some point in our lives. We pay good money for our stuff. But the truth is, we don't just pay for it once... we pay for it over and over and over again.
A couple of years ago, we took a year off, a sabbatical. We sold our condo, packed all of our stuff and put it in storage and traveled for a year. We had a budget for our year off and, like it or not, part of our budget had to include storage costs for our stuff. We had debated getting rid of many of our precious possessions, but in the end, decided that there were some things with which we just could not part. And once we decided to keep a few things... we decide to keep many things.
So, we spent a lot of time packing our stuff, and then paid a princely sum to haul it to a moving company's warehouse. The storage fees were charged by the pound, and so we ended up paying $325/month to keep our stuff safe and secure. Over the course of our year away, we spent about $4000 on storage. When we came back from our travels, lighter in body and mind, we paid another princely sum to move our stuff across two provinces to our new home.
Having spent about $10,000 on moving, storing and moving our stuff, we wondered what was so important, so valuable that we absolutely had to have it. As we unpacked the boxes, we found many things that... in hindsight... we could have let go of before the whole adventure began. Don't get me wrong, we did some serious decluttering before we packed up all our stuff but we still hung onto a number of things that... in the end... could have been jettisoned before we paid the princely sums.
One of the heaviest, and therefore most expensive, items to store was paper. Books, files, binders, photographs. Paper is heavy. Very heavy. And while one file or photograph may not weigh much, many files and photographs add up to a significant weight. But we attach a lot of value to things made of paper. We hang onto our books because we might read them again some day. We hang onto our file folders full of paper because they must contain something important that we will want to reference some day. We hang onto our photos because we might want to look at them again some day. I don't want to think of how many pounds of paper we packed up and moved to our new home.
Case in point... my old high school annuals. They are hard cover, printed on thick, heavy paper. For years, I have schlepped the annuals with me, from one home to the next. In the last 15 years, I have moved an average of once every two years. Do I ever reference my high school annuals? No. Do I have children who will giggle over the silly hair styles from back then? No. So why do I hang onto them? Memories. Nostalgia. But those are very expensive memories if you consider how often I have paid to move, store and ship these annuals to new abodes. Not to mention the cost of storing them in my home. Living space is charged by the square foot... whether we pay rent or a mortgage... we are paying for every inch of space in our current home. Those annuals have cost me a small fortune over the years.
Last year, I decided to make a dent in my paper mountain... my books, my files, my binders, my photos. I bought a neat little scanner that can suck in stacks of paper all by itself, scan them quickly and dump them into my computer as a pdf file. I scanned old documents that I didn't really reference but wasn't ready to let go of yet. Once scanned, the documents went into the shredder. I scanned old letters and ditched the originals. I came to my old high school annuals and... took out my exacto knife, cut the pages off of the spine and sent them through the scanner. The originals went into the recycle bin.
Right now, I am in the process of scanning my genealogy binders, a slow and laborious task as each piece of paper needs its own individual name. But I have made a dent in the dozen of genealogy binders that I had lining my shelf, and am down to the last three. My home office feels lighter. I feel lighter. I never realized what a burden paper could be, even if all it ever does is sit in a bookshelf or a cupboard. I know it is there. I know that if ever we move again, I don't want to haul that stuff with me. And so, little my little, I pare it down.
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