Stuff - Part One

Copywrite 2009
Kyle Ervin

There are no two ways about it…my parents have a beautiful home. It’s the type of place people dream about living. The type of place you might see gracing the pages of Sunset Magazine. The entire backyard has been landscaped in the Tuscan style sporting a wrap around veranda covering the patio, sand stone planters, stone pavers and brass sculptures. Oh and the fountains, I forgot about the fountains. And that’s just the beginning. The culminating feature (an homage to my father’s love for wine and wine making) is a ½ acre zinfandel vineyard that climbs up the rock wall terraced hill. Walking out their backdoor is like stepping into your own little slice of idyllic Italy…until you trip over the box stuffed to the brim with 5 year old Scientific American magazines.

You see (and there’s no gentle way to put this)…My Parents are both world class pack rats. I mean they’re not so bad that there’s only a single path through the whole house…but that could be because they live in such a big house.

Lest you think I’m being dramatic I will list some of the items they have around their house…

2 lawn mowers
6 ladders – the local fire department envies their ladder collection
16 pet kennels of varying sizes from kitty sized to large dog
5 dog beds – they have two dogs.

I’ve given much thought to this issue, applying my rather keen powers of psychoanalysis and come to this conclusion…Sure my pops probably has some OCD tendencies and Mom definitely shares my Attention Deficit Disorder but that’s not the crux of it. The real problem is that my parents are both very smart, capable and even handy people (can you tell I still want to be in the living trust). They have an almost superhuman ability to rationalize why they’re keeping stuff – “Someone might be able to use that someday”… “I paid good money for that”… “I’m going to fix that”. And when my dad says he’s going to fix the electric air compressor that I broke almost 20 years ago, you know he can, so you let him keep it even though he bought a new one almost 20 years ago. And when my mother says she’s going to fix the dog bed that popped a seem, you know that she can, so you let her keep it, even though the dogs are plenty comfy on the beds they have now.

Another part of the problem is that my parents have a seemingly unending capacity to acquire new stuff. My mom LOVES the antique shops and has now learned that the local Goodwill sells some brand new Stuff. My dad LOVES The Home Depot and the Vintners Supply Store. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Recently, though, their quantity of stuff has reached a level so vast that even their ability to rationalize has been challenged. They’ve become frustrated because their yard is so full of stuff they can’t use it in the manner for which it was designed. They’ve become annoyed because their eight person dining room table is so cluttered with stuff one person would be hard pressed to sit down at it to eat.

Recognizing that they’ve started to soften their grip on all this stuff and hoping to stymie the inevitable avalanche that will eventually land on my sister and me, I packed my family into the minivan for the 375 mile trip north.

We arrived at their home in Brentwood, CA on a Tuesday evening to find that my sister, who had been visiting but was supposed to go home to Indianapolis that morning, had decided to stay a few more days and help out with the cleanup. This was pivotal…it meant we could double team them. Before I had even arrived she had already convinced my dad to rid himself of any magazine older than Jan 2008. This was a total coup when you realize he had issues (still in the plastic covering) going back to before the millennium.

It was great to have sis on board and the two of us decided to keep our sights reasonable, hoping to just get the garage cleaned out to the point that my dad could have a workspace for his large collection of very nice woodworking tools. We started to attack the piles early the next morning. We had a trailer that we were loading up for the dump, a Goodwill pile, a hazardous waste pile, an automotive parts pile (to go to the Pick-and-Pull), an all metal pile, two large recycle bins and a garage sale pile– I started to fight the garage sale pile because I doubted they would actually follow through with a garage sale, but I realized that having that pile might increase their willingness to give stuff up so I let it go and we started sorting.

It has to be mentioned, and here’s as good a place as any, that July in Brentwood, CA is ungodly hot. It regularly clears triple digits and when we were there it was averaging about 105°…please don’t forget that’s 105° IN THE SHADE. I started every morning by donning my big straw sunhat and applying a pint of sunscreen.

One of the first things I tried to tackle were the numerous boxes of miscellaneous stuff my dad had stored on his garage shelves. There was one box that had nothing but telephone chord in it…probably a good 500’ of telephone chord! Professional kidnappers couldn’t use that much telephone chord. I tried to get that one to the dump pile but my pops seemed to think someone might buy that at the garage sale…so – garage sale.

Going through the boxes I sometimes had to chuckle at how organized their disorganization was. They had one box that was filled with those disposable Tupperware lids. It was actually marked “Unmatched Plastic Lids 5/05”…These lids had NO corresponding containers…for 4 years –Recycle bin.

The sorting started smoothly as sis and I started tossing the stuff that was ‘easy’…stuff like the 1960’s curtain rods and the roughly 1000 cubic feet of polystyrene foam that had been the packaging for various electronic devices. But as things got tougher I had to resort to some duplicitous tactics like hiding stuff at the bottom of the dump load and asking mom about things I knew she didn’t care about and asking dad about things I knew he didn’t care about. I’m not proud of these means…but I sure am happy with the ends.

As we sorted I found evidence that my pops had been entertaining thoughts of organizing his garage for sometime but had never gotten to it. For instance, he had collected 5 garden size trash bags…let me repeat that…5 garden size trash bags!... filled with empty, cleaned cottage cheese, margarine and peanut containers that he had planned to use to organize his thousands of miscellaneous nuts, bolts and screws – Recycle Bin.

The chemical collection was also amazing. My dad’s obsessive compulsive tendency to clean the carpet was evident in the 5 different carpet cleaning detergents that he had throughout his garage. He also had 16 pints of car oil of varying weights, 2 gallons of kerosene and about 10 gallons of paint. This was just the stuff I let him keep. He also had fiberglass resin for a boat that he got rid of some 25 years ago, numerous solvents, epoxies, polishes and cleaners – Hazardous Waste Dump. Note: We exceeded the hazardous waste dump 15 gallon per-trip maximum and were required to fill out two slips.

Tucked in there they also had four large brand new wine racks, that I assume were intended to be in the wine room until they purchased the temperature controlled walk-in wine room – Garage Sale.

It took us 5 solid days of effort, and I have to say I was pleased with how willing my parents were to 'get ‘er done'. We only had one major blow up over a 20 year old microwave my mom was saving for her patio kitchen (which is a pretty good record considering the amount of stuff we got rid of). Dad even told me a few days after we’d left that he was able to go with the momentum and clear almost everything off his patio…which means he can finally have his neighbors over for wine and Bar-B-Q like I know he’s wanted to. It’s great to see them finally in a position to use their home as a home instead of a storage space. And with maybe just one more trip up north and five or six more days of work we’ll be able to get the inside cleaned out as well…at least there’s air conditioning.