The Tortured and the Torturer

My job this week is to come and help my friends Warren and his sister Donna to clean out their childhood home and get it ready to sale. Both Warren and Donna inherited the collector gene from both their parents so it is a big task to deal with the what has accumulated in the house over the last 70 years.

I was supposed to be here at the tail end of this job that has been going on for months. Last week I got a panicked call from Warren that they were not as far along as they wanted to be before my visit. I told him it was my job to come crack the whip and hold their feet to the fire.  

When I got here yesterday Warren was not here yet due to the big storm that knocked power out at his house in Maine. Donna and I got supplies for the week then I told her she did not have to hang out with me and to go home and I started cleaning. I found great satisfaction in cleaning the appliances in the kitchen since I was going to be using them to cook. Warren eventually arrived just as I was settling into my sofa I was going to spend the week sleeping on since all the beds in the house were gone.

I awoke at the unnecessary hour of 5:30 this morning. It was a few hours before I was able to get to the task of the day, cleaning out one bedroom where many items had been placed from the attic. I was trying to enforce the OHIO method of “only touching it once.” This meant that I had to convince both Donna and Warren to throw things away, or put them in a pile to go to the Salvation Army, or keep something and then decide who would keep it.

Most of the valuable stuff had left the house earlier, but that did not make it any easier for me to convince them to throw things away. The biggest category of items today were the lifetime of games and toys they had pulled out of the attic. They had many original things still in their boxes. This treasure trove is valuable to collectors and was going to a friend to sell them all on eBay.

Just as I was the torturer saying, “throw those old pens, pencils and scissors that no longer cut away.” I was tortured because I was surrounded by a huge number of games, I would love to have been playing, and I was forbade even one round of password as my payback for throwing away dolls with missing limbs.

The good news is we finished the designated room, taking five body bag sized bags to the trash, and moving a dozen boxes of toys to the living room to be picked up tomorrow, bags and bags for Salvation Army and just a few items to go back to Warren’s and Donna’s. I can’t wait to see what job we will finish tomorrow.