The Storage Room Is Judging Me
Dennis and I have a project. Actually, calling it a project makes it sound far more organized than it is.
We have thousands of old family photos—some in albums, some in photo boxes, some in tubs, some already digital, and probably some in places I’ve forgotten about entirely. We decided, once and for all, that we were going to digitize them all.
This was not our first attempt. Over the years, we’ve started and stopped this project more times than I care to admit. But this time, we were serious.
We set up banquet tables all over the lower-level rec room and began sorting. First by decade. Then by year. Then, because apparently I enjoy making simple projects more complicated, by month.
Good enough.
We spent two entire weekends scanning photographs. We were making progress! I could almost envision the beautifully organized digital archive we would eventually have.
And then life happened. Something came up. Then something else. The banquet tables needed to come down, so the photos, boxes, tubs and assorted project paraphernalia all migrated into the storage room, where they remain.
Judging me.
Fast-forward about a year. Every time I walk into that room, I see them. I’m pretty sure they see me too.
Part of the problem is sheer volume. I have always been the family picture-taker. Holidays, birthdays, vacations, graduations, family get-togethers—you name it, I probably had a camera in my hand. I have photos of our immediate family, of course, but also of extended family.
And if you came of age in the 1980s, you may remember another little wrinkle: duplicates. Why order one copy when you could get two? Or three? You see, at the time it made perfect sense. I was going to make albums for each of the kids someday. You can probably guess how that went.
The albums were started. Then abandoned (juggling kids' activities, who had time?). Eventually the albums became boxes. The boxes became tubs. And here we are.
A few months ago, I was thinking about this dreaded project again—how badly I need to clean out that storage room, how we really should finish scanning all those photos, how many weekends it will probably take—and suddenly a thought stopped me cold.
Omg, what if nobody even wants them? 🤯
What if Dennis and I spend hours and hours sorting and scanning thousands of photographs, carefully preserving all these memories...and someday our kids take the digital files just because they feel like they’re supposed to?
And never look at them! Ever.
Horrors!
Now I really don’t want to finish.
Why tackle such a daunting project if nobody actually wants the end result? That thought sat with me for a while. Quite a while, apparently, because another six months have passed and the storage room is still judging me.
Proof We Were Here
Here’s the thing... photographs aren’t the same as an old waffle maker or a box of craft supplies. They feel different.
A photograph can take you back to a kitchen that no longer exists. A Christmas morning when the kids were little. Your dad laughing. Your mom before she got sick. A vacation you had almost forgotten. A hairstyle you really wish everyone else would forget.
You look at a picture and suddenly you remember the room, the people, the story behind it. Sometimes even how you felt.
And I think that may be why photographs are so hard to let go of. They can feel like proof that it all happened. That this family existed in this exact version of itself.
That Dennis and I were here.
Maybe buried somewhere underneath all this saving is a very human little plea:
Please remember me when I’m gone.
Oof. Lump in my throat. That one feels painfully spot on.
Suddenly this isn’t just about deciding whether I need three copies of Christmas 1987. It’s about memory and legacy, and which pieces of an ordinary life are worth carrying forward.
Which, by the way, is an excellent way to turn an already overwhelming photo project into an existential crisis.
Very productive.
In fact, if I start contemplating the emotional significance of every single photo before deciding whether to keep it, there is an excellent chance I will die before completing this project. And apparently turning the photos into an existential crisis wasn’t enough, because then I started looking around the rest of the storage room.
The Things We Thought They’d Want
The photos, it turns out, are only the beginning.
There are the kids’ school memories and yearbooks. My daughter’s Beanie Baby collection. My son’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—complete, if I remember correctly, with the van... and the sewer.
Actually, those might be worth something now. Maybe I should stop writing and look that up.
Squirrel.
There are baseball cards, which I suspect my son actually may want. And those are just their things.
Then we get to mine: china, crystal, craft supplies, wedding décor, holiday decorations...
Things I saved because they were expensive, because they were useful, because somebody might need them someday, or because they belonged to someone else before me. And things I have apparently saved for reasons that are no longer available to me.
We saved their stuff. We saved our stuff. Apparently we just save stuff.
Don't even get me started on a really good cardboard box! You never know. 😂
For years, I think many of us operated under the assumption that our kids would eventually want this stuff. We weren’t hoarding it. We were saving it for them.
At least that sounds better.
In the last couple of years, my sisters and I have lived through this from the other side. We helped downsize our parents after about 40 years in their home, later cleared out their condo, and after Mom died, the belongings in her room.
We each kept a few things that mattered to us. But a lot was sold, donated or simply had to go somewhere.
That experience changes the way you look at your own things.
You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “Nobody wants your stuff” by now. Maybe the more accurate version is simply: Nobody wants all your stuff.
Our children may treasure a ridiculous candid picture from a family vacation and have absolutely no interest in the china we thought they’d fight over. They may want Dad’s old baseball glove and not the expensive furniture. They may want one Christmas ornament because they remember hanging it every year—and they may not want the other twelve tubs.
Just because something means something to me doesn’t mean it will mean the same thing to them. I’ll need to keep reminding myself of that when we finally finish the photos and move on to the rest of the “treasures" in storage.
This Is Not Coming With Us
There is also one very practical reason I can’t keep avoiding all of this forever.
Dennis is getting closer to retirement, and we plan to move. I crave warmer weather. A change of scenery. Healthier food. Healthier lifestyle.
Where? Well...possibly Italy. Have I mentioned that on this blog yet? Haha!
We're still figuring out exactly what that next chapter looks like, but one thing I know with absolute certainty:
I am not moving that storage room with me.
Nope.
If we decide to pick up and start a new adventure somewhere else, I am not paying to transport tubs of duplicate photographs, abandoned craft projects and Beanie Babies across the ocean. Honestly, I'm not sure I want to transport them across town.
This isn't just about getting organized. I have three reasons for finally getting this project done.
First, Dennis and I need to finish what we started with the photographs. I can’t even get to the other stuff until the photos and banquet tables are cleared out!
Second, someday our kids will have enough to deal with when we're gone. I don't want one of those things to be standing in an overstuffed storage room asking each other why on earth Mom kept all of this.
And third, if we're serious about moving—possibly to Italy—with a few suitcases and maybe a box or two, this storage room needs to get a whole lot lighter. Now that's motivation!
That doesn't mean getting rid of everything, and it certainly doesn't mean the things we've saved were meaningless. Quite the opposite.
Maybe that's what this comes down to - not preserving everything, but preserving enough. The photographs that tell the story, the things that genuinely matter, the handful of objects that make someone say, Oh, I remember this.
We can ask the kids what they actually want and tell them why certain things mattered to us. But we can't make something meaningful to them just because it was meaningful to us.
Oddly enough, I'm beginning to think there may be something freeing about that. I don't have to preserve every object in order to preserve the life that went with it.
And I probably don't need six copies of Christmas 1987.
Probably.
So no, I still don't have a brilliant decluttering system to share. The storage room is still a disaster. The photos are still waiting, and I'm fairly certain they're still judging me.
But I have clarity now... plus one very big motivator:
Italy.
So let’s do this!
And hey, maybe I can even make a little money selling some of the stuff—I mean, ‘treasures’—to put toward the move.
That sounds like a whole new project. Scratch that. Donation all the way.
There's one more thing I haven’t quite wrapped my head around, and it's giving me a bit of anxiety already. When we finally finish scanning all these photos...what exactly am I supposed to do with the paper copies and albums?!
Throw them away?!
Oh boy. I may need a glass of wine for that. Or two. Or three.
Onward, Lori. Onward.
Such a great blog! I haven’t mustard up the will power to even start. Good for you!