#i want to bathe in bleach now

   I didn’t really get the sense that my father was a hoarder when I was young. While he had a lot of ‘stuff’, it was all useful or relevant to running the farm or legitimate hobbies like music or woodworking. However, after my mother left the farm in the 90s, he started just . . buying and buying and getting really, really weird about it. I was estranged from him at the time, so Not My Problem. haha.

   I was so sure it wasn’t my problem.

But here we are. One of the clever solutions he found for Storage Space for all his Treasure was to buy whole-ass trailers - like the back end of an 18-wheeler? - and parking them on the farm. And. Filling them up. With stuff. There are. There. There are THREE of them. This one is attached (sorta) to the house and it by far the worst.

   We started in here this morning. Luckily, we found a whole box of contractor-size trash bags right off the bat. We proceeded to fill 17 bags and haul out numerous other boxes, crates, boards, chairs, etc. This was just a ‘first pass’, getting the junk out of the way so I can figure out what to keep (very little) or what to put in a yard sale.

Honestly, it’s hard to get a sense of how much progress we made from the after photo, because there are still some bags and boxes stacked up to get hauled away. But THIS:

is about 60% of what we got rid of, and it’s almost certainly enough to completely fill the dumpster. Unfortunately, the dumpster got filled up by our bedroom project yesterday, and we’ll have to wait until it’s emptied on Monday to refill it with this delightful assortment.

   Still, progress is progress.

May 14, 2022