One of my plans for this vacation (of which I have nearly two weeks left) is to bring some order to the basement.

The basement is a mess. There are corners I have never looked into so I don’t even know what all is there. The things I do know should be there somewhere are hard to find and/or hard to reach. There’s plenty of junk that should be thrown out.

Yesterday was a basement day, and today is another one. I’ve found that it’s easier for me to make progress, and to feel that I have made progress, when I spend a large chunk of time focusing on a single “theme”. If I do a bunch of unrelated small tasks and cross them off my list, then I don’t get the same satisfying feeling. So instead of doing a dash of basement-clearing, a pinch of gardening and a smidgen of sewing, I am focusing on the basement only.

I’m clearing out so much stuff. Old inflatable swimming pools. (Plural.) Boxes of pool chemicals. A dusty foam mattress. A saggy foldable bed. Swathes of geotextile that I will never use. Buckets and buckets of old paint from when we renovated the house in 2011. Decades-old snorkelling equipment. A sleeping bag from the 1970s.

Things that I still have entirely excessive amounts of:

1. Terracotta plant pot saucers – several dozen. I don’t even like the terracotta pot + saucer combo.

2. Screws. Boxes and boxes of them. Deck screws, drywall screws, wood screws, floor screws, cabinet screws, roof nails, general-purpose nails – you name it, I’ve got it. Some of them literally in the hundreds. I am most unlikely to need this amount of screws in the next few decades.

3. Jam. I counted, I have 95 jars of jam/marmalade/chutney. These might literally last me until I retire (unless they go bad first.) I don’t eat much jam. Neither does Ingrid, and when she does, she prefers low-sugar versions, which these are definitely not. Adrian only likes raspberry jam and blueberry jam, whereas this is mostly funky stuff – cherry jam is the only “normal” kind here, and the rest is more odd things like gooseberry, rhubarb with ginger, redcurrant, spicy plum chutney, etc. Still, I won’t be getting rid of any of these. They’ve been made with love, and I will do my best to eat my way through them.