So last year I happened to be working from home in the middle of July, listening to the A/C hum while I was chatting with my wife in the kitchen and grabbing a sandwich between zoom meetings. It was just another typical hot day, with high noon at 4pm still yet to arrive and the house temperature already rising regardless of the cool air being circulated inside. While we're talking, however, I started hearing a noise similar to someone crumpling plastic wrap. At the same time, one of my kids walked in with the fateful question, "Why is there water dripping from the ceiling in the family room?" Crap.

The culprit turned out to be a stupid 5 or 10 cent hose anchor was never installed with my washing machine drain hose and, after years of working, it finally inches the hose out of the drain pipe to then spill an entire heavy load of drain wash water all over the floor upstairs. That resulted in about $24,000 of damage when all was said and done. Water being what it is found a way to quickly soak down through the subfloor upstairs, onto the ceiling downstairs and eventually onto my couch, ergo the crackling noise. It is now a year later and, after ripping out my entire family room, laundry room, hallway upstairs and office, rebuilding all and re-carpeting, I finally have my house back again a year later. Flood victims will know exactly what I went through and remind me I'm one of the more fortunate if that's all that that happened.

In the meantime, all our belongings in the affected room had to go somewhere else. That meant packing everything in other rooms and the garage as much as possible. A typical house can be packed up pretty quick if you're in a hurry and not to particularly worried about tracking exactly where everything goes or accessing it right away. However, it's a Mt. Everest of an adventure unpacking it all later and resorting your life again. That was me this month.

What you find when you finally hit the unpacking stage of a personal disaster recovery is just how much stuff you've accumulated over the years. Since we already had it almost out of the house, I decided it was a prime opportunity for a purge. Unless we really wanted the stuff, it didn't go back in. Instead, I made two huge piles in the garage: one for charity and a tax deduction, and one for the dump. Pulling things out and unpacking it took me two days to rip through most everything and decide if we wanted it immediate or if the item went in the piles. Then, I had the kids and my wife look at the charity pile and decide if there was anything to keep. If so, they had to put it in their room, not dump it anywhere in the house. About five percent was retracted.

That done, I filled up my pickup truck twice for the dump and once for charity in terms of amount of stuff we got rid of, and that also included getting rid of a full trash can of stuff with my regular weekly trash service as well. After it was all done, I kind of felt like I went on a mental diet of sorts with the amount of useless stuff we got rid of. Now I still need to do my home office and files. Urrg...

The moral of the story however is that life isn't going to wait for you to get back to whatever it is you saved something for. So, if you haven't used something for a year, pack it into the garage or similar. If you haven't used it in five years, and it's not an investment, get rid of it. You're never going to use that thing again. Don't fool yourself with a maybe; you simply won't open that box again until forced to by a disaster.

WYM