The Clean Up
Dec 9 - by Aleida
So I’ve been MIA for over a week, sorry about that! I can’t put all the blame on completing Assassin’s Creed 2 or shooting all those Assassin’s Creed related video’s and posting them on my YouTube channel. I have also been busy with some uni work and making an effort to clean up my room. It’s not that I’m a hardcore hoarder, but I do have a lot of stuff I hang on to. I’ve always been a collector of things I truly love and I do hang on to things that have ‘emotional value’. Hmm maybe that does make me a hoarder…
Since I plan on changing my living space at least once or maybe twice next year I decided I need to take a good look at my stuff again. One thing I need to do is just throw stuff out e.g. recycling old magazines or donating clothes to charity. The other thing is I need to look at a better way to store my stuff. I’m not a neat freak, but I do like it when things are somewhat tidy and organized.
Back It Up
One of the things that take up space is my collection of animé fansubs I’ve been collecting since high school, but really started to grow during my first year at Leiden U when I studied Japanese. My fansubs are Japanese animation series originally aired on the Japanese television and subtitled by fans. At the time the fansubs were released the series were not licensed in the US nor Europe. Most of my fansubs are still sitting on those classic 800mb cd discs and are already 6 years old or so. I needed multiple 800mb cd’s to store a full serie in contrast to using just 1 DVD to store a full serie.
At the moment I’m in the process of transferring my fansubs to my LaCie 500gb External Hard Disk. I’ve already been able to clear much space on my bookshelves. If I can get my hands on a nice boxset I will probably buy my most favorite series on DVD or Blu-ray somewhere in the future. I got my hands on a pretty ‘reminds me of a DJ vinyll storage case’ thingie for all the CD’s that I will not be transferring e.g. very old back ups of files. It can hold up to 200 CD or DVD’s which is pretty awesome! I bought it at HEMA for only € 15,00 .
Store It
I always loved checking out the tips and tricks in my AneCan & CanCam magazines on how to organize your clothes and other stuff in your room. Even though I do not consider myself a girly girl I found out I actually have a lot of shoes and handbags. Like most people here in The Netherlands I do not have a seperate closet space or walk in closet in my house. At the moment I only have a simple two door closet. Since getting a very nice custom made closet space is a very big investment I think I will hold off investing in one untill I have moved to my own appartment.
In the meantime I’m storing my shoes and handbags in two dark laundry baskets from HEMA. They were only € 19,95 per piece and definitely a good investment. Even though they’re plastic they don’t have that usual cheap look. They’re also pretty easy to clean if they’re getting a littly dusty. What I really like about the dark color is that they match my special TV / bookshelves thing I got from IKEA earlier this year.
At the moment it holds my TV, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. A whole bunch of games and DVD’s and of course a crazy load of books. Even though it offers a lot of space it’s already full! I haven’t even put all my stuff in it yet. So I still have a lot of cleaning up and reorganizing to do.
Sell, Give Away, Recycle It
Fortunately there are enough alternatives to just throw things away. Books especially those I use for university have been a storage problem. So I sold some of my books I really didn’t need to use anymore via Bol.com which is something similar to Amazon. I also like to give away things to friends & family or charity. When I upgraded my first laptop by buying a new one I decided to give my old one to my brother. Interestingly my new laptop died on me while the old one is still working. Old magazines and electronica – well sometimes there’s no other way than recycle it.
