My weekend

I give you the bane of my existence: the crawl space. The majority of my personal belongings are stored here and have been for two and a half years. I started moving these items a carload at a time the weekend before I tore my ACL. Since my move, I have not seen the end of the crawl space. I have not had access to many things, most importantly my old photo albums and negatives.

I told myself I was going to empty it this weekend. I cleared out my bedroom and locked the cat out. Could you imagine how irritating Addy would be covered in fiberglass? I've started this process a few times and given up after a half hour or so. It is so narrow, you can't fit yourself and a box next to each other and you definitely can't stand up. Basically, you're forced to kneel and drag boxes out one at a time. Oh, and the boards that are there? Not level. So you have to lift the boxes at every joint. There's no light in there, it's horribly hot and you want to be completely covered otherwise you get coated with fiberglass. It's not pleasant.

After two hours, this was the result. It felt like a scene from hoarders, where they do a slow pan over the piles of "treasures". I don't think I have a serious hoarding problem, but seeing a mountain of stuff like this, I felt the need to sort through it all. There went my Saturday! I'm proud to announce that I got rid of 4 boxes of books, an old stereo, a box full of board games, two jackets and two bins of twin size sheets (seeing how I don't even own a twin size bed). I also got rid of a broken pack-n-play and pulled out another bin of baby toys for my neices. Hopefully, I would have made Matt Paxton proud.

The very last box was what I went in for. I don't know what I would have done had I not moved this before hurting my knee; that box weighed a ton! I repacked the crawl space with this much closer to the front so I wouldn't have to kill myself to get it out next time.

I now have a plethora of images, which should cover Throwback Thursdays for the rest of the year, and that's just from the photo albums. I really went in there for my negatives. I started shooting seriously around 2000 and didn't get my first digital camera until 2005. How many negatives could I have shot in 5 years? 7,280, approximately. That's only counting the negatives I shot with my SLR, I have a whole separate photo box of negatives I shot in high school and college. I'm guessing there are at least another 2,800 in there.

They have been stored in waterproof/fireproof negative containers and luckily, I've organized the majority of them. Go me and my neurotic Virgo self! I did a little bit of math: 10,000 negatives scanned at 4 minutes a frame (which seems to be the general speed of film scanners) means that I've got 666 hours of scanning ahead of me. 666 hours, just scanning alone, not counting time to load the scanner, organize and file them digitally, nor edit them in Photoshop.

I'm starting to think I am a bit of a hoarder...

Now I need to look into film scanners. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I don't even know what resolution I should look for. If I'm going to spend 666 hours doing this, I want to do it right once.

P.S. A friend has talked me out of the crazy idea of scanning all these images myself. Instead, I'm looking into a few different options from a scanning company. I can do 600 negatives for $130, and not do any of the effort. I think that option is far superior because the number 666 appeared way too many times in this post for my liking.