They say the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Over the past few days, I've been figuring out the scope of my problem.
In anticipation of my big workroom makeover (which Bob promises will be done next week) I've been sorting through my beads and putting them in nice, organized plastic boxes. One plastic set of drawers (maybe waist high) contains only metal: one drawer for gold filled, one for sterling beads, one for sterling findings, one for copper, base metal or miscellaneous and one for wire.
I weighed one of the silver drawers, just for larfs: six lbs. of silver findings alone! I had been worrying that I had "no" clasps, so I've been buying up clasps on Ebay. I was wrong: I have clasps to last a very, very long time. I cancelled all my planned snipe bids for more clasps.
I'm now mostly done with the metal, and am starting on the semi-precious strands. I fear that I might have even more of those than I did of silver.
This is bad. Very, very bad.
The worst part is that once the workroom is completed, I won't be able to tell Bob he's imagining things when he tells me that I have a zillion dollars worth of beads. Not Good.
Kathy N-V
P.S.: I suspected that there might be a problem when I finally saw the episode of Clean Sweep where they organize a woman's bead room. I saw the couple of little hardware boxes she had, the kind that hold nuts and bolts, and thought, "That's an over-the-top bead collection? What are they, nuts?"
I didn't like the finished room, either. They added a really nice countertop, so she had plenty of desk space, but mounted all the hardware boxes at kitchen cabinet height. The poor woman was going to have to get up and walk around the room every time she wanted to use a different bead. Fugeddaboudit.