Yeah but the problem with clutter and the 10 year rule is that if I can’t find it in 10 years, I buy another one. I found 3 different pressure dials/inflators for my compressor.
The truly funny thing about my recent organization project is that it started with a desire to locate my electronic stud finder. The one tool I can’t seem to find after all this is… the damn stud finder. I have a box labeled for it and everything. I know it’s in the house or garage somewhere because I found it a month ago and was surprised the battery still worked. grrrrrrrrrrrrr. I even found the locking universal joints for my regular sockets.
My sister used a professional organizer. My sister is a hoarder, although not mentally ill about it, just really terrible about cleaning up clutter and getting rid of things that are still useful. None of her stuff is junk, it’s just too much stuff. The organizer worked wonders. I know they got rid of 8 large trash bags of clothing, and many, many more boxes of hard goods. Once your place is reasonably clean and decluttered, it’s not too hard to keep it that way. But once you go past a certain point of messiness, it’s nearly impossible to tackle the mess anymore and you just sort of mentally shut it out.
Don’t save stuff for yard sales. You hardly make anything at them. My kids make more money selling lemonade and brownines than I make selling good, useful stuff. Last year, they made almost $80, and I only made about $75. For a year’s worth of good stuff saved up, including furniture. I do much better donating it and deducting it from my taxes. Much better. Hundreds of dollars better. When you claim it on your taxes, the value of an item is what it would cost in a store. And even if I couldn’t use the deduction, I’d still be better off without the stuff, and somebody else is better off with it.
Oddly enough, we started cleaning out drawers and such this last weekend. Several bags of clothes, several boxes of books, and lots of trash and clutter have been disposed of. Except we only have the one trash can, and that is reserved for dirty/smelly/wet GARBAGE - the bags of old CDs, worn out socks, empty tubes of cosmetics, broken vases, etc. are just going to have to wait out in the garage until there’s room. I would like to seriously get rid of a lot of the clothes stuffed into my bursting closet - why is it so hard to part with things I only wore once and will never wear again??
A few months ago I did a HUGE closet attack. Took what the consignment store would take there and everything else to Goodwill, didn’t even blink at it. Anything in a size 2 or 4, anything that I’ve more than a few times put on and then took off because I didn’t really want to wear it, anything ANYTHING. Scheduled an appointment at the consignment store and hauled a whole car full. It felt amazing. Now there’s almost room for all my actual clothes that I really wear!
It was hard, though. It helped that I’d be getting at least some cash (not at all what it’s worth, but what else is new) from the consigned stuff. My mom was all “why didn’t you take the really nice stuff to the really picky place and blah blah blah” and I just couldn’t convince her that separating it at all almost made it not happen, so refining “this goes there” is just going to make sure that I end up with another pile. No piles. Go out.
So far I have watched “My Mother’s Garden,” a documentary about hoarding, and thrown away my bread machine.
I use the bread machine a couple of times a year to make rolls, but I stopped baking bread in it long ago–it’s old and grotty now. I’m perfectly capable of making bread without a machine, so I threw it out. One bulky appliance gone!
Everything else I’m putting off to after the 15th.
My biggest clutter is paper. Being a writer, I can’t just throw it all away - some of it is poems or story ideas.
But a lot of it is paperwork and bills. And for that I want a shredder. My boyfriend tells me to just bring it to his place and shred it there - but I never do.
And I need a file cabinet. The desk I have has one, but i’m tall and it’s short - so I think I’m just going to buy the file cabinet in my height along with a box of file folders, and the shredder, and be done with it.
Can everyone pm me on Friday and ask me if I followed through or not? I need some accountability. It’s getting silly.
In fact, I was so excited about the de-cluttering effect of my new scanner that I started a blog devoted to this exact subject (I’m not kidding!).
There is a certain degree of joy I feel when I band-saw the spine off of some aging textbook that nobody but me would ever want, and then I feed its pages through the scanner.
I haven’t triumphed over all paper yet, but I’m getting close!