Overwhelmed with Disorganized Living

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Good for you!

As for me, I’ve called in the troops (so to speak); as I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the boards, I’m dealing with a huge ventral hernia right now (I’m in the process of getting insurance approval to get it taken care of) and it’s so big that it’s caused a pinched nerve in my spine; this means that every minute of every day, I have pain in my hips/legs/ankles/feet. This really impacts my mobility. I can’t walk very far at all, and can only stand for a few minutes at a time before the pain becomes excruciating.

So a couple of days ago, I found out that my BIL (who just deployed from his 3rd run in Afghanistan) is coming to visit this weekend. Yikes! I found someone who will come in tomorrow for six hours and help me get the whole place whipped into shape.

Then, Thursday, when my hubby comes home, he’ll have his brother, as well as our 20YO daughter with him (she’s moving back in for a while); so, hopefully, if Jesse helps me get the place clean, my daughter can help me maintain!

62

I can’t believe I’m the first to say this: make a list. It feels sooo goood checking things off the list. I’m not the most organized person, but I’m making big strides and this helps me more than anything. Also when your kids need to be separated, it helps to put them to work in different parts of the house. Offer an incentive (we use marbles and when they fill a jar they get a super special secret surprise!) Sometimes my husband comes home and says “What happened in here today? It looks great!” That’s a good motivator, but the best is just the great feeling of peace when a room is tidy. I also feel worthwhile getting things done, because it’s too easy for me to be on the Dope all day!

63

Last Christmas, one of the presents The Kidlet got at my mother’s was a Playmobil Pirate Ship. When his dad tried to take it to the car, the kid said “NO! That’s the one which stays here!”

Mom was able to hold the shit-eating grin until they’d gone out the door. The kid will sometimes ask to go to her house because he wants to play with one of the toys he has there and that ship had been on his wishlist for a whole year.
I’m now in the middle of moving, but the move came just after the first part of “Spring clothing change”. That’s a good time to go over last season’s stuff and throw away anything I haven’t worn for all of it.

64

Does Freecycle still exist? I used to find it impossible to give away some things (books, fabric, potential - and I stress potential - craft items) until I happened upon Freecycle. I had been hoarding, for instance, certain lengths of fleecy which I’d bought to make trackpants for my sons when they were little. The lengths were no longer useful to me but I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. When I discovered Freecycle - oh, happy day! - I was thrilled to be able to give them to someone with children young enough to benefit from the fabric lengths.

65

For some people, making a list works great! You make your list, and go bopping along, cheerily checking things off and feeling good about the whole thing. But some people who are totally disorganized are, at the very core, perfectionists. The attitude is “I’m not going to do it until I can do it right!” I’m one of those people. Here’s what used to happen to me with lists: I had to make a list for each room that needed attention. I had to break each room down into sections, with a separate list for each section; I had to make sure to get every single thing on the list. By the time I was done all that, I was already tired, and working my way through those damned lists started to look like climbing Mount Everest!

If list-making works for you, great! It doesn’t work for all of us, because we’re kinda screwy. :wink:

66

The thing that has really worked for me is volume in = volume out. If I bring in a box or bag, I have to get rid of the equivalent volume of stuff I already have. It doesn’t matter how I get rid of it, just that it goes out of the house. I find this VERY hard to apply to books, I must admit.

Another thing that works is to have a checklist of things which must be done every day. I might not need to run the dishwasher every day, but I DO need to put dirty dishes into it and wipe down the stove and countertops. This keeps things from piling up. It’s just little things, daily chores that can keep small bits of clutter from taking over the house.

A lot of people love FlyLady. Personally, I think she’s got some good ideas, but her tone just nauseates me. Seriously, she sounds like she’s talking to a bunch of kindergartners. I couldn’t stand that tone when I was in kindergarten. I also don’t like the assumption that I WANT to do housework, and that it will make me happy. I don’t and it won’t. I accept the fact that I have to do housework, because I am an adult (and because I can’t afford to hire three housekeepers). But I don’t WANT to do it, and doing it won’t make me happy. If she works for you, then great. But she gets right up my nose.

67

Tone wise, I’ve never been able to stand her either. But her system and reminders are useful. Someone once said, and I think its true, she is directing herself to those people who are depressed, send their kids off to school, hang around on the internet in their jammies, and watch HGTV all day.

So instead of thinking her patronizing, I remember that I’m not as bad off as a lot of people - who need her patronizing thoughts.

Haven’t used her in years though. It was never useful to me as a working mom. But this thread reminded me to go dig - she’s improved things.

68

I was faffing about on Fly Lady yesterday and she does have some useful tips and I did feel motivated to get up and get moving and do a bit more cleaning. Today, however, I was working an early shift so I had to be up at 5:00 just to get to work on time. The idea of getting up at 4:00 (or even earlier) just so I could shine my sink kind of put me off the notion.

69

I took a whole car load of my 2y/old daughter’s toys to the local jumble sale recently - we didn’t tell her we were doing it, just packed them up one evening and got them out of the house.

She’s the first grandchild for both families, and has been given huge amounts of toys which she never plays with (she’s at nursery during the day so has shorter time at home anyway).

First we felt guilty that we were giving away gifts that people had bought us, butu we have a small house and they were taking over the living space.

We also didn’t want to traumatise daughter by chucking away treasured toys (we kept plenty of her favourites), but although she asked a couple of questions about where things had gone, within hours they were forgotten.

And it turns out the boxes the toys were stored in are just as much funas the toys themselves. :slight_smile:

The next challenge is her clothes - we have piles and piles, and while we’d like to keep some in case we have another daughter at some point, there are more than any child could possibly need (again, gifts and hand-me-downs from well meaning friends and family).

We have plans to put them on eBay, but I’m tempted to load up the car again and head to the charity shops.

70

You know, maybe it’s just me, but I always find it really disturbing how people will just take away the possessions of a little kid without warning. I mean, what does that teach the kid, it’s OK to take other peoples’ stuff without asking them? Would you do that to an adult? (Well, I guess some people do - I once had a “friend” who came over to “help” when I wasn’t there and tried to convince my spouse to just toss a lot of my clothes and books to make more room, as if I wouldn’t somehow notice the difference. It didn’t help that this nosy neighbor had entirely different ways of determining “value” than I did - wanting to toss my $1,200 band uniform, which I wore to gigs that earned money, because it was “frumpy” and “no one wears plaid anymore”. Um, it’s what you wear when playing bagpipes, and I earn money for wearing it, that’s why I should keep it?.. but I digress.)

Likewise, I find it disturbing when someone says “Oh, my husband/wife had a bunch of X and I tossed it because I was tired of it taking up space”. Um… it’s not your stuff? It’s one thing if the other person says “Could you clean this up, toss crap out, whatever it takes to clean up” but doing it behind their back?

Maybe I’m off base here, but it seems to me you’re not teaching your child how to make choices, or clean up, or get rid of excess, and isn’t childhood when you should start doing that? “Timmy, we don’t have room for all these toys. You have to choose which ones to keep and which ones we’ll give away to someone who doesn’t have toys”.

Then again, I was the sort of child with a disturbingly accurate memory who, if something went missing, would cry inconsolably for days and days over it. Which might mean my hoarder-tendencies started very early. I might have done better if my parents had taught me young to make “keep or toss” choices, said if I wanted to buy a new book I had to make room on the shelf by giving up an old one, and so forth. Maybe I grew up expecting pixies to magically make the clutter disappear. Having stuff “go away” when I wasn’t looking just made me want to hold onto the remaining stuff all the harder, even if I learned crying over it wasn’t acceptable and stopped doing it, even if I learned speaking of it was unacceptable and I stopped doing it.

My apologies if this comes off as overly critical, and clearly how you treat a 6 month old would be different than how you treat a 6 year old when it comes to too many toys, but maybe some of us would have done better with the clutter if we had been forced to make choices rather than having someone else do it for us? Is two too young to start doing that? I don’t know.

71

Staples takes Dell stuff for free, and will charge you a $10 fee for any other monitor or tower.

72

All fair points.

She had so much stuff that most of it was literally never used - it was buried at the bottom of boxes and crammed in so much that only the top few layers ever got played with. So she’s not had a chance to build up any attachment to them… they never saw the light of day and she couldn’t have got to them even if she wanted to.

As I said, her particular favourites were kept safe and sound and she’s still surrounded by more toys than she really needs. A lot of the removed items were duplicates - we got rid of three all-but-identical Bob the Builder dolls - and there lots of age-inappropriate toys which she’s now too old for.

Plus she’s not yet three, so memories are short and it doesn’t take long for something else to grab the attention. Yes, I felt like a bit guilty doing it, but my fault was more in allowing the stuff into the house in the first place.

And yes, I would (and have) done the same with adults. Not totally without warning, but I have said to my wife “If that pile of [whatever] is still on the floor next week it’s going to the tip” and I’ve then got rid of it.

Ask a toddler which toys they want to keep and they will say “all of them”, so it’s not a negotiation. My wife unfortunately has a similar attitude (due to not having much money when she was growing up, she tends to resist getting rid of things), but sometimes being a parent (or spouse) means making unpopular decisions.

73

They usually don’t make choices that young. Everything is special and they really don’t have a concept of space. A two year old with a toy fetish could be her very own episode of horders. It may be my kid’s stuff, but its my space. If they care for it, and make a special space for it, Mom won’t touch it. If it sits in a box in my basement, except when friends come over and take it out to play with it, then I trip over it because no one cares about it enough to put it away, its fair game for Mom to “rehome.”

(My kids started to be capable of making those sorts of choices around eight or so. They’d have garage sales and the $25 their old toys brought was reward enough - but they had to be old enough to start to understand that they were getting something in return for giving up something - and getting back “Mom’s space” still doesn’t count. And all kids are different, my son will purge almost everything without a care - and always has with a few exceptions, my daughter would treasure a Happy Meal toy she hasn’t seen in months if you let her.)

In our house the rule is “how you respect your own stuff is how other people need to respect your stuff.”

74

My husband had a lot of his toys thrown away by his parents when they moved cross-country, and he is still quite bitter over it. He was the kind of kid who valued his toys and took very good care of them (still does, actually), and throwing his stuff away like that was probably one of the worst things his parents could have done to him. I guess it depends on the age and nature of the child in question - he was definitely old enough to remember all the things they threw away, and should have been involved in those decisions.

At this point in our lives, he wants to keep more things than I do (possibly because of this loss), but he got an opportunity to see what my dad’s house looked like after he died - my dad was a “path through the towers of stuff” hoarder, and I think it gave my husband some perspective on trying to keep everything.

75

With two young children it can be difficult to find the time and patience to do anything let alone clean up.

There are two strategies I would recommend.

Strategy 1: Every journey begins with a single step.
Tonight when the kids are finally in bed (you know that time when you usually collapse from exhaustion?). Pick a small space that is cluttered (like one shelf in your kitchen or one pile on the coffee table). Create four boxes; keep (belongs here), keep (goes somewhere else), give away and trash. . At the end, throw out the trash, put everything away where it belongs and put the give box somewhere out of sight. This should take no more than 30 minutes (if it does, tomorrow think smaller). Do this every day. Do not put anything that does not belong there back in a place that you have already decluttered.

Strategy 2: Make a date
I find that enlisting help means that I have to get it done. So, ask one of your friends or your mom or sibling to come over for a few hours to help you go through your stuff. (This means that you will need to repay the favour someday.) They will have a more objective view of your things which can help you to get rid of more. You will probably need to send the younguns out with someone else (so you will need double help) to get any of this done. (Heck, where are you from, I love decluttering.)

76

I’ve had this happen to me, as well. Some people don’t appreciate that others might value something that they themselves don’t see any worth in. Little kids DO get attached to their toys, and they can even get attached to multiple copies of toys. Discarding anyone’s possessions tells that person that you don’t value their opinions or feelings…and it doesn’t matter how old that person is.

I can remember events from the time I was about 25 months old. I can pinpoint this so exactly because a little sister died, and I remember her, and the events just after she died. I can remember that some of her items disappeared, and I missed her and those items very much. As an adult, I learned that the items had been put away because my parents couldn’t deal with the reminders…but at the time, I missed my little sister and those items very much.

77

Broomstick – you mentioned paring down your linen closet. Any animal shelter/animal hospital/rescue mission will LOVE anything you don’t want anymore. Heck, even a regular vet office would likely be happy to get some stuff. Any toweling item from wash cloth to bath sheet, any linen from pillowcase to king sized sheets, any blanket/comfortor/bedspread. Stains, rips, worn spots – does not matter a bit. Dogs and cats aren’t fussy. :slight_smile:

When I was cleaning out my mother’s house I found she had literally dozens of “good” sheets, all of which were apparently “too good” just to use and so had been left to gradually go yellow. What a waste, but the animal shelter woman almost wept with joy when I drove up with the entire back seat of the car stuffed from floor to ceiling.

78

Sheet sets are a funny thing - I have about five sets of high-thread count sheets, and I’m finding that it’s about two too many. If you leave the sheet sets in the closet too long, they don’t smell fresh when you put them on the bed. I find that three sets is just about the right rotation for us (we aren’t daily sheet changers).

79

We’re in the process of cleaning out my mother’s house, and OMG, the restrictions we’ve got on trash collection is a mile long. Like broken steel bedframes, for instance. They’re still on the front porch because no place will take them. Ditto the bulkier items like old broken furniture and assorted bric-a-brac.

Paying someone to take it away is astronomical around here :shudder:

80

Wow, that’s some excellent information! I’ve got some sheets I need to get rid of, but they are too ill-looking for Goodwill. Thanks! I never would have thought of the animal shelter.