My husband is moving back home with us after four and a half years in an apartment three hours drive away for work. He JUST came home with a stuffed carload, and reckons there is at least another four to go. So I’m on this declutter bandwagon, too! Just got to persuade him to part with stuff now…
^ This is why I’m trying to buy the new ones as e-books. Less clutter.
My own house wasn’t very cluttered to begin with, plus one of the objectives when I redid the kitchen was “get more storage space in the kitchen so I can stop storing dry goods in the living room closet”.
But I’m helping Mom with some decluttering: objectives for the next few months include taking home the two Encyclopedias I want (great-grandpa’s Universal History and one which is very, very good on historical information; the Bros have already said they don’t want any) and finishing scanning her old pics. I’ve already finished cleaning up the scans of the first batch of old pics (task to do with Mom: identify each one properly). And I understand that the encyclopedias nobody wanted are already in the trash, the Bros have been taking them down to the paper dumpster one heavy book at a time.
Another portion of the Decluttering For Mom Project includes buying a gizmo… record-player to mp3 converter. Among other things, getting those transferred to mp3 means she’ll be able to listen again to those records whose copies to tape have broken down or which never had them in the first place; right now they’re just taking space in her storage room.
Does weeding my garden this morning count as de-cluttering? It does make the vegetables more productive, and I do grow a substantial portion of our vegetable food…
On the table for today:
Working on the bathroom in my spouse’s workspace (we got 1200 square feet for $100/month for 1 year… but the low low price is partly in exchange for doing some improvements on the space. Like making the bathroom functional again).
Sorting through the plastic containers (I find I have to do that about every 6 months) and sanitizing the keepers and tossing the ones that are deteriorating. This will also help with the future freezer spot, 'cause that’s where they’re currently stored.
Breaking down boxes and moving the shipping supplies to the spouse’s workspace. Of course, tossing any that won’t be needed or are damaged.
Trip to the recycling center (it’s that time of the month again) with the aluminum cans + 1 other item.
Super good idea for a thread!
One thing about moving all the time is you begin to see your stuff less as a collection of cherished objects and more as a bunch of crap you have to haul around in boxes. One thing about unemployment is you have a lot of time to clean.
So, I’m cleaning. A little bit every day. One of my big issues is losing things all the time, so I’m trying to make a specific place for every single thing in the house.
-Bought a canvas over-the-door shoe holder for my bedroom. It’s hanging over the back of the closet door so you can’t even see it unless you close the door. I love not having to search the entire house for a particular pair of shoes.
-Cleaned out the Spare Room, which was so badly cluttered that I basically left the door closed all the time. The contents of the boxes themselves aren’t quite organized yet, but at least everything looks tidy from the outside.
-I’m a sentimental fool. I had three large boxes of crap from my childhood and college, including like 8 yearbooks. I saved two yearbooks (one jr. high and my senior year), went through every single thing as ruthlessly as possible and managed to condense it all into a single bin.
-Trying to get a handle on my desk clutter. Put a small wicker basket near my desk, that’s my ''Inbox." Husband puts my mail there so I don’t leave it on the end tables in the living room, and when I sit down to work I know exactly what needs to be done. I also keep my ‘‘to do’’ list in there so I can easily jot things down or complete them as I go along.
-Now in the habit of making my bed. I do it every morning when I wake up. It makes a huge difference in how inviting the bedroom feels.
There is still much to be done. But I’m pleased to say overall the house has maintained an appearance of tidiness for going on four weeks now… the things that are left are the hidden things.
As for the person wondering how to organize receipts, we have a pint-sized accordion file (this exact one) with a label for each month of the year, and a separate label for Major Purchases (electronics, furniture, anything in the hundreds of dollars range.) I save my receipts in my purse, put them in my inbox when I get home, and when I sit down to work I file them in that month’s slot. When we get to the next month, we throw out last year’s receipts. Easy peas.
Thanks for the baby stuff advice, Lacunae. Now that I have the favorite little-baby toys packed away (things like rattles, plastic links, crinkly books) I will stop keeping toys. I mostly had anyway… I probably take a load of toys to Goodwill every other month. I hope that by the time she’s able to realize and object, her toys will have gotten smaller.
When it comes to documents, the best purchase I ever made for peace of mind was a sheet-fed scanner that automatically produces searchable PDFs. I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap, but there are other options out there, including one called the NeatDesk. Every piece of paper coming into the house goes through the scanner and then gets shredded (unless it’s particularly important to keep a paper copy for a while, like certain receipts or tax documents), and the results are kept on our computer and securely backed up online. Anything I need I can print out again, or just email the PDF without having to scan it on-demand.
It’s worth ten times what I paid for it, solely from the time/space savings. It only takes sitting down for ten minutes once a week to take care of that week’s paperwork, and not much longer than that to make a dent in our backlog of archived paperwork (a thirty-minute scanning session can take care of several file folders’ worth of paper).
Ugh, we’re trying too - I just took our rugs to be cleaned and I’m considering finally biting the bullet and having our wood floors refinished, which would definitely make me clean up the living room! I came back from a bridal shower in another state this weekend to find that my fiance has been working hard on it, which is sweet and kind of amazing, and I felt so bad I actually cleaned up the kitchen! So that’s something. A start.
It’s one of the mornings that my daughter is at daycare, which is when I’m supposed to be house cleaning. I had just scrubbed the place for my mother-in-laws visit, so I was thinking “what could possibly be ready to be cleaned again???”
Fortunately, I have a system. I’ve broken housecleaning into discrete chores and written each on an index card. I keep them in a holder on my bathroom shelf, where I can’t ignore them. When I’m ready to clean, I start going through the cards, doing each task as it comes to the front of the pile.
Oh my. The bathtubs were filthy. It was time to dust again already. Trash bins needed emptying. Toilets needed scrubbing. I am glad I have a reminder system.
I’ve got big, intermittent tasks set on repeat in my Google calendar, btw. Index cards are for the small frequent stuff.
I’m not sure what I can do about my mom (age 79), who yes is a clutterer, but this sounds like a good place to bring it up. She has always had said tendencies, but they have gotten worse as she has gotten older, and my dad dying 12 years ago probably didn’t help either (as he would get on her butt about it-tho of course he wouldn’t lay a finger to actually help her). And now she had that stroke earlier this year and is apparently feeling more fatigued than ever. She is a snowbird and both places are pretty awful at this point-she will be forced to sell at least one, and I don’t know what to do to help when the time comes, as she constantly refuses my offers, saying that only she “knows” where to put things and what to keep. Any advice is appreciated, tho I’m not sure what else I can do frankly.
I’m loving these ideas.
Oh, and we started washing the sheets every week. As students, it wasn’t exactly, er, a major priority in life. I didn’t realize how easy it was to just pop them in the washer with the towels. I’m even trying to learn how to do hospital corners. It’s like I’m officially a grown up now that I make my bed every day. This is going to sound really bizarre, but I’m starting to enjoy doing laundry. And just cleaning in general.
I love to do laundry. Very little effort, very big reward, warm nice-smelling fabric and I get to SORT STUFF! YAY!
I hate to scrub floors though.
Note: around here, Goodwill no longer sells toys or baby items (this started when all the Chinese toys were being recalled due to lead content.) You may need to find another charity shop if the ones in your area are the same.
Ah, if only!
I have to bundle everything up and take it to the laundry down the road. Installing a washer in my current building would require upgrading the entire waterworks, from well pump to installation of a water softener system to, possibly, a larger septic drain field. Not going to happen.
So I try to do it efficiently, at least.
Ah yes, before I had in-home laundry I HATED doing laundry. There’s nothing more miserable than lugging bags of it through the snow only to find out that all the machines are broken. Scrounging for quarters isn’t cool either.
This is basically what I came in to say. I just finished moving and for a while I went through all my paper and spent a good deal of time thinking about whether I could get rid of it or not. Having the ScanSnap eliminated all of that dithering. I even scanned all the childhood art of our nephews and nieces. There are (a very few) things where you need to keep originals. I just scanned these and added a note as to where the original was (lockbox, file cabinet). There is also a whole category of stuff that you need to keep for a short time and scanning works great for that. At least when you need them you can find them. Dealing with paper in this way does add a whole new level of importance to backing your shit up, but it is well worth the effort. Of course all you have done is to replace hoarding with digital hoarding, but it leaves your house a lot cleaner.
Can I come in? I am not normally untidy or cluttered but life is seeming to overwhlem my house.
I hired a housecleaner to come every two weeks but I don’t even seem to be able to get to tidying before I go to bed.
When I got up this morning, there were actually all kinds of papers on the floor (my kids, it’s a good thing they are adorable sometimes).
WTF?
I actually cleaned up the kitchen, ran the dishwasher and did the dishes three times yesterday. TO NO AVAIL! I swear I am living with walking tornadoes.
Which reminds me: My backup XP computer was running terribly slowly till I went through the masses of downloaded photo files and cleaned out a lot of them. I always download my digital camera to that computer as well as my primary one (both have backup external hard drives), and then to a third just-in-case computer. Chucking a bunch of the raw files broomed out multi-megabytes of useless files. The machine speeded way up!
Lately it’s been slow again, so I’ve gone back to weed out more photo download files, plus brooming out programs I no longer use. The difference is obvious.
Is there some kind of quick-scan machine for photos too? I want to go completely digital with my photos but I have one of those scanners where you can only do a page at a time.
Don’t know, but I doubt it; photos are way higher in data bytes than documents.