I agree with j666. Toys should be getting played with and loved, not just stuffed away in a barely remembered box and aging past usable.
I have recently (i.e. within the last week) sorted through decades of patterns and fabric which I know I will never sew into any wearable garment. I’ve kept a few pieces but probably less than a quarter of what I had. I was going to put it on Freecycle but a friend mentioned she’d be happy to take it all off my hands. My family room looks lovely now, with all the containers of material and sewing patterns gone.
We did that with my grandmother’s sewing room a few years ago, **jabiru[\b], and it was like magic! All of a sudden, it felt like it was manageable to empty her house! (Her home had so many expensive structural problems that it was not fixable on the budget we were working with, and she couldn’t come home from nursing care until she had a safe home. Therefore, we emptied the old place, gave it to someone willing to move it within our time frame, and had a modular home trucked in.) The old house had a 16x32 addition on the back, and 75% had become sewing room/fabric storage - to the point that the sheer weight of the fabric contributed to the structural damage! (Needless to say, Grandmother bitched a lot about all of her missing goodies, but for the five years she was able to live in her new home, she probably didn’t tackle any sewing project more complicated than fixing a hem, even with an organized and accessible 12x12 sewing room and plenty of good remaining material. Besides, the old stuff all smelled like rotting pumpkins and mildew.) Fortunately, a family friend was able to clean the fabric and actually use it for a charitable organization she works with.
Bragging just a little here: I have managed to finally hang curtains and pictures, finish a few more projects, and organize a little more, and the house looks so nice that I’m taking pride in it, keeping it clean and neat. We had company over for a cookout Wednesday evening, and I even had time to open a beer and relax before everyone arrived. The dishwasher was loaded that night (and so was my husband!) and the porch and yard were picked up by noon Thursday - a couple of stray beer bottles and chairs next to the fire pit, trash taken out, etc. I’ve been keeping up with the laundry and dishes, making the kids put away toys, sweeping daily and running the steam mop as needed, and finding that it’s less stressful to keep things clean than to get them clean after the mess settles in.
My “ah ha” moment came last night, when I casually invited the in-laws to come over for dinner tonight, knowing that I didn’t need to do a panic clean before cooking. I’m even on track to finish my Easter cooking, basket assembly, etc., without stressing out. Go me, if I do say so myself!
And yesterday, my newly cleaned car was rear ended and totaled.
Damn it. I was just getting serious about selling it, too.
((Sarabellum1976))
Hand-made Christmas gifts from my siblings’ kids. From about a quarter of a century ago. They bring back the past like nothing, and they really don’t take much space … but I’m supposed to be getting rid of stuff here.
If I never come across them again, I will not miss them, but I will never get the feeling they give me from anything else ….
And then there are the Christmas cookie tins. I know I’m supposed to fill them with cookies next year and pass them on, creating a circle of Yuletide love and wishes. But I don’t bake. I can get rid of them, right?
For some people, “documenting” something like the Christmas ornaments is useful, taking photographs and making a scrapbook or webpage of them to help you keep the memories without the physical object.
The cookie tins - give them to Goodwill if you aren’t using them, or some comparable charity, so others can enjoy them. If the Christmas ornaments are of high enough quality you can do the same with them.
Part of my decluttering plan includes giving away the plastic crates and drawers which contained my decades’ worth of fabric and sewing patterns. The fabric and patterns have gone to a good home. (Thank you, Elizabeth and your fellow parishioners.) My son will take all the plastic crates etc I can send his way. The family room is looking great.
I have two major decluttering chores which I’ve been putting off forever. I have a large plastic crate (which I’ll give to my son when the chore is done) which contains a bazillion articles related to my work which I need to sort, cull and file somehow. Every time we start a new treatment protocol, I print it out and also print out the drug information for my own education. Sadly, for my clutter bug ways, I just put the info into the crate ‘for later’. This will be a mammoth job to tackle but I really need to get a start on it.
I have a week off at the end of June (typically cold and wet where I live) and I’m hoping to sit down and get this whole shebang sorted in one day.
The other chore which I keep putting off (and will probably continue to put off for some time yet) is the piles and piles of photos I have of my sons which have yet to be put into albums. My most recent, properly sorted album contains photos of them when they were six and eight. They are now (almost) 30 and (almost) 32, so there’s a lot to do there.
The kids’ gifts have been back for another round; they are small and light, so I can handle that.
Oddly, all my cookie tins fit neatly inside each other. I did cull several gift boxes and other sundries, and we are on to the Hallowe’en stuff.
Does anyone need glow in the dark side walk chalk?
Did you store it in an uninsulated attic or something like that? Our legos and clicks (playmobil) are in perfect shape.
Which I guess amounts to “anything you store, make sure you’re storing it properly”.
A proposal to simplify our lives:
Give gifts to other people on our own birthdays, rather than on theirs.
Then we do not find the presents we bought a few months in advance, a few years later, gathering dust.
Managed to get a garbage bag of deferred clutter out of here every day this week.
Finally got back to the middle room, cleaning about 4 feet of shelf space - all of which was taken up again by stuff we want to keep, but clearing more room. My dad is taking back all his stained glass equipment. The computer-controlled lathe is in my spouse’s shop where it will hopefully start generating income for us.
Unfortunately, I was feeling poorly the last two days which put the brakes on again, but it’s still great to see some progress anyway.
I washed almost every bit of my laundry backlog this week.
And as it turns out, the car was not totaled after all. It will be repaired and returned to me in a couple of weeks.
Wonder if I’ll have to clean it again?
Worked on the middle room again today, got the spouse involved, too. Woot! Made a visible dent.
The family room is 90% tidied and packed up, which I think is as far as one should go with a family room.
I’m working on the closets now. I have thrown out, given away, or donated about half my clothes so far. My closet is shockingly empty, but that’s because my sweaters have been put away for the season, and I’m bringing several items for dry-cleaning.
I’ve had an en suite bathroom I don’t use merged with where the old hot water tank used to be and converted to a store room. I’ve tidied a lot of my clobber there - in the process chucking loads out - and put in a wine rack and put all my wine in the rack, so all the boxes that the wine bottles were in have also been chucked.
Took a big bite out of my messy garage today. Removed about twenty bags and boxes worth of stuff. Another 6 or 8 bags of old clothes and such to donate, plus a big box of books destined for Half Price Books. All gone, gone, gone!
Now have sufficient cleared room in the middle room to reclaim part of the workbench - it has now because a room I can Do Stuff In again.
Miraculously, I’ve been able to get even more garage space cleared out. My husband was willing to get rid of old computer equipment, and in the spirit of things I pitched some old camping equipment of mine. It hasn’t been used in 10 years anyway, and if I suddenly decided to start camping again (with four small children in tow, doesn’t that sound fun?) I doubt I’d want to sit on 20 year old, probably mildewy camp chairs, anyway. Nice, new camp chairs do not cost a fortune.
I set them by the curb, where a truck full of teenaged boys scooped them up, along with an ancient 3 man tent, and a camp table, within the hour.
On a scanning binge, tackling the paper again. I just bought a new 1TB terabyte drive and have made the decision not to feel guilty about *digital *hoarding.
Gone: paperwork for shared accounts with people who are dead, at financial institutions that no longer exist. Maintenance records for a car I got rid of in 2009. Latin homework circa 1985.
I’ve also dismantled and scanned most of my yearbooks. I don’t anticipate ever needing to sit down with them and resuscitate pleasant memories. I don’t remember most of the people in them, and mostly they remind me that yearbooks are really for the popular kids and their friends. I envy the millennials who seem to be dispensing with them altogether.