The De-Clutter and Clean Up Support Thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
501

Go, Broomstick! Go, Sara! You can DO it! :slight_smile:

Anyone got something really weird that they’ve held onto? I was trying to work on my cupcake / cake / cookie decorating supplies, only to find I’ve got enough decorative Halloween cupcake papers to last me at least the next 6-7 Halloweens. What the *&^% was I thinking? Anyone got any kind of handy hack for how to store this stuff? My kitchen storage goes up and up, height-wise, but I do not. :frowning: Consequently, I don’t really have anywhere to put this stuff at hobbit-level, and I tend to buy dupes since I’m too short to effectively see what I’ve got. Suggestions welcomed.

On the plus front, I decided to book-ground myself this year until I get rid of some of my “bought it cause I wanted to read it then back-burnered it” pile. It’s a BIG pile, but I’m already a few books lighter than I was. Here’s hoping for strength enough to keep that resolution!

502

I have two sets of those freestanding metal shelves six feet tall along a wall in the basement. These serve as my “pantry” and hold foods I buy in bulk when it’s on a good sale plus seasonal stuff plus pans and such that aren’t used often, like canning supplies and turkey roaster and 16 cup coffee pot. Works pretty well for me.

Warning, though: if you do this, keep a written list up in your kitchen, adding and subtracting as you add/use supplies. Otherwise (if your memory is as leaky as mine) the day will come that you take inventory and discover you have EIGHT jars of green relish. (Why?? I don’t even LIKE green relish, I only mix it into tuna salad sometimes…)

I started doing something like that a few years back. But I’m not as stern as you: I allow myself to buy (or take out of the library) one book for every two books I read, at least one of them needing to be an ‘old’ book off my backlog. The piles gradually went away and I still got to read the latest releases from my favorite authors. :slight_smile:

Of course the shrinking of the piles was helped by he fact that I got a kindle. Same rules apply (must read two books before can get one new one) but getting rid of one or two ‘real’ books and only replacing them with a digital one really helps speed the process.

503

Hmm, if I find myself straying from my book grounding, I’ll have to implement your 2-1 rule. You hoard green relish? I’m a former Jell-o and pudding hoarder, myself. My best friend swore I’d make it through any number of natural disasters by ingesting my pudding supply :smiley:

504

I have a tendency to buy things because I get to the grocery store, ask myself whether I have X item, and decide “eh, it won’t go bad, buy one.” Which tends to result in stuff like 6 extra bottles of paprika or cinnamon or 8 jars of mayo and no mustard. Lately, before I go shopping to restock, I take a cell phone photo of
[ul]
[li]Pantry[/li][li]Cereal cabinet[/li][li]Spice cabinet[/li][li]Fridge #1 and its freezer[/li][li]Fridge #2 and its freezer[/li][li]The free-standing freezer[/li][li]The baking cabinet[/li][/ul]

A couple of shelves are too tall for me to see, but I can take a photo and bring it down to my level - I try to store seasonal items there, like cupcake liners, or items that my tall son is saving for himself.

Seriously, this method is working nicely for me - I get to the store, wonder whether I need more flour, and pull up the photo of my bottom pantry shelf to see at least four bags of flour. No need to buy more, unless it’s a great sale. Saves me from climbing around a lot, too - I can take that photo above my head, and only climb up to the correct shelf (or call the tall boy to come retrieve it for me.)

505

I’ve been working on a smaller scale. I pretty much had sinus issues for the month of December and it just seems to be impossible to get anything else done over the holidays anyway.

I took apart an old pantry cabinet I had in the house. It’s made of particle board and the bottom was starting to rot and fall apart making it unstable. I had already cleaned everything out of it a while back. I had ideas to do various things to fix it but then I decided I got my money’s worth out of it, I’ve had it at least 15 years or more, and it was time for it to go. I’d miss the storage space but I’d rather have something that’s not made of particle board. I took it apart and I may reuse some of the boards but there is no way for me to change my mind and put it back together since I had to break some pieces to get it apart. I am going to toss out the bad boards.

506

I did quite a bit to try and start catching up, on Saturday. And I’m going to do some more tomorrow. It’s just daunting, and I feel guilty about letting things slide, and it’s just hard to get started again.

The post-holiday clutter struggle, it’s an annual tradition 'round here. XD

507

Not for how to store it, but my mother has a List. The List lists everything that’s in the highest storage closets; it started with those items that couldn’t be seen without getting on a stepladder and eventually got complete. She’s also added a few items stored lower but which she can never remember where the hell they are.

We’ve yelled at her repeatedly that she’s not to climb up herself, she’s to wait until one of us is handy. One time she asked “but how do you know?” (that she’d climbed) “MOM! You broke one of the handles! Again!”

Is there an expression in English for “grabbing onto something high, such as a shelf or handle, and putting all your weight on it”? She does that, and we don’t particularly fancy getting there for lunch one day and having to call the coroner.

508

I shall certainly make a List going forward. I’d join your mom in not knowing where anything was if I don’t. :smiley:

If that word doesn’t exist in English, we should invent it. My husband would agree, as he’s the one who’s gotten to fix my broken sinks, handles, etc. I understand your mom’s struggle… but I agree on the caution too!:eek:

509

If anyone needs some inspiration, I just read “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” and it was like a revelation. The book is built on pretty simple principles- only keep a bare minimum of items that truly inspire love in your heart, keep your organization scheme simple and in a single place, and learn to let go. I think the author’s take on letting go was what was really transformational to me-- she teaches you how to literally thank items for their service and for what they taught you (even if all they taught you was “I’ll never use a gravy boat”) and set them free. She doesn’t take it too far with a lot of precious “minimalism” or “simplicity” or “downsizing.” She just encourages readers to let go of things that it’s time to let go of, and to focus on taking very good care of what you do have.

After reading her book, I took about three days off work to more-or-less throw things out. I removed probably 20 bags of stuff from my apartment- quite a feat for a tiny apartment that didn’t seem extraordinarily cluttered to begin wtih. The change has been specacular. It’s so much easier to keep the house clean, and somehow I feel a lot less of the subtle, lingering anxiety that messy drawers and avoided closets can bring.

510

Get a big transparent or at least translucent bin and pile it all in there. At least it’s all in one spot then, and while you might need to put that bin on a high shelf, you can look in one place when you wonder if you’ve got cupcake cups or whatever. All our stuff like that is in a bin.

Of course, even when you buy such a bin, you’ll find that you wind up with more stuff than will FIT in the blasted thing, if you’re like me :slight_smile:

Our latest triumph: We’re renting out our basement for a few months. That prompted us to finally get rid of:

  • A large guinea pig cage
  • A large moving box containing hardware tools from our last house (we’ve lived here 12 years)
  • Bank statements and the like from the early 1990s (OK, we still have those, we’re waiting for a bank or something to have a free-shred-fest, but they’re in a specific plastic bin, ready to grab)
  • A carload of outgrown toys and books
    And oh so much more.

See, that basement was a floor we never went to, unless we needed something from the unfinished storage, so it was out of sight, out of mind…

Not to mention several basketsful (basketfuls?) of clothing (the cleaning lady wanted them to donate to her home country).

Does the house LOOK any better? Well, um, I’ll take the fifth on that. But it’s very telling that we can get rid of that much crap, and not see much visible improvement. OK, the basement looks better but we’re never down there :).

511

Very clever!!
On the spices, I would imagine you need to make sure all the labels are facing forward - something that is, um, not usually the case at my house :smiley: I did largely eliminate the “can’t find it, so buy more” on spices at least when I got a bunch of door-hung Elfa spice shelves so I finally have a way to keep them organized and in alphabetical order.

My thing with all of that is that I’m pretty good about making a list and sticking to it when shopping; I’ll only do the “won’t go bad, grab it” thing if it truly is something like flour or other use-in-large-quantities thing. For me the problem with spices is that I’ll be running low on something and just assume I’ve got it, then go to make the dish and find out nope, I need x amount and have half of it. Oops.

If you have a smartphone, there are a number of grocery tools out there (I use ToMarket for Android) to help with shopping lists. I am not really good about adding stuff to the list when I notice it’s running low, unfortunately. Maybe a whiteboard right by the pantry would help with that.

On a sort-of side note: I’ve seen a couple episodes of a show on cable where couples are looking to purchase a “tiny house” - often 200 or so square feet. I cannot IMAGINE managing in a space that small. But it does make me think about how much of our stuff is truly essential.

512

I think I’ve mentioned before that actually I find the clean house MORE anxiety-generating for several days or a week after a clean up. I find having my stuff around me comforting in many ways, even when there’s too much of it.

Seriously, after a big clean up I’ll wake up in the middle of the night convinced I’ve thrown out something essential or that I wanted to keep, it’s all I can do to stop myself from leaping up and going through the garbage. That usually goes on for a couple nights in a row.

Yeah, I know it’s not normal. I am really trying to get past it. For some reason, I don’t get as much anxiety from donating stuff as throwing it out. No, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not rational.

I still find that keeping a small notepad of some sort in the kitchen where I can jot things down quickly works best for me. The electronic stuff just adds another layer of complication to things for me. Maybe I’m just stuck in the old habit, but it works for me.

513

That is awesome. Someday, when I’m no longer a homeschooling mom and the house isn’t filled with kid stuff, I’m going to live in an empty apartment.

A couple of weeks ago I went over to help clean a lady’s house–she had had sudden severe surgery and won’t be able to be a spry little old lady anymore, and her house needed clearing out before she could come home. It wasn’t horrifying, it was just full of 60 years’ worth of knick-knacks and cute crafts and country charm…dusty and cobwebby, because she is old now and can’t clean easily. Our job was to clear more space and tidy the in-progress crafty stuff away, because she’ll probably be in a wheelchair. I went home and told my kids that when I’m old, I’m going to live in an empty condo and have a cleaning service, and they have my full permission to make me get rid of junk. (This obviously does not include books, which are necessary, and fabric, because I’m going to spend my old age sewing up those quilts I haven’t gotten to yet. And if I can’t, the fabric can go, but not the books.)

I don’t need 10 pretty colored bottles on the windowsill, or countless country-style signs, or hand-painted ceramic plates. The style I really prefer is Craftsman/Mission, but if I can’t have that I’ll go for Danish Modern, just to have the space.

514

I think that’s completely rational; if you donate it, you’re not wasting it.

Throwing out something you paid good money for because it just doesn’t suit you just piles one more failure - waste - on top of extravagance and poor judgment.
Donating it is charity and recycling and being sensible, and is wonderful.

515

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of “reorder point”. When something gets below the “reorder point” you add it to the shopping list (in my family and for most items it’s “when the last package is opened”). You do it when you open that package, not when you put it back in the pantry or when you finish cooking: you do it with the package in one hand and the pencil in the other.

Shopping lists should be created in the format in which they will be used and should be accesible to the whole “shopping group”, which in most households means to the whole family. That way anybody who reaches the reorder point can add the item to the list. For my mother’s house, that means several pieces of paper stuck to the microwave by magnets (butcher, fishmonger, supermarket, veggies); when he was first married, my brother used Excel to create and print a table listing their most usual items, with additional lines to add others. He’d keep the tables and, if he saw there was an item they added manually very often, added it to the typed part. That way instead of writing the names in their horrible handwritings they just had to mark an X (or two, or three, to mean “buy a lot of it!”). He’s been married for 16 years, the current edition is stuck to the front of their fridge. I turn into Drooling Auntie any time I’m at their house and one of the Kidlets announces “we’re low on [whatever he or she just grabbed from the fridge], I marked it.”

516

I’d suggest giving the book a try. It’s not one of those books about obtaining minimalist perfection. It’s more about a process of learning to recognize why we hang on to items that make us feel bad or just cause clutter, and finding a positive way to let them go. My house is far from empty after (I tend to describe it as “Babies’R’Us got in a fight with World Market”), but it is more…edited than it used to be.

She writes primarily for a Japanese audience that is likely hosting a multi-generational family in a tiny space, and she works with the realities that we aren’t necessarily masters of our space.

517

Does cleaning out the freezer count?

Work was hectic this week and we wound up eating through what was in the freezer.

518

No, my accumulation was NOT “extravagance” and with rare exception was NOT “poor judgement”.

A lot of what’s in the house was inherited from others (meaning lots of memories and emotions tangled up with it).

Some of the rest of it used to be used, like my skis, bicycle, and other sporting goods, but isn’t any longer (to give you an idea of how non- extravagant those purchase were: the skis I bought in 1982 and was still using up until about 10 years ago. The bicycle was bought in 1978, still used until about two years ago. So it’s not like I ran out every year and bought new gear.)

Some of the rest is books: last count I have several thousand books. I am slowly whittling down the collection but the fact is there are quite a few I re-read every 5-10 years. I sort of wish there was an easy way to convert some of them to e-format, but there isn’t.

Some of the rest is the products of my crafting - all those blankets, scarves, etc. DID serve a useful purpose, entertaining me in their making, but after 45 years of various fiber arts I have far too many. I really should donate them but I’m finding a surprising number of restrictions in doing so in some circumstances.

So… the problem isn’t that I’m always running out and buying a lot of crap, it’s that I have a lot of trouble throwing anything and now have a half century of stuff piled up. I think I’ve got the input problem largely under control (as evidenced that when I stop the purging the piles don’t grow), now I have to work on the output part of it.

I going to keep making crafty stuff, I enjoy it too much to stop. The problem is the stuff piling up (when my great aunt Pearl died there were crates of her hand made lace left to the family - very pretty, but how many lace dresser runners can anyone use?). Lately, I’ve been doing the very practical thing of knitting socks - useful, don’t take up much space, and they’ve replaced some of the socks I had that wore out (And yes, I’ve thrown those worn out pairs out. Yay!).

I don’t want to stop making things, but I need to do something with what I make and, needless to say, making something beautiful only to throw it out is NOT going to happen around here.

519

This is why the better solution is to do the cleanup the night before the garbage truck arrives (assuming you don’t have time to do the cleanup the same day as the truck arrival).

520

The truck normally arrives around 4 am, no way to do a clean up the same day before it arrives!