The De-Clutter and Clean Up Support Thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1081

I got to do some serious decluttering and organizing over the break. Now it’s pretty much glorious.

I got a big 12-slot wooden mailbox for our countertop to get all of the mail off the kitchen island. Now it’s neatly sorted. The husband and I each have our own inbox, but we’ve also got boxes for things that need to be filed, things that need to be shredded, my son’s schoolwork, events and coupons. We review it every weekend.

I got some of those little drawer dividers and finally found a solution for my nightstand drawer. No more fumbling in the dark for the bed or space heater remotes.

I also put dividers in my makeup drawer. Now I can see what I’m actually running out of.

I organized all the bathroom shelves.

I got a couple of little corner shelves to put on the bathroom counter. I have all my daily meds on it so I don’t forget them. I then have a box in the cupboard where all my extra meds go. (Like if I have a three month supply.) This has solved the problem of 1) forgetting to take my medications and 2) having no idea how many of each medication I have. No more rooting through empty prescription bags or looking all over the place for extra meds.

I also organized all my cross stitch supplies into stackable art bins with adjustable dividers, and I loved them so much I got four more of them to organize all of our electronic accessories. You know, display port cables, HDMI cables, USBs, cell phone accessories, PC equipment, it’s all organized and labeled now.

Finally, I started a habit of emptying the dishwasher every morning and running it every night, no exceptions. This has made a HUGE difference with staying on top of dishes.

Miraculously it seems like I’ve been able to maintain these new systems. I’ve been living by the adage “don’t put it down, put it away.” The other adage is “don’t sit down yet.” When I come home from work or errands, I spend a little more time on my feet tidying up before I crash.

Stress levels at home are way down.

1082

Wow. So glad to see people find this useful so many years after I started it. 14 years and still going.

I fell off the de-clutter wagon a few years ago. That’s because over the past 3 years I have had 7 operations/“procedures” and six months of chemotherapy to deal with 2 rounds with cancer, a potentially blinding retinal issue, and cataract surgery. I was a little… busy. Preoccupied.

The good news: things never got as bad/out of control as they did in the past. I’m currently taking a few days off work for a “staycation” and part of that will be some picking up/organizing around this place. Including getting my filing back under control. I was doing well until the chemo last summer, followed by the usual retail chaos of the holidays. The filing went off the rails last June so I basically have six months worth of stuff piled up that I need to go through. That’s considerably better than the first time I really got serious about tackling the filing.

I got permission from my current landlord to install shelves and a coat rack in my apartment.

The coat rack is up and has drastically reduced clutter in the hallway and front room - my active outerwear, purse, work bag, etc. are now hung up and easily accessible, and also have a place to go the moment I walk in the door.

The same friend who helped me with the coat rack (selection, installation, moral support, etc.) also got some shelves up in the kitchen above the table, making use of some vertical space. This has helped immensely as the “extra” storage space made a big difference in keeping clutter down in my tiny kitchen. They are also properly anchored in the studs so they are not coming down.

I’m trying to arrange a day for that same friend to come out to put up shelves in my bedroom, only half of which I use for a bedroom (it’s big) and the other half is my craft/workroom. Again, this will increase my storage significantly.

A good friend of mine who is very good at helping others organize is coming to visit next month. Although we’ll be sure to schedule some fun we’ll also be spending some time with her helping me out. If the weather allows we’ll be tackling some of my off-site storage unit which really needs another “purge” cycle.

Somewhere in there I need to go through all my electronic/computer/etc stuff. I now have a contact for either donation of old equipment or proper disposal of e-waste which will help considerably in dealing with that pile of stuff.

The downside is that my pickup is now at the end of its useful life so movement of large quantities to the recyclers/charity/whatever will have to be done in loads small enough to fit in my car. But that’s still very doable.

The most frustrating thing is that I’m still battling fatigue and having to rebuild my stamina after the chemo. The last time I saw the oncologist he said I was doing fantastic, better than 99% of the rest of his patients, but it’s 6-12 months to really fully recover and I was still on month 5. But you’re doing great! he says. I said but doctor, I’m still tired. He said yes, I know, I’m sorry, but you really are getting better.

He’s right. It is getting better. But I’ve had to recalibrate what it is even possible for me to do in a day. My steps might be smaller but I can still keep moving forward one step at a time.

1083

We do unfortunately have a big box of computer stuff that needs to be wiped and recycled. We have yet to tackle that, because it’s going to be a pain. But I think it will really free up a lot of space in my husband’s office, because his office is half storage. That and our laundry room are the most problematic areas of the house.

I think a process like this is ongoing so it makes sense to me that it’s a little easier for you coming back to it. A few years ago I got rid of at least half of everything I owned. That was the big purge. But ever since then, I’ve been trying to keep it going, through smaller purges and organizational efforts.

I can’t imagine how much more difficult it is with all of the health issues you’ve been having, so I say kudos for doing anything at all. Sometimes the expectations we set for ourselves are the hardest thing.

1084

During the worst of my health issues I kept as priority keeping the kitchen and bathroom clean. The rest could be cluttered and dusty, but keeping up with those two is what kept my environment healthy.

It wasn’t fun, that’s for sure!

I’d have a health “episode”, recover enough to start getting things back in order, then another thing would happen.

1085

We have the same standard 2 car garage that came factory-equipped on every mid-century American ranch home. We also, like so many (most?) people, use it for junk storage rather than parking our cars in.

My wife and I have been together for 25 years and in that quarter of a century we have accumulated a staggering amount of stuff. Much of it is junk that can safely be tossed without practical repercussions. The emotional repercussions, on the other hand…

Regardless of the fallout, our goal for this winter is to clear out and organize that damn garage once and for all.

I’ve made some progress, mostly working on my own so far.

First, the Christmas décor. We have, oh my God, (2) 15-quart totes, (6) 30-quart totes and (3) 70-quart totes filled with Christmas stuff. Plus a big donut-shaped wreath holder. But… BUT!!! 6 weeks ago all that crap was in various ancient ratty cardboard boxes and random bags in different corners of the garage. After Christmas we went to Lowes and picked up the aforementioned totes to put all of our Christmas junk in, which includes the two (yes, two… sigh…) Christmas trees. We spent the weekend after Christmas de-decorating and packing away all that décor. Just getting it all organized and into storage totes has helped my anxiety immensely. As we were packing them I made lists of everything that had been stuffed into each one, then afterward printed up content labels and taped them to the front of each one.

We had our sons’ crib in the garage. This thing was hand-made from oak by my FIL. It was big and built like a tank. It also did not fold or otherwise come apart. It took years for my wife to agree to get rid of it – our kids are 21 and 18 now. A few weeks ago, when my wife was out of the house but with her blessing, my oldest son and I took it outside and cut it into little sticks with a Sawzall. Into the back of his pickup and to the dump it went.

I’ve so far made three trips to the landfill with junk from the garage – each trip taking my son’s loaded pickup. I’ve thrown away random stuff that really has no value to us or anyone else, including – please don’t hate me – a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica from 1991. My parents made Mr. Crab look like an extravagant spendthrift, but in 1991 they were visited by a door-to-door salesman who talked them into buying a the full micro- and macropædia sets, a five-year subscription to the annual yearbook, as well the complete Compton children’s encyclopedia set. Once Encarta came along those Britannicas were destined to live the rest of their lives as mere shelf decorations. They’ve been sitting in boxes for 15 years now, at least. I’m loathe to throw away books but with those things, I had little choice as nobody, but nobody wanted those. I literally could not give them away.

I’m at the point now where I need my wife to be more involved because, naturally, I’m not going to throw out her stuff without her blessing. With three loads of stuff removed to the dump and the Christmas totes in the house for now, the garage looks… pretty much the same. Sigh. This is going to be a big project.

I did find 8 or 10 boxes of old family pictures that my dad had given me after my mom died. I knew they were there but they had been living in seclusion in the back of the garage for a couple of years now. This week I hauled them into the house and simply repackaged them into totes. 10 random-sized boxes condensed into (3) 25 gallon airtight totes.

(Random aside: why are storage tote sizes measured in liquid volume?? I’m not using them to store emergency drinking water or gasoline. Cubic inches / feet would make much more sense.)

Well, I did do more than just repackage them. I threw out a box of 35mm slides and thousands of strips of negatives. I figured if I thought about it long enough I could/would justify saving the slides, so I threw them out before my own hoarding tendencies could kick in. Only one envelope of pictures got tossed: that of my uncle’s wedding to a woman who he later wished had been taking a peaceful stroll on an eastern Sri Lankan beach on the morning of December 26, 2004. It’s a safe bet that he does not want those particular snapshots. In those three totes there are tens of thousands of family pictures going back to the 1850’s, I have absolutely no justification in keeping any more than I already did. I did find my uncle’s photo album full of snapshots he took in Vietnam, something I wasn’t aware even existed let alone that my mom had. I don’t know what to do with it… hell, I don’t know what to do with any of those pictures. Organizing them will be a task for another season… this year I was concerned with getting them out of their random boxes and into protective totes.

I have triple 6 foot tall stacks of packages of toilet tissue, napkins, and paper towels. Lessons from Covid, dutifully learned. I don’t know where I’m going to store those.

I have more books than I have space for, by a couple orders of magnitude. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all those. We plan on acquiring 4 barrister bookcases for the living room. That still won’t be enough. When we moved into this house I culled much of my book collection, it’s now about as thin as I’m willing to let it be and I still have >1k books.

We spent years collecting DVD’s as we were very late to the streaming game and did not have satellite or cable. However we have now fully embraced the digital revolution and we have many, many boxes of DVD’s that haven’t seen a laser in years – probably a decade, at this point. I have no idea what we’re going to do with all of those. How does one decide which ones to keep?? The only ones I want to keep for sure are my Northern Exposure and Home Improvement series.

Same with my wife’s CD’s. We no longer, I believe, even possess a CD player. (I’m actually sitting here thinking about this… and no. I’m certain we do not own a CD player. I own an 80’s style boombox with a cassette player integrated into it, but no CD player. And no, I also do not own any cassettes that I am aware of. The boombox can be used as a Bluetooth speaker which is the only reason I’ve kept it.) We have SiriusXM subscriptions now. I don’t know if I can convince her to part with them.

I have a performance of The Nutcracker, Op 71 performed by the London Philharmonic under Mariss Jansons on a 2-CD set. I’m loathe to get rid of that but… as John Ray taught us, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Besides, it’s available for $4 on eBay. Not exactly a rare item. It was also my mom’s, and she loved it. But I can’t play it. Sigh…

Once we have purged all of our extraneous clutter, we will organize the remaining stuff into totes and store them on shelves. We’ll have one shelf dedicated to kitchen overflow / dry goods / pantry items and likely get a used fridge to go next to the upright freezer for cold-but-not-frozen stuff that needs storing.

This spring, when it warms up a bit, and assuming the garage organization is complete, I’m going to build a workbench that will live on east wall of the garage. I’ve not had a workbench or really any kind of space to fiddle with stuff since we’ve lived here and I’m looking forward to that perhaps most of all.

But for all the work done so far, it doesn’t seem like much progress has been made.

1086

My husband had a bunch (not as many as you) and he paid a friend looking for some extra cash to digitize them all. Much easier to sort now, and take up zero space. He has made many of them into picture books he created online (Mixbooks. He does one every year for our son, but ever since he digitized these old photos he’s been doing more projects.)

We don’t have a garage but I imagine it’s a huge undertaking. I think putting stuff into totes is progress because 1) it’s probably a lot more attractive and 2) now you know what you’ve got.

I’ve been listening to the A Slob Comes Clean podcast and she says to prioritize what’s visible before anything else. Because you’ll just feel better when you can see the difference.

She also says to put stuff in the first place you would look for it, which makes sense.

1087

We live in western Oregon so temperature extremes aren’t really an issue. Thus, pretty much anything and everything can be safely stored in the garage. It became the default storage place for anything that we just needed out of the way. Our house has not-particularly-big closets so not much extra storage there and the kitchen has the typical 1960’s design with small cabinets so not much storage there either… and now, after nearly 5 years, the garage is just piled with stuff. It’s like the Room of Requirement in the final Harry Potter movie.

We decided to utilize totes on shelves for the very reason you note: it’s easy to see what’s inside (we chose clear totes with the exception of the Xmas totes, which are red with green lids, as one would expect) and once everything is squared away and in its place it will look organized and put together. Clutter gives me mild anxiety – I have OCD – and having all that stuff organized and stored properly, and all my books on shelves in the house where God intended them to be, will be immensely comforting for me.

I’m going to check out that podcast.

1088

The slob comes clean method is very good. The 5 minute better works a treat, as well as the no pile, take it there now thing.

She has good you tube videos, and the end credits are a hoot.

1089

The one I listened to today was about experimenting and learning rather than trying to commit to doing something every day for the rest of your life. I found that incredibly relieving, because she understands that mental process I get into: “I should clean today. I should clean every day. But if I clean now it’s 5pm and I can’t clean at 5pm tomorrow and this method won’t work if I ever have to return to the office because there’s no way I’ll be home by 5pm so really it makes no sense whatsoever to clean today. It’s just too big of a commitment.”

Lol that’s how my mind works. Even with my cross stitch today I was thinking, “I’m gonna be screwed when my eyesight fails me. Then what am I gonna do? I’ll have to find a new hobby.” I’m 42!

Just the idea of try something today and stop worrying about the future covers a lot of ground for me. Or as she put it, give yourself permission to learn.

1090

Last Friday I had someone from Social Services come by and we discussed what my options were for getting my place cleaned up. I have a collection of brochures with info on various services, some of which may even be covered by Medicare or other assistance programs.

Now that my physical/occupation therapists are working out definite schedules for their visits I feel more confidant in setting up assorted home visits for decluttering and cleaning. In addition to needing someone to stand over me while I go through my crap and point out that there’s no reason to keep half of it, the biggest part of it will be taking books off my shelves and packing them up to be brought to the public library.

1091

Your whole post is inspirational but this… we have been waiting until it is full to run it, but the problem is that then we forget to empty it. I am gonna try this and I bet it will make a big difference in our house too!

Okay, I am taking so many notes from your post. I’m also gonna get some organizers to organize all my craft stuff. I’m halfway there as I’m in the process of going through all the craft stuff, at least… And deal with the mail organizer. The problem with mail organizers – I actually do own one – is that I put mail there and then it sits there forever. So I love that you say you review it every weekend. I think what I need is a set time every week where I commit to reviewing what’s in there.

Over winter break I did make some headway into cleaning and organizing some of our space. I have mostly got the living room/music room into shape where I can’t do much more without clearing another space (e.g. the musical instruments, which are kind of in a big messy pile right now, could go in the playroom but I’d have to figure out a dedicated place for them which there isn’t yet). But ugh I have a ways to go.

1092

If you want to keep the music but not the CDs, you should be able to rip them to your computer. That’s what I did with all our CDs. I did keep a small selection to play through our soundbar, which is attached to the TV in the living room. A DVD player will also play CDs. I’ve got an external drive I use for backup as well, so if the hard drive on the computer blows up I won’t lose any of it.

I also digitized all the family photos and sent links to a Google Photos album to my cousins of the photos that I thought they might be interested in. That came in handy for them when my aunt passed away - they were able to use some of those photos for the obituary and funeral program.

1093

My wife and I stopped by an estate sale at one of our neighbors. I found the home very disturbing. It was so filled with crap that you could barely walk. An old pool table. Piles of computer peripherals from the 90s. Library stacks of books. A wall of creepy old dolls. Apparently the gentlemen was a former Air Force fighter pilot, bookstore owner, and mayor of the town. I would have assumed the home belonged to some sort of lunatic shut-in.

1094

Lots of productive citizens turn into “lunatic shut-ins” as their vigor fades and their lifetime accumulation becomes larger than they can deal with.

Which is why I’m a strong advocate for people aggressively trimming their accumulated lifetime of stuff as they enter retirement, not waiting another 15 years or whatever until it’s an impossible task and they become prisoners of their own device.

1095

How much mail are you getting every day? I get the mail and immediately take care of it. I throw junk in the recycle bin, bills go in my work bag to get paid when I have down time at work, investment info goes into a folder, and items I’ll need for tax prep goes into a folder. Other stuff gets read and tossed. At most, we get 5 pieces of mail per day.

1096

We get a lot of mail, the main issue is my husband would just let stuff pile up on the counter. He insists on going through every newspaper, coupon or event, but he won’t take care of it right away. So now we have a place to put that stuff that I can review, sort and file on the weekend, even if he doesn’t.

1097

One thing that I started doing years ago was keeping a bin next to my seat on the sofa, and as I finish reading the mail, newspaper, etc everything that is not needed gets tossed into the bin, and eventually goes out to the recycle bin.

1098

Probably about that much.

This is the problem. I’ve found that if I put it in my bag or anywhere else that’s not actually visible, I forget about it, and after a couple of overdue bills I just started putting them out on my desk where I knew I would see and deal with them but where they are certainly cluttering. And I have a lot of inertia against putting things in folders, I don’t know why, but it’s just not something I can make myself do every day. Hmm. I could probably make myself do it every week, though, and maybe I could build up to every day.

Maybe I should set a daily task to look in my bag for whatever bills I have.

1099

Yeah, I’m not quite 50 and I would really like to start making headway on that. My late in-laws, whom I loved dearly, were, er, inspiring in that regard, and my parents are even more so (they’re still alive, but… yeah). Or at the very least balance stuff that comes in the house with stuff going out of the house! Sigh.

1100

How about a task of “Automate my bills so I don’t have to pay them manually.”?

I was a late adopter of this, and I’m a total convert. As many bills as posible pay themselves. As many as possible come only as email, not snail mail. When I get an e-mail bill that I need to pay “manually”, that consists of using the bank app on my phone, or their website on my PC, to select the vendor rom my personal list of vendors, type in the dollar amount, and [OK]. That is far, far easier to do at the moment you notice the email than is fiddling with pens, stamps, envelopes, and filing.

The only snail mail bills I get are from doctor offices. Everybody else has entered the 21st century.