This is the blocker in my house.
If it was just recognizing the minuscule chance of later needing some old SCSI cable, that wouldn’t be a problem. It’s giving up the aspiration of needing it later. There is all this stuff for hobbies and pursuits that haven’t been used in 15 years, or never worked in the first place, and if they go, then that hobby is done.
In keeping with this, I decided a good time to drop off my donations might be after my Saturday workout with my fitness trainer. I’m going to be out of the house anyway. But I worried it would take up too much time.
Well I took the donations by and it added a grand total of five minutes to my drive home.
So I’m just putting things in the back of my CRV as soon as I can to get them out of the house and then Saturday it takes a whopping five minutes to drop them off.
More progress! Apparently all my work motivated my husband to help me with the Office of Doom. We got some old electronics out of there ready to recycle (there are still a ton left but let’s not dwell on it.) Between the two of us we’ve managed to get it to a place where you don’t want to scream when you walk in. I should’ve taken before/after pics. It’s so much better. I can actually get my workout bench in and out of the room.
I found a place near my job that recycles electronics so I intend to get the old printer and microwave out of here Wednesday. Then I’m going to have to dedicate a day solely to wiping hard drives on old computers and laptops. But first, all I really have to do is remove them from the machines so I can donate the computers themselves and just put the drives in a baggy to wipe later. My friend loaned us this machine that reads hard drives just like a USB stick. Since a couple of the drives won’t run, this is an easy way to delete the files.
My husband noticed the tree bag I moved to the office closet. He was impressed. I was cleaning out the office closet and realized I can’t even really get at anything until we get our gift wrap and accessories under control. They take up fully half of a large closet. So I secretly bought a gift wrap/supplies organizer. That’ll be another surprise for him. He thinks such things are a waste of money because we already have “perfectly good bags” to shove stuff into, but he doesn’t understand economy of space and what a difference stuff like that makes. Plus it creates a “container” to limit our stuff. That one I WILL take a picture. The last time I broached the subject of a supplies organizer he said, “if you must.” He doesn’t always recognize my genius ahead of time.
Just wait. He’ll be so impressed.
Ugh. The garage. It’s like the opposite of a black hole… it seems like no matter what I do the massive mountain of junk just does not get any smaller.
Now, I know, intellectually, that this is not the case. Yesterday my wife and I spent the morning out in the garage going through boxes and throwing old junk that we haven’t used in years into my son’s pickup for an eventual run to the dump. We deconstructed two plastic shelf/rack things that we had bought years ago but were now leaning and sagging to the point that they were no longer safe and tossed them in the pickup as well.
An old food dehydrator that I had used in my homemade chili powder days but hasn’t been used since got tossed. It was the size of 2 5-gallon buckets stacked on each other.
Several years ago I had wanted to start doing some home canning of fruit and preserves and so purchased much of the equipment – jars, lids, the water canners themselves – in prep for that and, of course, never actually did anything. It was still sitting in the garage. Yesterday I gathered all that stuff together and offered it to a friend of mine who’s big into home canning. She was interested; hopefully she’ll come get all of it this week.
My wife tossed a bunch of old bedding that we had stuffed into boxes. It was far too old and threadbare to donate so to the dump it went. I have no idea why we saved it in the first place.
She tossed out several boxes of “her stuff.” No clue what was in them. But I’m glad they’re gone.
We found a couple of file boxes filled with ancient utility bills, pay stubs from jobs we haven’t worked at in 15+ years, appliance manuals that were so old I don’t even remember owning those appliances, and rental agreements for houses several interations past, including the shitty little hovel we were living in when we got married – in 2003. We ran everything but the manuals through a shredder, double bagged it all, and into the bed of the pickup it went. That felt really good.
When we had stuffed the bed of the pickup to capacity we took it all to the dump, unloaded it, and then went to Home Depot and bought two heavy-duty metal shelf units: 90" wide x 90" tall x 24" deep. Absolutely massive. We brough them home and unloaded them – right into the garage 
.
When my son, who has been harping on us for months to get the garage organized, went out to look this morning he commented on how much stuff we had tossed and how much better it looked.
So like I said, I know we’ve made a difference, but I’m damned if I can see much progress.
The next step(s) are to start moving the still extant mountain of boxes that are currently against the north and east wall to the center of the room, put together the big shelves, get them situated where want them (against the north and east wall), and then start going through the rest of the stuff. What we want to keep will go on the shelves. What we don’t will be donated or sent to the dump.
And herein lies my next problem.
My books.
I have thousands of books. That is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. Most of that mountain is boxes and bags of books. 95% non-fiction, mostly political and social history and art history. When we moved into this house in 2021 we didn’t have room for dozens of bookshelves like we had in the past so the shelves were sold and the books boxed up with the plan to go through them that fall. I would cull what I didn’t want to keep and find appropriate bookcases for the rest.
5 years on and that hasn’t happened. The books remain in the garage, suffering the effects of poor storage, moisture – did I mention we live in a rainforest and the garage is not climate controled? --and general neglect.
There are some I will keep regardless: the complete works of Mark Twain that belonged to my grandparents. My Calvin and Hobbes books I collected as a kid. The Straight Dope books (naturally). But so many of my books just… need to go. Be donated. Sold to the local used book store. If damp and mildew has gotten to them, tossed. But that is going to be so, so hard to do. Books are part of who I am, being a bookworm is just part of my DNA. Many of those books were gifts from my grandparents or came from their estate after they passed. Parting with those books will feel like parting with part of my grandparents. Even without that connection some of these books are irreplaceable. Some are exceedingly rare. I have a copy of the New Testament printed and bound in 1587 (that one is in the house and on a shelf). A set of Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia from 1885. Going through boxes yesterday I came across books I had forgotten I had and of course I rescued several of them and brought them into the house… where I don’t have a place for them.
So. That’s going to be my next challenge. We’re hosting Easter dinner this year so this seemingly sisyphean endeavor absolutley must be done by then. I have no choice. My goal is to get that mountain of boxes and bags moved this week so this coming weekend we can put together the shelves. If I give myself 5 days to go through those books and seperate the keeps from the donates, and actually do it, then the rest should/might/hopefully go pretty smooth. It’ll just be an issue of organizing it all onto shelves.
I’ve actually taken pics of this whole mess so hopefully when all is said and done I can post them here as before-and-afters.
I resisted buying dedicated organizers for years, but organization is what makes storage space actually useful. You have to be thoughtful about selection, but the right organizer makes a huge difference.
Just for anyone else with bedding of this sort -
Before you toss it ask your local vet, animal shelter, or pet rescue if they can use it. Because animals don’t care about stains, age, or threadbare state of cloth, but such places do need an enormous about of towels, sheets, etc.
I filled the bed of a pickup with old bedding and drove it to the vet I was using at the time for my pets. They happily took every bit. Then gave me a discount when I needed to board three parrots on an emergency basis a couple weeks later.
It may not matter to most, but some of us find it easier to part with stuff when it gets donated or recycled. Just a thought/suggestion.
During my years of whittling down my mountain of Stuff I found that bringing in a friend or relative who hadn’t seen the mountain recently is an excellent way to receive assurance that you are making actual progress. Because during the process you often can’t see the forest for the trees. Or rather the walls for the boxes in the way.
I’d say that for most members here that’s a more common situation than not. A lot of us have thousands of books.
I might finally be below a thousand. It has been a long process of letting go. When my back is feeling better I plan to bag up a few hundred more books.
I almost exclusively use an e-reader these days and I still have a ton of books. Mostly that people bought for me, and I keep telling myself I’m going to read them, but then another Kindle book draws me in and I never get to it.
Okay, this weekend I had a lot of other non-declutter stuff I needed to get done and therefore lost some momentum, but I reserved some time on Sunday to declutter two of the three "junk/hobby” drawers in our bedroom. This seems like a small task but I knew it was going to be, er, emotionally if not physically taxing, which is why I made sure I could do it over a weekend. Not emotional in any kind of over-the-top way, just emotional in the sense of “I don’t want to get rid of that!” Stuff like the box my wedding ring came in. Like. I didn’t even know I still had that. But I still didn’t want to get rid of it. (I did.) I got rid of some mineral specimens that I had bought in graduate school and had forgotten were still there. On the other hand, I did not mind getting rid of the several (!) tiny violin bows that were falling apart. Good riddance!
I have saved the last drawer for another time. That one really has the hardcore hobby stuff. I expect I’ll end up saving at least some of the hobby stuff – I expect there’s at least a 25% chance that I’ll go back to doing chainmaille or at least will have use for the aluminum jump rings, and the general jewelry-making supplies range from actually-constantly-useful (pliers) to I-still-think-I-will-come-back-to-this-someday (will I ever really use that jewelry saw again – maybe). The latter I will probably leave until the next decluttering, at least. (Hey, baby steps.) I think I’ll get rid of the enamel, though, as it is much harder for me to envision a future in which I go back to doing that.
I’ve also bought some clothing, which I realize sounds like it’s going backwards. I actually have a hard time buying new clothes, but my trip last week taught me that I need a little more in the way of business-casual-ish work clothes. I need very little or maybe even nothing in the way of formal work clothes (I can’t even remember the last time I wore anything more formal than business casual) and can probably get rid of my formal blazers, etc. The nice thing about business casual, especially tops, is that if I get stuff that’s comfortable as well as looks nice, then I can also wear it as every day wear with jeans, so I can in theory get rid of some of my clothes that only serve one purpose.
Yay! It’s just one thing at a time. I definitely have my share of that stuff. Especially hobby stuff - I had to downsize considerably. I just decided there were some projects that weren’t in the cards for me. I picked hobbies that have small footprints - and while I’ve ended up buying more stuff for cross stitch than I thought I would when I chose that hobby, it’s all manageable.
I’m in the middle of gift wrap stuff right now and putting it into the organizer. There is tissue paper everywhere. Spouse Weasel is amused.
Huzzah!
Definitely much more space-efficient and the materials are much better protected from damage. Nicely done!
Brilliant!
Aw yay, I love it!
That is similar to the organizer I have except mine has a clear front panel so I can look and sort of guess if I’m out of birthday wrapping paper. Which would work better if the other users would put birthday paper in front of Christmas paper since one is used year round. I’ve had mine for over 5 years and everyone knows where to find the paper, tissue, scissors, tape, and tags.
For accountability’s sake and to inspire me to do better this week, I’m posting to say I almost completely fell off the declutter wagon last week. Partially because I had a lot of other stuff going on, but I certainly did have the time to have done more. I did go through one pile of papers so that I didn’t have to look back and say I didn’t do a single thing. This week will also be not super great, but I think I’ll try to at least go through the papers in my organizer-that-doesn’t-actually-organize so I can try to use it for, like, actual organization. And let’s see, next weekend I should have time to go through that fourth hobby drawer I mentioned. What I’d really like to do is look at my younger kid’s room with him and see whether we can do something about all the clutter in there.
On the other hand, running the dishwasher every day has been going great, and I’ve also enjoyed the drawers in my dresser being more organized (I did that two weeks ago).
Way to go for what you did do! I definitely fell off the wagon this weekend because I am sick. I did manage to take care of dishes today but that’s about it. I’ve also had personal stuff going on that made it seem less urgent. Once I’m feeling better I can regroup.
Tried the “two minute pick-up” with my kid and since we were both competing to see who could pick up more of their own stuff, I never saw that kid clean so fast in my life. Keeping that one.
I’m… I dunno.
My wife has been helping a lot in the garage which, to be honest, I didn’t expect. We’ve made two more trips to the dump, which I’m very happy about.
A lot of my books we found had been damaged by being stored for ~5 years in a damp garage and so we had to toss them. That hurt.
The ultimate goal, which I’ve probably mentioned in this thread but am too lazy to go searching through all my posts to see if I have, is to put metal shelves against the walls of the garage and get all the junk that’s been in random boxes for years into plastic tubs and onto the shelves.
We’ve made it as far as pulling most of the boxes that were against the walls into the center of the garage to get ready for putting the shelves together. After a trip to Home Depot and $800 later we have the big shelves ready to be assembled. As part of this process we’ve found odds and ends that belong or will belong in the house and have pulled them inside. So… now our living room has totes and tubs and boxes stacked around the perimeter and my anxiety is growing. I hate clutter and the one thing keeping me sane is knowing that eventually – sooner rather than later, hopefully – all that crap will be organized and put where it belongs. Just the process of getting from point A to point B is daunting and far too time consuming. But, we soldier on.
I’ve been taking pictures of this process and, if I’m feeling brave, will post them once we’re done. We must have this entire process done by Easter weekend. We have invited several people over for dinner so having the house clutter-free by April 5 is non-negotiable.
The anxiety though… I could really do without that part.
the relocation piles. those are the things that really linger.
today i used the bins that were to go to storage to create a cat barrier. they are painting the unit doors and the door has to be open for about 5 minutes while it gets painted and dried. i’m not home and don’t want maintenance to deal with cat herding. should be fun getting into the flat tonight. as soon as they don’t have to be barriers i should “take them there now” to the storage unit.
