In addition to the boxes and shelves of books that I need to cull and bag up for donation to the local library, I have decades worth of magazines (Ellery Queen, Asimov’s, and Analog) that are now doing nothing but taking up space. I know I’m never going to re-read them, but I haven’t been able to find anyone who would be interested in taking them off my hands. And even if I could find someone, I’ve got no way to pack them up and ship them anywhere. The thought of just taking them to the dump for recycling goes against all my instincts. I’m sure some of them might be considered collectable.
I’ve already decided to let my subscriptions lapse when they come up for renewal later this year, to avoid adding to the problem.
uhhhh okay so this is my declutter weekly journal I guess??
Because it’s effective! This week, and I think only because I had posted about it here and could not face telling you guys I hadn’t done it, I did go through that last hobby drawer and also mostly clean out my mail organizer, which is now on my desk and actually holds mail instead of a) some mail, some of which dated back three years b) a plaque I got a couple of years ago that I don’t even want c) random receipts d) printer toner (?? which I had been looking for, lol!)
I saved a lot of things from the hobby drawer that I still have the delusion that I’ll get back to someday, haha, and that doesn’t take up much space, but I did throw out some stuff I had saved for literally twenty years and knew I wouldn’t ever get back to.
I didn’t get around to going through my kid’s room with him. Totally forgot about that.
This week, let’s see. I think that now I have a nice mail organizer to put things in on my desk, it’s time to organize the actual desk. For a bonus, if I get done with that, I should start on the 5x5 bin shelving.
What I’d really like to do is, there are SO many Legos in the playroom. I’d like to put some of them in bins and then shove the bins somewhere. Hmm. I will need to consult with my husband about storage bins and with the kiddo about actually putting them away… these are completed models that he’s made but never plays with.
This is what my life is like – these are a few odds & ends from my last move – and this happens every move! This is a full-size dumpster, and it’s just in the process of being filled – nowhere near done!
I’m on vacation this week and a friend is coming from out of town (well, actually she’s already here - she’s sleeping in while I play on line).
In addition to doing fun things she’s going to help me get my pile under control again. Things did get a little out of hand last year during chemo and I never really did get caught up again.
I’ve already pre-staged stuff to go to the recycler - steel, aluminum, paper, and way too much cardboard. She’s going to help me stay on task, and also probably do some of the actual throwing out if my brain starts getting in the way of progress. We’re going to evaluate my e-junk to see what makes sense to keep (like an extra keyboard or mouse) vs. what needs to be either donated or responsibly disposed of (and I have a place to take e-waste).
If I can wrap up a deal to sell my dilapidated nearly 30 year old truck she will be my “emotional support human” and hold my hand when I part ways with that particular thing.
She’ll also be the emotional support human while I organize my stacks of filing.
That’s great to have a partner in crime, makes the work go faster and they can ease the anxiety or indecision on what to purge or save.
I’m sure there are folks out there who would be geeked to find those titles. What I did was identified all the goodwills, Mel trotters, and community center drop offs that took donations. Any place that relied on donations to fund their programs I made sure old books and magazines were accepted. Natl Geo, Smithsonian, vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Hagerty, all my paperbacks,( Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes, yes everything ) lots of hardcovers, textbooks, some old old religious books.all in good condition. I boxed up my stuff and every couple weeks I’d drop off a couple boxes here and there. I did not want to overwhelm anyone with a hundred pounds of books.
Wow! That’s real progress. I don’t even know if I could fit that much stuff in my house.
This sounds really promising. Sometimes another person can just be that extra nudge we need. Best of luck with it all.
As for me, I hit some setbacks, what with the sudden mandate to return to office five days a week combined with illness and fatigue because I couldn’t use my CPAP while I was sick. I’m back on the CPAP and starting to feel more energy again, but it’s all I can do just to stay on top of dishes right now. I did take care of my laundry this morning, so baby steps. Dana White calls dishes and laundry “procrasticlutter,” so it counts!
Probably won’t be tackling much else until the weekend.
i did the bins in the storage unit last night. sooooo much better. things fit into the new bins well and the bins fit well into the storage unit. i will buy 4 more this weekend and that should do it for all the not in season items and furniture move abouts. right now i have 2 storage units. my hope is that once i get this done, i will only need one.
someone in the building was very happy to get mismatched different sized bins. they disappeared from the good will bins very quickly.
For me, laundry, kitchen and bathroom are the most basic basics. I was able to keep the kitchen and bathroom decent while getting chemo, but needed to ask for help with the laundry a few times. Also “outsourced” the grocery shopping for awhile, which is one reason I had so much *$^! cardboard and paper.
This morning we took a car load of cardboard and paper down to the recyclers. I got a whole quarter for it. Whatever. I’m tickled when someone will pay me (even teeny amounts) for my garbage and it’s a way to get it out of the house.
Also swept up the front hallway and put away a lot of the coats and such off the rack. Not 100% done but still much better.
Every other week all my cardboard gets recycled by the town along with types 1 & 2 Plastics, cans & bottles. It just went out in fact.
We’ve minimized plastic grocery bags in NJ so what I used to bring back to the supermarket 4-5 times a years is just once a year tops. I always carry a reusable now and have had them in my car since the mid-90s.
My decluttering has been small things of late, eventually another bookshelf of books will be going though.
I’ve got a collection of empty binders that probably far exceed my future needs. I’ll toss most of those soon. I recently got rid of some video game CDs and DVDs that were all over 15 years old. Not to mention a container of CD-R that will never get used and might not even be good.
My wife continues to go through her boxes in the garage, organizing into various piles what she wants to keep and separating the rest into boxes to donate or bags to throw away. She’s ordered me to stay out while she’s doing this, likely because she thinks I’ll be advocating that she keep fewer things and toss more things, but since all that stuff isn’t mine, I wouldn’t try to tell her what to do with it. But she wants to do it alone, and that’s ok.
Well, kind of ok. the clutter in the house is reaching critical mass and I really, but really want to get those shelves put together so we can start getting all this crap into plastic totes and organized on the shelves. I’m still worried that we won’t have enough shelf space for all this stuff, but we’ve agreed that we will only keep what we have storage space for.
Christmas decorations I finally went through and got it down to two bins from four. Sifted through broken yet possibly fixable ornaments, vintage macaroni holiday art, cheapy crappy stuff from oriental trading post or the dollar store. I question my motives for saving all this tacky shit. One upon a time it all mattered I guess. Swept up a bunch of glitter, bits of ribbon and scads of wrinkled paper. Some pieces had school pics of the kids pasted on card stock, I faltered but nah most went in the trash. Maybe saved one of each.
Sometimes I think in this respect I’m lucky that I had a shit childhood, because as a result I don’t really like to save things. All the ornaments and papers and stuff I did as a kid, I’d just as soon not think about, so I toss it. I don’t have boxes and boxes of keepsakes and mementos. I barely even held onto my high school diploma.
I’m a little more cavalier about hanging onto my kid’s things as a result. The cool stuff we hang onto, but it’s not like I have stacks of my kid’s art everywhere. Most of it goes straight into recycling.
When we moved back to Japan from Taiwan, we tossed most of the stacks of art. I took pictures of a few of them and brought a couple of things, but the rest went.
High-fiving you here for the saving of lots of cheap crappy stuff.
Seriously, I am looking at some of this stuff I’m throwing away and am like… WHY did I think this was worth saving? For years, in most cases??
I haven’t quite got to the point where I can throw away the school pic ornaments, but I did go through and throw away lots of the ones that none of us are attached to. I am aided in this by my kids not generally being nostalgic about things like Christmas ornaments (although as I mentioned above, my younger one is super nostalgic about his Legos and I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to do anything with those for a few more years…)
An angle I use on myself is the “throw three things away” trick. When I go into a room, even if I’m not aiming on decluttering or cleaning, I chant “throw three things away”. I make a quick scan of the room and pick out three things to toss, whether it’s trash or hoarded clutter. This is an everyday tactic, one that I do a couple of times a week while attending to other chores. It really cuts back on the buildup.
I also pause and chant “put three things away” when I’m working in the kitchen, to prevent buildup of tools and food on the counter while I’m cooking.
proof that experts have clutter, things don’t have to be folded perfectly, and sometimes a step ladder isn’t necessary. although, personally, once i had the floor space i would have gotten the step ladder and neatened up the top shelf.
i believe this video shows why ms white and her method are so popular. you really can see yourself and how you do things in her video. things look so much better and no secondary “go through” pile, just trash for the bin, and a box of donate.
