Christmas is coming at our house. The time for peace and joy for everyone.
And the time when cleaning things out is no longer an option at our house. To put up the decorations, everything must be clean and tidy to start!
So, this weekend we cleaned out my daughter’s room (well, actually she did the cleaning out but we helped her to get organized. It sounds like it should be easier than just doing it myself but I assure you, it would have been easier to do alone). The storage closet got cleaned out (in an attempt to find the boxes that I just knew I had).
Next weekend is taken up by my son’s birthday. (Yes, the whole weekend. My family couldn’t all come at once so we are having four gatherings at our house for it. <sigh>)
I try to clean out every closet and cupboard every six months and at that I am failing miserably. I haven’t touched anything since March. Still, I have been maintaining the clutter pretty well so nothing is totally out of hand. I am carving out two days in January to at least start tackling it.
I let things slide for a while, but over Thanksgiving I got the kitchen back under control (especially the cabinets where I’d just started putting random canned goods in no organization. I have lots and lots of beans and pumpkin because of this).
Rest of the apartment got a good going over. I need to deal with the second bedroom again. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was, but when I don’t stay on top if it I tend to start using it as random storage. I have 2.5 weeks off this month, though, so I’ll have some time to really get into it.
I’ve discovered something that really helps me with doing a thorough, deep clean and de-clutter - throw a Halloween party every two years. I was raised to not be able to stand the thought of having guests over to a messy, dirty house, so I clean it from top to bottom for the party. I think two years is about as long as you’d want to let your clutter build up, too - any longer and it would start to become a bit overwhelming, I think.
My mother passed away several weeks ago so my home de-cluttering has been put aside in order to clean out her condo so we can get it on the market. Unfortunately, this means I am bringing more clutter into my house.
I have vowed that I am going to use some the same techniques we are employing at Mom’s to sort my own stuff - invite in a couple of friends to help me sort. It does seem to make a quick job of paperwork, excess outdated stuff in the kitchen, etc. But it must wait a while. Sigh. At least we have made massive progress at Mom’s.
^^Was your Mom’s place cluttered? It’s good that you’ve had a little practice so that you can be realistic about what you have room for.
That was very difficult for me after my grandmother passed - there were literally a hundred things from her house that I would have liked to keep if only I’d had room. As it was, I probably kept a good dozen or so things that I really didn’t have room for, and that are now what I call “clutter bottlenecks”. For example, I couldn’t let Grandmother’s beloved tea service go to the estate sale so I took it. But I don’t have a cabinet shelf large enough to accommodate the massive tray, so it must remain out on display all the time.
It’s silverplate, of course, and therefore must be polished regularly.
Sarabellum, she was actually pretty good about things until the last couple of years. But she had lots of stuff from her own mother, who was a good artist. I don’t want that stuff to go by the wayside, but I also don’t want my brothers to grab them just to put 'em on eBay either (one has a partner with a serious buy/sell habit).
We’ve made it through the clothes, jewelry, kitchen and paperwork. Now we’ve got the good china cabinet, storage area and furniture to go. Then, we can prep the place to be listed.
I made some headway towards getting caught up on laundry again, but darn it all if my four kids don’t seem to KNOW that Mom’s trying to get caught up and they increase their laundry soiling production threefold to account for it!
But Muahahaha! It’s also time for our annual Christmas toy culling in advance of getting new toys. I got rid of 2 and a half garbage bags full of stuff that is rarely played with yet frequently gets tossed on the floor for me to pick up. Maybe it won’t be as hard to keep things clean for the next couple of weeks.
While I was working on laundry/toy-culling, my youngest son managed to get hold of TWO boxes of wooden matches (500 per box) and toss them on the kitchen floor. I thought I might cry. Those are the worst kind of messes - it only took 5 seconds to happen and it took soooo long to pick them all up and get them back in their boxes, crawling on my hands and knees.
I made some headway into the “third room”, cleaning off 3 feet of the long workbench, filling up one trash can with garbage, and then moved some of the crap on the dining room table onto the workbench. Yes, it is shifting stuff from one place to another, but I’m cleaning off more of our actual living space and did toss an actual can worth of trash. Progress!
Good for you Broomstick!
I took some more stuff to the Goodwill this week, and got rid of a printer that’s been non-useful for years. I got a whole shelf back, so now I get to decide which stack of books to put on it. Baby steps are better than no steps, right?
I cleaned off the top of the bookshelves in the living room, and I dusted the ceiling fan. Obviously I need to have tall people over more often. I don’t look up often enough, I guess.
I’m back on the ‘throw one thing out each day’ system.
Definition of ‘thing’ is flexible. A garment, a book, any object. A handful of coupons will do when I’m desperate. It doesn’t sound like much, but a major change is visible by May or so.
I have just spent the last three straight days clearing up my daughter’s room. She’s had the classic 10 pounds of stuff in a 5-pound bag situation going on for years, compounded by her tendency to treasure absolutely everything that comes within her sphere. She’s 12, and has literally not had an orderly room since she was an infant, and a pretty young infant at that. (Gaah, why must people send stuffed animal after stuffed animal? How many stuffed animals does any child need?)
Anyway, my family was away for the past days and I stayed home with the dog, and took ruthless advantage of the opportunity. Oh, I was merciless! I’m confident that I didn’t discard any actual treasured things of hers, but I’m equally confident that most of the stuff in her room was just background crap that she couldn’t even see anymore; there was just so damn much of it all there. I went through absolutely everything and spent the last phase watching Doctor Who while sorting decks of cards and discarding everything that wasn’t complete. The trash bin outside is full to bursting, the stack of things downstairs to be sorted for the next children’s bazaar has quadrupled (woe to me if she discovers it before I can smuggle it out of the house), and there is finally room for everything that remained in her room, along with floor space. Floor space! For years on end, it’s been a struggle to walk from the door to her bed without stepping on anything, and now the floor is clear and vacuumed.
Gah, the dust on every surface! It gave me such satisfaction to wipe every surface, thinking of my girl breathing non-dusty air when she gets back tomorrow.
The kittens have now gotten big and curious enough to jump up to the top of the bookshelf in the second bedroom, nearly shattering a ceramic lamp that my mother made in the process. So apparently it’s time to rearrange that room so the short bookcase isn’t next to the tall bookcases, serving as a handy stepping-stone.
Which will cause a cascade of stuff, including taking down a shelf on one wall that was there when we moved in so there is room for the bookcases to go along that wall, and possibly touching up the paint where the shelf brackets were. Which means we now have to figure out what to do with the stuff that was on top of that shelf. GAH.
Congrats on all the hard work, and I genuinely hope she appreciates what you’ve done!
Just a note of caution, however- she may react poorly, and you should be prepared for that. This would have freaked me out when I was a kid- my mom regularly played the game of “What the hell happened to all my stuff??!!?” on me, and never handled my ‘lack of appreciation’ well.. I really believe this back-and-forth played a serious role in my difficulty in throwing things away now. She always swore she never threw away anything ‘important,’ but the thing was that her idea of important and my idea of important were two entirely different things, so the creepy-as-hell porcelain doll that my grandmother’s neighbor had given to me but I was never allowed to touch (not that I wanted to!!!) survived the cull, but my absolute favorite, still functioning, lamp that I’d had since I was a toddler didn’t.
If she does respond poorly, perhaps letting her help you go through the pile for the bazaar will help.
I do hear you, bobkitty, and I appreciate your words! Thankfully, when she walked in her room today she gasped and gave me a huge hug and proclaimed me the best Mama in the world, which was a major whew. When I was her age, I had the same attachment to my Stuff, so I understand what it feels like.
The thing is, she had a proto-hoarder thing going on; pathways from one area to another – more like tiny islands in a sea of piles, actually – giant, tottering stacks of things and papers and toys and games with the occasional bit of laundry shoved between layers, and everywhere dust. She deserves better, and it was an impossible situation for her to get under control by herself. I discarded things like stacks of wrestling chips, which were popular with her friends more than three years ago, and the garage toy that she had disassembled more than a year and a half ago so she could clean each piece and reassemble (it was still as grubby as it had been the day she took it apart). Games that she’s owned for more than two years (up to 5) which had never been played with got dropped in the bazaar pile. Blankets and throw pillows were moved into a storage closet. Anything that was stained or broken got discarded.
Whenever I hesitated on anything, the question was whether there was any realistic chance that my girl actually loved it or if it was something that was weighing her down. Things that had been closed up in boxes or were at the bottom of dusty stacks, I figured there was no way she could even remember them.
I wanted to make it possible for her to keep her environment in order by herself, and for her to feel refreshed by her surroundings instead of swallowed up by chaos.
Please tell me you left that creepy doll behind when you left home. shudder
I was raised to not be able to stand the thought of having guests over to a messy, dirty house, so I clean it from top to bottom for the party. I think two years is about as long as you’d want to let your clutter build up, too - any longer and it would start to become a bit overwhelming, I think.