declutter my house

Went through puzzles and games with E. He did a great job parting with things he’s outgrown. Big stack to Goodwill and 3 bags to my cousin’s son, who’s 4 years younger than E.

Also, we’re probably about to embark on a big renovation project, taking down 2 walls and putting up another to improve the layout of our downstairs. We’ll lose 2 closets (definitely the drawback of this project!) so we began sorting through the contents. It turns out that I still had all my notes from college! Ugh. I thought I had thrown those out years ago. So I culled those two boxes, recycling almost all their contents, and keeping just a few papers. Though I never had any desire to publish academic papers, it’s nice that some profs urged me to. One grad school paper in particular. The professor even kept a copy when the class ended. It’s nice for the ego to have stuff like that. But anyway, most of those old notes and syllabi and handouts were easy to toss.

Sold 2 soccer balls, one baseball glove, 5 pairs of cleats (some soccer, some baseball), and two pairs of skates. In return we got one pair of skates for E to wear this winter, and some store credit. And more space in our house.

We actually brought things to 2 stores. Neither would take the Heelys or the life jacket. Heelys=not ever, life jacket=not the right season. I guess we’ll try Craig’s list for the Heelys. E never got into them so they’re barely worn (and expensive!).

Our garage is basically a glorified shed. It’s a one-car garage, but if we kept a car there, that car couldn’t be big. However, we don’t. We keep 3 kayaks, 3 bikes, 2 mowers, a pressure washer, a spreader (for seed, fertilizer), ladders, fishing poles, gardening tools, bird seed, and so on.

What we don’t now keep in there: lots of stuff we don’t really want or need anymore. We spent over 5 hours cleaning up the garage, and we put a bunch of stuff out by the street (more than half of which has since been taken).

Before this, we really could only stand in front of the garage (there’s no door to the house in it) and get what we could reach from there. If we wanted to further in, we had to pick our way awkwardly through piles of stuff.

This was made worse by the fact that we’d bought various tool racks and hooks and stuff and never installed them, so they were on the floor among the detritus and dirt. (The floor is concrete, but the door fits poorly, so dirt and leaves get in when it’s windy. We need to address that, too.) Now we’ve installed them and hung things up: double the amount of stuff removed from the floor! Yay!

We can now walk into the garage and we can find things. We keep looking into the garage window and admiring it.

When E was 3, a neighbor brought over a big bag of videotapes for him. Very kind, and some he watches over and over (nature shows). Others have just taken up space in a basket on top of the entertainment center for years now. Lately we’ve watched a few so we’re free to give them away (Bambi, Alice in Wonderland) and others we’ve decided we don’t even care to watch (Land Before Time II, some cartoon version of Camelot) and can just give away. It’s a small thing, but every bit counts!

We also sold E’s wooden train set via Craig’s List. In public places where wooden train sets were set up, he was always drawn to them, but although he had one of his own, table and everything, he didn’t ever play with it much at home. He’d clearly outgrown it, so we listed it online and let him have the money from selling it.

E was sick with a fever for a few days, so we canceled one thing after another and were home for days on end, and got tons of stuff done. So then when he was feeling better, so much routine stuff had been done, we had time to spend on his room. We spent hours and hours in there and he was astonishingly patient and cooperative, and willing to give up unused toys in unprecedented numbers.

We went though every shelf and every bin. We dusted every shelf and washed out every bin. We moved furniture to vacuum under/behind it. We washed walls! And we put back only toys he really wants, purging at least a third of the things, quite possibly more. Goodwill, here we come! (And maybe Craig’s list, for things he might get a few bucks for.)

We also organized the things that are left in more accessible ways for him. (We usually think we’re doing that, but having gotten rid of a lot of stuff, it is working better right now.)

And now we actually have empty shelf space and a few empty bins!

It’s startling (and wonderful) to walk in there now. I wish my room looked so terrific!

I’m a hoarder of Potentially Useful Things. So in the basement I had a ginormous collection of mailing boxes I was saving in case we needed them. With S pulling out all the things we’d set aside to list on eBay, I took the opportunity to find a mailing box for each item. Then I purged the remaining boxes, keeping only one, two, or three of each size (depending on the likely usefulness of any given size) and breaking down the rest for recycling.

The pile is no smaller now, but that’s only because when I put them back I didn’t nest the boxes inside each other. Instead I’ll be able to see how many I have of each size so as new boxes come into the house, I’ll know at a glance whether I want to save it or if I already have some of that size. That seems key to preventing becoming overrun with boxes again.

So yeah, it’s a stupid thing but I did get rid of a ton of boxes and that counts for something.

It always amazes me how much we can give away while not noticing its absence at all. Again, we’d accumulated lots of bags and boxes in the basement, so I took all those as well as various things that didn’t fit in bags (such as a child-size wheelbarrow E is now too tall to push) to the donation center.

We have a big plastic box in the basement where things for donation go. It always overflows into multiple bags and boxes before we get around to bringing the things in, but it still seems like a good system. We don’t have to decide to go around and gather what we no longer have use for—we have a spot to stash that kind of thing as we come across it.

E never wants to throw anything away.

I somehow feel that when there’s a type of paper he does every week as schoolwork, I shouldn’t start throwing them away while he is doing more of them—it seems unsupportive.

He sometimes sits down and churns out a pile of pictures quite quickly.

All these sorts of things pile up. We found a big basket and started using it as a landing spot for them. That was in kindergarten.

It filled. It overflowed. We moved it to our bedroom to be sorted through, but kept from visitors’ eyes in the meantime, and started a new basket. That filled. It overflowed.

The deluge slowed this summer, allowing further procrastination. We could squeeze the occasional new page into the 2nd overflowing basket.

With school starting next week, and recycling being picked up today, it was finally time to address this problem. So last night, while barely listening to the convention, S and I sorted through the baskets, emptying them completely. Things too adorable to discard (pictures, things he wrote) went into artists’ portfolios (one for kindergarten, one for first grade) bought for the purpose. We were able to keep it to a pretty reasonable quantity kept. And about 98% of the stuff went right into recycling.

I feel so much lighter!

We have a artist’s portfolio for second grade work already, so I’m hoping we can put things we can’t part with into it throughout the year, so the basket stuff will just be unimportant papers we can ditch more easily. If we’re not as daunted by the pile, I hope we won’t procrastinate it as much.

At some point (listen to me lie to myself now) I’d like to go back and scan a lot of the stuff we saved, then load it all into one of those digital photo frames so we can see all the cuteness instead of keeping it packed away. Because some of the pictures are just. so. cute.

My cousin/friend and her husband and son (my godson) came to visit yesterday. H is almost exactly 4 years younger than E. I was able to give away a ton of stuff to them—boxes and bags of clothes and toys that I’d been setting aside. I don’t care if they only end up keeping a fraction of it when they get it home and sort through it; if there’s anything they can use that pleases me, and it makes it so much easier for E to part with things if he’s giving them to someone he knows.

And they didn’t want two ride-on toys we had, so out by the road they went this morning, with a “free” sign on them. They were gone within the hour.

Yay!

When E was littler, he was given one of those nice wooden pretend oven/stove/sink things, with TONS of that realistic looking pretend food and dishes and pots and pans and all kinds of stuff.

He was only ever interested in it in a lukewarm way. With encouragement, he’d play with it on occasion, especially if I played with him. But mainly it was a big space hog.

Some time ago, he agreed with us that it could go. But, though I give away so much unwanted stuff, I thought this was worth selling. So it sat in a corner of our dining room for a long, long, long time, waiting to be sold. Much like many other items we intend to sell.

Finally, knowing that Sunday would be a rare weekend afternoon at home, I got some focus about this. I dusted it, spread all the food items out in attractive groupings, took pictures, and wrote an enthusiastic description. S posted it on Craigslist, and 4 hours later it was in the buyer’s hands. And E was delighted, because it’s his money. And I am delighted, because I’ve reclaimed some space in the dining room.

I’m hoping this will be great positive reinforcement for us to continue doing this kind of thing.