declutter my house

Today I cleared the floor of my bedroom as much as possible, so that I could run the Scooba. Now I have a clean bedroom floor again :)

Thought I should write about this. While I was clearing up my document box, going through each paper one by one, I came across a letter from the bank at which I have my car loan running with. I believe when I received it, I had just dumped it onto the pile of papers on my home-office desktop. After a while, it got lost in the pile as more letters and other documents and mostly junk piled up, and I had forgotten about it at one point. The letter was actually an offer by the bank to refinance my car loan (something that banks usually don’t do with car loans). Which meant, I would have been incurring a lower monthly repayment, with extra cash to spare in hand for savings or investments. Last weekend, when I read the letter, the first thing that came to my mind was, “what an idiot!” Lesson learnt the hard way. Now all my documents are neatly organized and stored, and I have a fool-proof (at least for me) system to make sure all letters are attended to personally, and appropriate action taken almost immediately.

My house is finally all cleaned and decluttered. This happened last week. Last week, Mama hired a couple to deep clean, clean, and declutter the whole house. They were the janitor of the First Baptist church and his wife. Their names are Joe and Mary Agnes. Joe also contacted someone to come and mow the grass. He came on last Thursday (grass cutter) with his lawn mower and weed eater and he did an excellent job. He did much better than the man I currently have employed. On last Friday, Joe and Mary Agnes came along with another man and they all worked all fron 8:00 a.m to 2:00 p.m. except for a short time (30 minutes) beginning at about 9:20 a.m. to about 10:10 a.m. Then they worked until lunch and Mary Agnes went for their lunch and after they ate, they started back to work. They worked until 2:00 p.m. At about 11:30 a.m. or 12:00 noon another man joined them and worked until 2:00 p.m. This was when they all left.

They returned the following morning at 8:10 and I went to the door to let them in. When I opened the door, I saw Mary Agnes, Joe, another man from the day before, and a third man who I had not seen before. Later there was another woman who came and worked also. At one time I counted seven people in the house I believe. There was Joe, Mary Agnes, the other woman whose name was Mary also, and there were three other men so that would be a total of six.

They did excellent work. They even cleaned the stains from the floor. Mary Agnes and Mary worked in the kitchen a lot as did Joe on Friday. Mary Agnes and Mary did the dishes, cleaned the oven, wiped off the counters. cleaned out the refrigerator, did the laundry, and they cleaned out the kitchen drawers. However, when they put the dishes away, somebody put them on shelves that were too high for me to reach easily Friday so on Friday night, I moved the things from the high shelves down to the counter and I was going to put them up late Saturday. I had thought except for the laundry they were through in the kitchen. They were not through and somehow the things found their way back to those shelves and also to the shelves above those. When they were beginning to gather their things, I did peek in the kitchen cabinet just to see if the things were on a high shelf and they were. I told Joe that they should be moved down to the first shelf and they were.

There were also things that the housecleaners did not know where they belonged and they put these things in places that they thought the things would belong. I am locating some of these things as I go.

I have completely reorganized the kitchen except for some few new things that I have not found a home for yet, but there are going to be several things like these so I have decided to leave them until I finish reorganizing each room. By then I can pick new homes for these things.

I am very happy with the quality of the work Joe, Mary Agnes, and the others did.

Cleared out my documents box today.

Hmmmmm. So here I am, thankfully with time to declutter. Now I just need to maintain energy and hope! I’ve returned from holiday to a digusting dump. I know for a fact I have less “stuff” than I had because I have emptied the house of so much. But what I have seems to spread out like melting ice to fill every inch of floor and surfaces. This suggests lack of storage. But I have quite a bit of storage, so actually I think it spells too much stuff for size of house. :-(

As I’m not about to buy a bigger house, I need to get rid of yet more stuff – even though I thought I’d reached the end of what I could part with. Thats the exhausting part – having to make decisions about every ‘thing’ that I own. I mean who has to go through this crap? I guess its the price I pay for accumulating and being busy. Being busy on many projects generates so much different debris. I need more order, which in turn requires more space, and we’re back to the vicious circle!

I’m going to make yet another start! I just want to get to that ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place’ stage. God knows how far I am from that. Yikes!

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.

Today I did some rearranging, due to the additional space in my new shelf. This turned out to be much more fun that I had thought. Now all my art books are nicely lined up. I first sorted them into three categories and then sorted them by artist, theme or vacation-where-I-got-the-book. Looks really cool :)

Of course this took a bit longer than really necessary, since I had to stop and browse in several of the books ;)

Yesterday I started putting stuff into my new shelf, it already looked much nicer, not so much stuff crammed into the only available spaces.

This also meant I could put some things in there, that had been sitting on my table, since my vacation. So ended up doing some additional sorting, sifting, trashing of papers and then putting the ones I want to keep in that shelf.

Lately I’ve had to double-fill parts of my shelves and just generally seemed to run out of place. So today I decided to head to the Ikea and buy one more of them.

I’ve just finished assembling it and it fits nicely with the others !

Now, of course to see how best to rearrange things, so they make the most sense…

Again, it’s not my house. The product boxes are back in my office! Argh! I hope not for long.