declutter my house

Cleaned out my closet and room!!

This isn’t really happening at all. I have hardly any clothes that fit me – yet mountains of clothing in the spare bedroom. I have put some work clothes that are now too big into a bag destined for a thrift shop, but… I’d guess I actually wear about 10% of the clothing that I have. The rest needs to go.

The books – I have to SORT them because some of my favourites are mixed in with all the junky ones.

And then there is just all the stuff – papers, old bills, tax things – that I pile and sort and then forget about so really it’s just a mountain of paper all over this massive desk.

Need to recommit to this.

Hurray! A young woman we know who sews took some of the fabric. Not all of it but enough to make a dent. The shame of it was that I kept wanting to take it from her and stuff it back into the bags to keep ;). However, I do know that she is much more likely to use it than me. I need to cut down on my hobbies. There is simply no time to do everything and very soon, I will be riding two horses regularly.

This morning I took all the electronic devices away to be recycled. Nice to be rid of them !

I am moving in November, so I want to have a fresh start. I have so much crap in unreal. I want to downsize and become a “less is more” person. Should I start now, or wait for the move?

Been a while since I touched this one. I’ve still been decluttering though. Now that I’m going to be moving sometime in the next few months, I really want to declutter. I do NOT want to take all of this crap with me.

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.

Today I’ve started and I think more than half completed the gathering of electronics, that I want to take away for recycling.

I swung by the Goodwill store after work today – not to shop, but to drop! I gave 4 bags of clothes and 4 bags of household stuff. Most of it had been in totes on my terrace waiting for the next garage sale but I got tired of it taking up space. Yesterday I added to it by cleaning out a kitchen cabinet: 4 mismatched coffee mugs and 3 soup mugs – BUH-BYE!

Today I mailed another item sold on eBay…and have 2 more boxes to go later this week! It feels so good to unload (and send them to people who wanted these particular items enough to buy them!). A few more square feet of space. I love it, love it, loooove it.

As was recommended to me, I’m reading a book that I’m finding very helpful in this decluttering process (thanks again, Frannie) – It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh. It’s helped me put the process in perspective.