So I wouldn’t say I necessarily buy into any particular
trend of getting rid of clutter (cough-KonMari-cough) but also I don’t have the
brain power to care about reading those books and having some sort of aha! Moment.
You do? Excellent. I mostly glean what I know off my friends who do, and I
figure the basics of all the methods is “you don’t need the majority of what
you have. Keep what you actually use/like/”brings you joy” and get rid of the
rest.” I find that what inspires me to get rid of things is when Ashley blogs about decluttering and I think “hey, I should empty out [pretty
much anything]”. A couple months ago it was my nightstand. C came in and said “we
should send a picture of this to IKEA to show them how much this thing can
hold. It’s impressive.”
Last month it was the spice cabinet (which I didn’t get
rid of a lot because I do a lot of cooking, but I did a lot of organizing,
which felt good).
I also got some bins for the pantry for snacks for the kids
because I have never been good at handing off the reins to them to get their
own snacks. That felt good. Two days ago this was my project:
We have this little antique desk and we never clean it
out. Even when we’ve moved, we just haul the whole thing from one place to
another. I didn’t take a before photo, but this is all the stuff I took out of
it. Part of my decluttering is just acknowledging that we have a lot of crap
that has built up and the easiest way for my sanity is to get rid of it all and
start anew.
So I got rid of this box of crayons and other writing implements
which were in every drawer and everywhere, and bought one new large box of crayons.
I saved one set of colored pencils, one set of markers an a handful of pencils
that I confirmed sharpened well and then I donated everything else to a friend’s
church for the kids. I now have one drawer of batteries (we go through a lot).
I have the coloring implements on the desktop so they stay clean instead of a jumbled
mess. Otherwise – empty.
It’s lovely.
Future projects:
-
the linen closet. I do this all the time and it’s
a disaster two weeks later. I need to be ruthless.
-
The office closet – we haven’t opened this
closet in seven years. It’s … not good.
-
A good scrubbing of the refrigerator. I am the
only one who cleans it out and I don’t usually give myself time to clean it
well. There are a lot of jars of sauces that need to be trashed.
-
Under the bathroom sinks. It’s … I don’t need
most of that crap.
-
The pots/pans/Tupperware. I ordered a new set of
Tupperware and I’m getting rid of all the old stuff. All. Gone.
-
The box of school papers from S’s first grade
year and Henry’s VPK. I generally keep everything for the year and then at the
end sort it and pick a few items and the rest of it goes in the recycling. A
new school year means I need to get rid of the last year’s stuff. Also, I
probably need two boxes now. Ugh.
I think that’s a good start. I was pretty ruthless with
the kids’ toys before Christmas this last year and between that and the
post-Christmas redo of their room I got rid of a LOT of stuff. Unfortunately it
will probably need to be done again before Christmas this year.
