What's with all the clutter?

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.