De-clutter

I spent this past month de-cluttering our house. I feel like this is a never-ending battle for me. I have trouble parting with things that have a potential future value, S is a borderline hoarder and we are both guilty of dragging home all sorts of found/ free stuff for projects we will never have time to complete, plus anyone living with kids knows how much clutter they generate. One of my goals for the year was to compress all selling of stuff to two months to coincide with the bi-annual kids consignment sales my twin parent group hosts. The spring sale is coming up which makes March one of the selling months but I realized I would first have to identify all the items I wanted to sell hence the month of February becoming a deep-cleaning and purging month. Besides, what else am I going to do when it’s stupid cold out.

In the past I’ve mostly organized and gotten rid of things as a reaction, like “oh crap, we’re moving again. Better try to get rid of some stuff” or I’m just irritated to the point of action by the amount of junk we accumulate such as the lotion incident. Since I’m really trying to turn over a new leaf this year, I decided to take a more organized approach to getting organized and getting rid of clutter.

I set out a systematic approach to make sure I didn’t give myself any wiggle room to back out of getting rid of stuff. I wrote out a list of each room in the house and made a checklist for each of the following steps under each room. I focused on one room at a time and chipped away at each step as time allowed.

Step One: Trash and recyclables. I went through all drawers, cabinets, stacks of stuff, closets, etc and got rid of anything that was trash/ recycling. This included expired coupons, food, or medicines, old notes, broken stuff.

Step Two: Home the homeless. Part of our problem is that we have a lot of stuff that doesn’t have a set “home” since our last move so things end up just getting stuck wherever there’s open space. I spent a good amount of time in each room relocating stuff to a more permanent home.

Step Three: The Purge. This was the hardest part. I set a goal of getting rid of 10 items per room. Some of the items included toiletries that I will never use, clothes that I will never fit in again, movies we can get online, books we can get in the library, etc. The removed items went into one of three categories: stuff to sell, stuff to give away, and stuff to toss.

Step Four: Organization wishlist. I jotted down some notes as I went room by room about any organizational items that would help keep the room in order better. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for free or super cheap items to meet those needs.

Felt really good to go through the house and get more organized and reduce some of the clutter. I’ll be repeating the exercise in the fall!