Tag: decluttering

28 Simple Days ~ February Recap

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This year, I have decided that I need to dedicate 30 days each month (28 days in February!) to make simple changes in my life that I can stick with.  Permanently.  I didn’t want to set a bunch of goals and fail miserably at them a few months from now.  Like I have done every year in the past.

Hello again!

We are in the last week of February now and I thought that I would give you a better insight on how things have progressed this month with my new habit.

To recap:  I wanted to spend the month of February putting things away.  And to be able to put things away, they need a place.  I like order.  Order gives a calm space in the chaos that is life, in my humble opinion.  Also, I am a control freak.  You can’t control life most of the time, but you can control your response to all the things.  Hence, I like order.

One of the first things that I realized at the beginning of the month – and I don’t know why I was so shocked and surprised by this – is that I needed to step up my decluttering to make this happen.  Now if you’ve been hanging around with me for very long, you know I am not a novice when it comes to decluttering and sending things away to live with a new family.  I’ve been doing this diligently for over eight or nine years now.  It’s a never ending process.

Even though I mentioned it in the last post, I still didn’t realize the scope of how much stuff I still need to go through and get rid of.  You can see my last donation haul here, and it’s a direct result of sending away the things that I know I don’t want in my home anymore.  But.  You knew there was a but coming didn’t you?  This is going to take me a lot longer than 28 days to complete.  I have worked every single day of February somewhere in my house for at least five minutes decluttering something.

That my friends, is the gist of it all.  Very tiny chunks of my day.  I get overwhelmed very easily when it comes to all the things.  First there are a LOT of things.  If I decide to KonMari my house, things are going to go horrifyingly wrong in a hurry.  You’ll notice when I do KonMari something, it’s a micro segment of what normal people would do.

I KonMaried my purses and I was actually okay with that.  It was a task that I could carry out and accomplish within a reasonable time frame.  Otherwise, things would be pulled out and piled around my house for weeks.  That’s seriously not an exaggeration.  Ask Denton how I know this.  Actually don’t, he might tell you in detail.  I need limits.  So I don’t declutter my kitchen.  I declutter a DRAWER in my kitchen.  It’s something that I can do while I’m cooking supper and not turn my kitchen into a disaster zone that won’t allow me to function.

Every day this month I have decluttered something so that I can put things where they belong.  Like this:

I spent about 2 minutes going through my wooden spoons, culled out what I knew that I never reach for and stuck the lot in a crock that was gathering dust.  Now it has a function and a reason to sit there and be pretty.  My favorite reason for having beautiful things.

I am learning new things about myself throughout this process too.  I am not the type of person to buy all matching containers and then come home from the grocery store and switch all the cereal into the beautiful matching containers.  I just don’t have the patience for it.  But I also do not like looking at the cat treat box that comes from Wal-Mart.  We need a safe, out of Batman’s reach container for them, but I hate those plastic, ugly containers that they come in.  When I found this guy, I snatched him right up.

Form and functionality.  I love it.

As with January’s habit builder, I didn’t plan to have my entire house sorted out by the end of February.  This year, I am trying to teach myself routines that I can stick with forever.  This way, once I have my belongings sorted out and culled down to only what I love and know that I want to clean every day, it will be easier to spot newcomers who do not belong.  Because let’s face it.  Things are not going to miraculously stop coming into my house.  I see new things that I want to try all the time.  But once I determine that they are just not a good fit, hopefully it will be easier to send them on their way.

I found permanent places for quite a lot of stuff this month, but there is still a lot more to go through.  I have many, many lovely things that I’ve collected over the past 25 years, but as lovely as they are, most of them are going to grace someone else’s home soon.  I am not aiming to be a minimalist, but I definitely want to have less stuff.  

I want what I think most people want:  A comfortable, clean and welcoming home.  Now that I’ve finally figured out for myself how to get that, I am on a mission to get it done.  Five minutes at a time, clearing out the clutter to make a place for everything, so that everything can be put in its place.

I know that I will reap the rewards of teaching myself this new habit too.

Do you have plans to make simple changes in your life this year?  I would love to hear  about it!  Let’s build some habits and routines!

You can find all of the posts in this series here.

Tracie

Decluttering ~ 02.23.19

Published on by Tracie2 Comments

This is the space that I am devoting to documenting my decluttering journey.  You can find all of the other posts here.

Note:  This post may contain affiliate links.  Check out what that means to you here.

It’s time for another round of donations at our house.  It feels like a never ending cycle, sometimes.  Maybe one day, I’ll start my decluttering for the day, and I’ll actually have to look for something that doesn’t belong anymore.

Here’s what I’ve gathered up and is going to live with someone else today!

I’ve finally made a dent in my unending collection of cookbooks.  Shocker I know.  I was in the mood to get things out of my house that I know I’ll never use again.  These are the 32 that didn’t make the cut.

I never have a problem getting rid of my magazine collection.  It’s been awhile for my magazines.

We have way too many coffee mugs at our house.

Random pillows and waffle weave dish cloths.  I hate those dish cloths, so I don’t know why I keep putting them back in the drawer.

We are slowly replacing all the things in the house that we know we need, like that pencil sharpener.  I bought one like this for Liv as a Christmas gift (she actually asked for it!) and it is amazing.  The one we are giving away WILL sharpen your pencil, it just takes forever and chews off half the pencil first.  No thanks.  Also, I discovered that I am not a wax melt kind of person.  I’d rather have candles burning than deal with the mess that inevitable happens with these things.  Also, we keep the burning candles up high now away from Batman.  He is afraid of heights, so now he can’t set himself on fire anymore.  Only we would have a cat who is afraid of heights.

Now let’s talk about printers, shall we?  I have bought a multitude of printers over the past ten years.  I got so sick of replacing either the ink cartridge or the printer itself that I started investigating and finally chose this one to replace ALL of ours.  I haven’t regretted it yet.  I also haven’t had to replace its toner cartridge yet either and I bought it last October.  Win!

I am becoming very picky in my forties and things that don’t bother most people drive me crazy now.  Like the cord on that red lamp.  It’s vintage and beautiful, but whoever wired this one up did it so that the cord comes out of the top of the lamp instead of the base.  It’s been driving me bonkers looking at that every day so it has to go.

We also invested in a water filter that lives under the sink, so it took the place of my soap dispenser that did live on my sink.  I’m not sorry.  I LOVE that water filter and it has saved us a LOT of money so far in water bottles.  Not to mention, I don’t need to recycle all of those bottles now.  I’ll tell you all about it later.

I found this Barbie downstairs in the laundry room and started to stick it in the box of Barbies that Liv kept when she stopped playing with them.  And then I asked myself ‘Why’?  Why would I keep something that will probably never get taken out of the box again – especially when we didn’t even know it was down there – when there are at least 50 more in that box already?  Going away.  And why do I have sixty Christmas boxes?  I’ve never used more than ten or fifteen at Christmas, so that’s what I kept.  The rest are going to live in someone else’s attic.

Three light fixture’s that have been replaced but not donated yet.  And a random belt, cord and spice container.  No Mother, I am not going to clean that outside light fixture before I donate it.  I’m sorry and I will apologize to Vicky when I donate it.  But, if it doesn’t leave here today, it will sit in my garage gathering even more dirt and dust waiting for me to clean it before it can be donated.  On and on and on forever.

More candle jars for the candle making lady, books, Cd’s, a phone and its base, some of my cast iron that never gets used and an essential oil diffuser that only stays on for ten minutes at a time.  I don’t have time for that but someone might.  BTW – don’t donate your trash!  I always ask them if they will take something and give up its history; they will price it appropriately and people who like to tinker will take it home to see if it’s salvageable.  When I donated our dead electric fireplace, they put $50.00 on it with a sign that said it didn’t work and a woman bought it for a decoration.

Random toys, a bunch of lunch containers, and a set of wooden bowls Denton came home with one day.  He was so proud because he knows I have a love for wood bowls.  But I don’t like these.  I thanked him properly, and sweetly, but I did ask him if he minded if I get rid of them.  Life is too short to clean things you dislike.  He’s fine with it.  He is very like me when it comes to gifts.  A gift isn’t a gift if it comes with strings, or guilt.  Now, someone who does love these bowls can clean them every week.

More things that we have too many of.  Wooden spoons, corn on the cob holders – I still have ten sets, shesh – a cheese slicer I’ve only used once and hated, a pair of sunglasses that I hate the way they fit, and a milk glass bowl that I just dislike.  Don’t worry, I have three other’s that I love and use every week.

Finally, a failed project.  Did you know that you can use the old 1980’s cassette holders to hold washi tape?  You can, but I discovered when I got this one home that it’s not a cassette tape holder.  I have no idea what it is, but it’s not solid all the way back and washi tape falls out the opening in the back so it’s useless to me.  This is going to live with someone else, and I’ll keep my eyes open this summer at yard sales for an actual cassette tape holder to repurpose with our washi tape collection.  Meanwhile, our washi tape lives in a jumbled heap in a basket in Liv’s room.

When we finally took everything inside our local Salvation Army this afternoon, it took three buggies.  Three buggies!  Vicky asked me if my house was empty yet.  I know she must believe that I am a hoarder with stuff piled to the ceiling in all the rooms and I just don’t want to say so.  I’m not actually a hoarder, but someone with a big house and lots of collections of stuff that I truly don’t need.  That’s probably something a hoarder would say, though, right?

We took three full shopping carts of stuff into the Salvation Army and brought one thing out.  This:

Pinkie.  The ceramic match to Olivia’s Blue Boy that she found at a yard sale last summer.  What are the odds?  Liv was ecstatic.  Which means she smiled.  She takes after my Daddy.

And that’s it for this week.  There is more stuff just waiting for me to bag it up and stuff it into the Pilot, but this stuff actually got donated today, and now I can have some breathing room before I drag more things out of the closets.  What have you hauled away recently?  Do tell.