Things.

[rivka]

We've started the sorting/discarding/organizing process which will one day lead to packing. Yesterday Michael took a first load of stuff to Goodwill: five big bags of old clothes and toys, and a chair. We've also gotten rid of three 30-gallon bags' worth of trash. It's a good start... but it's also just a tiny dent in our three-story house full of stuff.

We're not precisely pack rats. We don't have emotional attachments to most of these things, or vague ideas that someday they'll turn out to be useful. It's more a problem of inertia. Things come into the house and get stowed away, and when they've outlived their usefulness we just never get around to throwing them out. We probably have more storage space than is really good for us.

I filled a 30-gallon trash bag just with things that were in my desk, on my desk, or stacked behind my desk in the little space between my chair and the wall. The black cardboard folder I used when I was planning our wedding, with rough drafts of the guest list, extra invitations, and sample menus from the restaurant where we held the reception. Cartoons one of my old housemates drew of my ex. The Lesbian Avengers handbook. Every single card we received when Alex was born. A highlighted guide to the competitive races in the 2006 election. A list of books I read in March of last year. Old Mac-formatted backup disks with my college senior thesis on them. Back issues of Mouth magazine. Printed-out drafts of academic papers. Posters I once presented at conferences. Manuals for electronics I no longer own. A 56k modem card which, if I recall correctly, doesn't even work, and which belonged to a laptop I got rid of in, um, 2002?

It's kind of exhiliarating to get this stuff cleared away. And it feels so good to imagine moving only needed, useful, appreciated things into our new house. The new house will have vast quantities of storage - there's a full basement - but we will not just move our junk.

Keeping the new house decluttered is going to be a different story, though. Anyone have good decluttering or clutter-prevention resources to recommend? Anything that's actually, you know, follow-able?

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

TNH has a recent thread called "Clear your clutter."

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

It's All Too Much was a really good synthesis for me on decision making about stuff. Skarps and I went through about 90% of our house before we knew we'd move and culled, as we call it. After a big initial clean (like a move) I think there are two ways to do it: 1) prevent stuff from coming in 2) periodically go back to each room and reclean it. I think I'd like to make a schedule so that every room gets decluttered once a year.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

Having too much storage space will make it difficult. We have a rule that everything has to have a designated place, and live in its designated place, and that helps us keep the clutter down - because when we run out of spaces, we have to get rid of things. But if you have enough room to make spaces for everything, then that will be harder...

Congrats on your progress thus far!

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

A lot of people I know swear by http://www.flylady.net/. She's annoying as all get out, but if you can stand her LOL'ing at herself all of the time and her cutesie soccer-mom-archetype attitude, she's got some good tips.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Isn't she the one who says I have to wake up in the morning and put on make-up and laced shoes? Hmmm.

Are the people you know who swear by her mostly stay-at-home moms? The little I've seen seems to be geared towards people who are home all day, but I'll admit that I haven't looked into it much.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

Some are SAHMs, some aren't.

Yep, she is the one who says that about the shoe and make up. While I don't agree with all of it, and found her rather annoying, I do like the idea that getting dressed and put together can help your mindset. She does have special sections for people who work outside of the home.

What I do like and think is applicable is the idea that you should break it up into manageable parts. She has you set a timer for 15 minutes, and when that's up, you're done. She breaks the house into zones, and that's what you tackle for the week. Some of it's maintenance, some is declutter. Most of it is probably basic, though, what you might find at another site.

My house is full of clutter though, so I'm not probably the best to ask. You do expand to fill your space - we lived in a 1600 sqare foot house with no basement and no garage, and while we were stuffed, we fit. We moved into a 3400 square foot house with a basement as big as the old place, and a 2 car garage. Somehow, we're still full.

I tried it for a little while, with some success. I liked having my kitchen clean every night before I went to bed, and I kept up with some clutter hotspots pretty well. I started when I was still working, and pregnant with Henry. Once we moved though, I didn't pick it back up.

I wouldn't suggest signing up for the mailing list though. You can spend your entire 15 declutter minutes deleting testimonials from your email.

[ladyvonkulp.livejournal.com]

Purging is a cathartic feeling; we're getting rid of a lot of our stuff through FreeCycle right now.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I find the "Sunday Seven" challenge on homekeeping useful. The idea is that every Sunday, you find seven things to throw out/give away.

Photos, REAL backups, BookMooch & feeling rich, and a shredder recommendation

[(Anonymous)]

If you have a decent digital camera and electronic storage space, or the ability to burn data to a CD or DVD, then taking pictures of things that you kinda-sorta want to keep can enable you to toss them with little regret.

http://www.crummy.com/2007/09/29/1

It feels more doable to toss drafts and paper backups when you feel secure in your electronic backups. Set-it-and-forget-it automatic backups help a lot.

BookMooch is helping my husband get rid of books and knowing they'll go to someone who actually wants them.

The best way for me to feel okay about getting rid of semiuseful things, e.g., envelopes losing their gumminess or a folding chair we never use, is to feel rich. I am now confident that we will never feel so poor that we can't afford to buy a new one yet SIMULTANEOUSLY need it immediately or else terrible things would happen.

The Staples MailMate shredder is a good, durable, stylish-enough cross-cut shredder. And it can swallow junk mail whole, as well as CDs/DVDs and credit cards and paper clips. And it automatically turns off if you pull the shreddings-bin out and expose the sharp bits. Keep it handy.

-Sumana Harihareswara

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I've tried to cultivate the mental attitude of, "If I bring something new (non-consumable) into my house, what old thing will go to make room for it?"

I understand about the inertia thing, though. It's certainly responsible for most of our closet-cruft.

[juno.livejournal.com]

The book - It's All Too Much. It really worked for me.

[namedphoenix.livejournal.com]

Ok, well, I've not yet perfected this, because honestly, my apartment could rival your three story house with crap that I just haven't gotten rid of yet.

I am, however a packrat. I have emotional attachments to things, and the guilt of throwing/giving away a perfectly good thing that maybe I'll use, or someone will be upset that I gave it away.

ANYWAY. My biggest issue is the clutter, too, but it's paperwork. Papers from school, bill stubs, pay stubs, junk mail, credit card offers i need to shred, the coupon ads, and my clothes that aren't dirty, and the clothes that are dirty.

I have a new system of taking the clothes with the hanger out of the closet and hanging the empty hanger on my door, so that when I get home and say my suit-jacket isn't dirty so it can go back in the closet, it is that much less effort to put back away cuz I don't have to hunt for a hanger.

But the paperwork, if I have a PLACE for it set up already, then it goes very nicely in that place. So when you are setting up your house, think of the things that pile up, and make a place for them. Me, I need an in and out bin.

I also need trash containers in every room, so that the trash (little netflix covers are a bit culprit) gets into the trash. If you have paper recycling, have a recycle bin next to the trash bin, too.

Also, all the organizing shows on TV say to put like objects together. That's something I don't do, and am resolved to work on this year.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

When I moved into this house, I filled one of those big dumpsters - the kind people use for home-construction project debris - twice with the accumulated crap of the previous dozen years of rental living ... and fully half of that was paper.

While I knew myself well enough to avoid making sweeping resolutions about changing my packrat ways, I did vow to stop accumulating paper. And somehow I came up with what proved to be a brilliantly simple plan:

Place a good-sized waste-basket somewhere near your front door, preferably next to a small table or shelf.

When you walk in the door, make a habit of stopping, before you get any farther, and sorting your mail. Real Mail - bills and personal correspondence - go on the table for further sorting and reading (Bills, as quickly as possible, to an organizer next to my computer, where I pay them). Everything else, without exception, goes into the wastebasket.

Here, where we have curbside recycling, the wastebasket is reserved *only* for paper, and gets emptied into the recycling bin on garbage collection day.

I also cancelled all my magazine subscriptions; I wasn't reading them anyway, and I couldn't bear to throw them out. Since then, I've taken the additional radical-for-me step of cancelling my newspaper subscription; I get most of my news on line long before the paper comes out, and if I want to catch up on the local stuff, I go to the paper's Web site.

These two steps have virtually eliminated paper clutter from my life - and with the paper gone, I hardly have a problem.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I have a condo and while the development has some recycling, it doesn't have mixed paper. So I bring mail and receipts to my desk where most of it goes into a plastic bin balanced across the wastebasker and the rest either gets filed or put in the to-shred binder clip. I have more mixed paper recycling, weight-wise, than all the rest of the trash per week and I take that bin to the transfer station and dump it in their mixed paper dumpster.

[shandra.livejournal.com]

I am not a clutter buster entirely but what I have found that helps:

- a mail system similar to a pp's; mine is that everything that comes in the door goes in a basket and I DO NOT open anything (unless it is registered) until I am ready to deal with it with a waste basket, file drawer, etc. No dragging it throughout the house.

- Every weekend I do a (FlyLady, but she bugged me too) 27-item sweep of the house where I just take a garbage bag, and find 27 things to get rid of (small ones count), quickly. I still have not figured out how we get 27 things every week INTO the house to get rid of, but there it is. I seem to find some every week.

- two long weekends a year (Victoria Day and Thanksgiving) I go through our storage and drawers and things and pull stuff out for charity donation and organize and that. I like the weekly decluttering but it doesn't quite manage all the aspects.

- no recreational shopping, shopping way in advance, stockpiling things just in case/for a great sale. If they are SO urgent then I don't need a sale to buy them. I have found that sales do seem to come around when I really need them, like acquiring a work wardrobe.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I don't have any good suggestions for keeping things uncluttered, but your post reminded me of a quotation that's always made me grin:

In the early years of their relationship Georgia O'Keeffe gave Alfred Stieglitz an urn. Finding it unhandsome, Stieglitz smashed it to pieces. "These things spread," he said...

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I'd like to have a solution to the 20/80 problem, which is that the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time, which means that 1) you should never never never pack your books, or pack them first (get your friends to do them at the last minute, when all the hard stuff is done already) and 2) that you'll move boxes marked "misc." or something like it, containing things like a handful of pencils and pens, an almost-worn-out scrub brush, most of the last 2 week's mail, some plant fertilizer, and 4 Duplos.

I once unpacked a box labeled "things found under the couch."

K.

[ailbhe]

We pack books first because it's easiest that way, for us. We still have enough small boxes, for a start.