rivka | Entries tagged with decluttering

12:34 Second work block completed; stopping for a longer break.

The first part of the day went very quickly, and I was filled with hope that perhaps this wouldn't be as difficult as I thought. Now I've hit the slower part, where I need to organize things thoughtfully and make decisions.

Accomplished in the last 90-minute block:

Straightened and organized the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Culled 100 books.

Separated out books better stored in Alex's room.

Sorted several pounds of coins, some of which were Michael's informal collection and some of which were real money, all of which had been mixed together by the kids.

Filled a laundry basket with things that belong in other rooms of the house.

Usefully organized half of the big floor-to-ceiling storage unit which holds art supplies, games, and homeschooling materials.

Listened to two more lectures about the history of the evolution controversy.

Accidentally picked up a dead shield bug augh augh augh.

I'm going to take advantage of the fact that Colin is napping to put away the things in the laundry basket, which belong various other places in the house. Then I'm going to get some lunch and take my self-reward, but still useful and work-oriented, trip to the thrift store.

9:00 Begin working on study. Take embarrassing panoramic photos.
10:36 Fifteen minute break to drink water and make notes.

Accomplished so far:

Study table and all its drawers cleaned out.

Medium-sized collection of empty cups and glasses out of study and into sink or dishwasher.

Closet totally emptied & closet items put away in new homes.

One full bag of trash, one full bag of clothing to be donated.

Large load of clothes to dry cleaner's.

Three loads of clean laundry put away.

Friends list and online forums successfully ignored. They are off-limits, even during breaks, until after 5pm.
Listened to two Teaching Company lectures on the history of controversy regarding evolution.

I was just about to go downstairs for a basin of soapy water to wash down the closet shelves so that I can load them up again with their new intended contents, but the kids came home. I need to hide out from Colin, so washing the study shelves will have to wait for his nap.

Okay, my fifteen minutes are up. My plan is to do another 90-minute session and then reward myself with a trip to my favorite thrift store. Colin and I need long-sleeved shirts and Alex needs more Magic Tree House books.

I am taking three days of leave this week. I call it "vacation," but technically they are furlough days. I have declared a homeschool vacation for Alex. I have full-time childcare for the three days of leave.

Because I am officially an old and boring person, I am planning to use this leave to put in serious work decluttering and organizing our house. My top priority is the study, which could be the heart of our home if it weren't such a messy, cluttered pit. My goal is to spend eight hours a day decluttering.

If you see me online before 5pm, please tell me to get back to work.

It's been a long slog of a weekend (and I should be packing right now, not posting to LJ) but we've made fantastic progress. It's quite satisfying to watch everything come together - to look around a room and think, "Well, there's not much more I can actually pack in here."

We got the keys to the new house on Friday afternoon. Friday evening I ceremoniously carried the first box over (Christmas ornaments - light, but bulky and fragile and incredibly in the way) and put it in the basement. We've loaded some other things directly into the basement, moved some of Alex's toys so she'd have something to play with when we're at the new house, and put a dozen boxes of books onto the built-in shelves in the master bedroom. A few hundred books sure make a room look lived-in, even when it doesn't have any furniture in it.

Astounding progress on the Old Home front: we (mostly Michael) totally cleared out our crawlspace storage area, which had been packed to the gills. We've thrown out ungodly amounts of junk. Another carload of stuff went to Goodwill and to The Book Thing, a free-book giveaway. Michael recycled a huge pile of ancient computer components. We disassembled the bed and wardrobe in the guest room. And box after box has been packed: baby toys and blankets, framed photos, booze (cartons 1 and 2), piano music, manuals for all our electronics, candles and candleholders.

It's kind of amazing that we've given or thrown so much away, and still have so much stuff left over. SO MUCH stuff. Even after we've packed the rational collections of possessions into boxes, there is so much left that's just... misc.

Alex is the healthiest sick kid I've ever seen. She's clingy, and congested, but not notably ill-appearing. We have still chosen to follow our normal sick-kid rule of unlimited TV, because it makes moving much more convenient and because we are bad parents.

It's hilarious to watch her try to game the rules. She's ostentatiously sick when she wants to watch videos or have her pacifier at sometime other than bedtime.[1] On the other hand, she isn't sick when she wants to help cook dinner and get her germy hands all over our food. She got her signals crossed yesterday and insisted at length that she wasn't sick in order to get a glass of milk... which I would've given her just for the asking, given that her stomach isn't affected this time. I guess she remembers that milk was prohibited when she had that stomach bug.

She's taking the move really well. She likes going over to the new house, and helped me unpack some books and scrub down the pantry shelves. (Either the new landlord decided not to send a cleaning crew because time was short and we really wanted to get in there, or he needs to fire his cleaners.) She doesn't seem at all concerned about leaving some of her toys there. We'll see how she takes the actual transfer of all our possessions, and the part where she actually has to sleep in her new room.

Me, I'm so excited about sleeping in my new room. As long as the curtains I ordered get here before Thursday, which is moving day. Yaaaaaay, new house!

[1] I know, I know, she should've given up the paci long ago. See "bad parents," above.

Socks with holes in them.
A pair of big fluffy polartec socks in a weird garish print, received as a gift years ago and never taken out of the package.
Ugly free promotional T-shirts.
A lipstick, still in an unopened package, from before I met Michael.
A sweater I got in high school, which is still in good shape only because I haven't worn it in years.

I got rid of all but three of the T-shirts I've had since college. Since college. I graduated in 1994.

...It's kind of pathetic that I'm still holding onto three, isn't it?

Edited to add: OMG. Condoms that expired in 1998. (Don't worry - no one's been using them.)

Decluttering is so exhiliarating. I just bagged up three-quarters of the contents of our linen closet to give to Goodwill.

We don't need a dozen sets of double bed sheets when the only double bed in the house is the rarely-used guest bed. We don't need sixteen adult-sized bath towels, half of which are too ratty to use. We don't need a massive plastic baby bathtub which, despite its gargantuan size, babies outgrow in about four months. We don't need six afghans. We don't need an electric blanket controller for an electric blanket we no longer own.

We. Don't. Need.

I can't believe it, but it's my day at home and Alex is actually napping. She never naps. I hope she isn't getting sick.

I'd love to say that I was celebrating her unexpected nap with some peaceful relaxation - but given that we're moving in two and a half weeks, there's not a chance. We're a little bit behind with the packing - and we're going into church budget season now, which consumes all of Michael's time. So I'm using her naptime to solicit estimates from moving companies, clean out and pack up the linen closet, run some statistics for Lydia, and cycle through a few loads of laundry.

Oh, and post to LJ. What would naptime be without LJ posts? I've almost forgotten, it's been so long.

We did, incidentally, get the lovely house next door to our current house. I'm very excited. All three of us are. They're doing some renovation work over there right now, so we haven't been able to get in, but I am gloating over all the lovely details in my mind's eye. The ones I remember, anyway. I'm finding that my memory is hazy on things like closet space.

Decluttering for the move is going well. We've taken two full carloads of stuff to Goodwill and thrown much more away, and I'm feeling resolute about not moving things we don't need. On the recommendation of

fairoriana and

juno I read It's All Too Much by Peter Walsh, and had a lightbulb moment: We shouldn't try to figure out where to put all of our things in the new house, we should try to figure out how we want to use each room of the new house, and then only move in the things that actually serve those purposes. Totally different emphasis.

I'm also realizing how much the clutter gets in the way of actual cleaning. I've always made a distinction between a messy house and a dirty house, but really it's the case that one leads to the other. You can't keep surfaces clean when they have piles of stuff on them.

( moving to-do list )

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?