My desk has been cleared off. I wish I could say it’s because I got all the books appraised and papers filed, but that’s not true. The stuff has been boxed up so that we can clean the desk and swap it with the table we bought as a replacement, which is in a holding pattern in the living room…
However, I HAVE decluttered 3 boxes of papers in the past 2 days.
The desk swap will not finish today. We need to clear areas like near the doorway, off the stairs, etc. which will have to move before we move a heavy piece of furniture out a crowded door, into a hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door…
I feel like I’m being attacked by all of the stuff in my house so it’s time to declutter!
I did a big buy nothing post, sold a table, gave away my indoor plants, and started a kid toy purge.
I also hate all of the lamps in my house. They are all hand me downs, none of them match, and none of them fit our style. I’m getting rid of them all and trying to find less bulky ways to light our house.
I’m giving away all of the baby things to a friend who is having a baby in August and I’m trying to get it sorted better but once she comes that will be a bunch of stuff gone too.
I’m just so frustrated with every surface, drawer, and closet right now. Nothing is in its place and it feels overwhelming.
I feel like I’ve been bouncing from one area to the next or starting one spot and either it feels too overwhelming or I get distracted and then it’s messier. Does anyone else do this too??
I’ve also really been feeling the weight of the mental inventory of every single thing in our home. I can tell you where almost anything is and it feels like too much to keep in my brain.
Okay writing that out feels better. I’m going to try and do the smallest area tonight and make progress and just keep doing one thing at a time until it feels manageable again.
LITERALLY. Even when I don’t know that I know. Yesterday my husband went to do the girls hair and I noticed he was looking around confused at the drawer we keep the stuff in. A lightbulb went off and I was like “oh you set the brushes on the mantle yesterday” I guess I noticed them on some subconscious level and logged it. This happens with everything. Where precisely is the X in the fridge? Upper left corner behind the pickles.
What is being sacrificed for all this information to live in my head??? We have tens of thousands of individual items in this home. Hundreds of thousands maybe?
This is where Dana White’s stuff is the best. Her system leads to no additional mess so if you’re interrupted, it’s fine. IME it doesn’t get stuff as well reorganized and optimized as other systems, or AS well de cluttered (need more passes through for that) but it for sure gets life manageable the fastest with the least mess.
She’s partial to “start where it’s visible”. She says start at the front door or wherever guests enter and work in that way. Personally, I like to start at the pain point. If the snap lock cupboard is making me want to scream… start there! (The exception being pain points that have a lot of paper or emotional clutter- those should not go first IMO. They make me run out of steam before I get to anything else). She’s also a big advocate of- get rid of big things like furniture, you’re basically making your house bigger when you do. And if a flat surface is a clutter magnet you can’t keep under control, considering getting rid of that flat surface. I’ve found that technique shockingly helpful- I’m way more likely to put things back properly then.
Mostly right now though, it’s just having so much stuff, and entropy goblins spreading it all about constantly. I live in fear of the summer if I don’t declutter now- we’ll roll into both kids home full time and omg the chaos. I mean. Art.
We finally cleared out the storage unit that was a staging area for renovations! It’s just shy of 2 years since we moved back in. Original plan was to do it over the winter, but it dragged out a bit since we were unwilling to have this take over our lives entirely. It took about 5 big pushes including some babysitter time & grandparent time. Cool date night, huh?
There is a big pile of boxes in our basement but at least I can do that a bit at a time in the evenings, and stop paying the $80 a month rental fee that had ratcheted up to $270.
8 bags of clothing, all but one donated to the Salvation Army, dropped off
Old rug and her bike dropped off for big item pick up
Old propane tanks returned
Crappy hangers replaced by the good hangers
We purchased so little shelves for storing her coffee mugs more effectively- she won’t part with any of the 2 shelves double stacked just yet.
Back yard area had 3 mulch bags worth cleaned out so we can hopefully complete the project today.
I don’t think her garbage bins have both been so full.
Also adding- we are tackling stuff she has been meaning to do but never gets to list, as well as stuff she has made purchases to fix but hasn’t done.
This pinged me so hard but in the complete opposite way. We have enough stuff in our house that, once you add in the baby chaos, I don’t know where many things are – including things that I really need to be able to locate quickly. The burden of not knowing – and especially the bait-and-switch of “I put this in its proper home and then Wizard/Chickadee moved it” – is really weighing on me.
Got rid of some outgrown baby clothing yesterday, and today I put in the trash an old air mattress that not only do we not really have room for, but it’s sprung a leak that I cannot find for the life of me. Thank you for your service, items, now leave my house.
This was one of the hardest things to get used to as latte has become more busy and her own person and so forth. Is it there are whole categories of things that I don’t know where they are though. That can be an absolute pain sometimes. Especially if she’s been home a lot.
Yeah, I’m foreseeing at least a decade of complete inscrutability.
It would help if the other adult in the house were not complicit in this inscrutability but you know, a person can’t actually be perfect, so he had to have a weak point somewhere
I firmly believe in having multiples every place that you need to use them so that you don’t have to walk around and find them. I have no less than six scissor locations in my house. And three or four different sets of hairbrushes for the kids.
I am the only person in my house who uses a hairbrush, and I only use my hairbrush in the bathroom and put it back in the drawer immediately – and yet we have five of them because they keep walking off.
ETA: Wait what do you y’all use scissors for in the laundry? (me like what am I missing?)
I finally tackled my closet this weekend. 4 bags of clothes donated. 2 bags of trash. The hangers don’t scream anymore. It’s quiet in there. Weird. But good.
That’s how I know when things are getting out of control at our house–when I can’t find things that I usually can find. Suddenly they are buried under other stuff. And my husband is always asking me for stuff-- why should I have to keep track of where something is if you can’t?
Oh! Your scissors remind me of this that I literally just did TODAY:
We have a paper grocery list on the fridge. My husband will tell me “we need X,” and I’ll say, with varying degrees of annoyance, “OK, add it to the list.” But then he’d have to go get a PEN. The pens are mere feet away, but sometimes if it’s in the moment it’s hard to stop and switch gears. So I put a pen on a string and attached it to the fridge where the list is. We’ll see if he uses it, but I will.
This isn’t really a clutter thing, just one of those things where having the right item in the right place is life-changing. If something isn’t on the list, it doesn’t get bought!
