I've been learning about Pinterest recently. It still seems like freaky voodoo magic to me most of the time, but I periodically find an interesting recipe or a nifty craft or an incredibly helpful household project. The best thing I've found so far in March has been the 40 bags in 40 days decluttering plan, so that's what I'm writing to tell you about.
Here's a little bit about me:
I live with my in-laws. When I got married in 2011 my husband and I thought that we'd be moving out of state within six months, so I didn't bother moving everything out of my parents' house and to my new home because I thought I'd have to do it all over again. Flash forward and three years later I'm still in the same spot and I still haven't packed up my room; I liked the ability to drive half a mile away and still have someplace set up for me. But the time has come, at long last, for me to get my shit in order. Even if we aren't moving soon I own too much junk and it's well past time to pare down so I'm systematically going through my room at my parents' house, as well as through all the spaces I occupy at my in-laws' house, and getting rid of everything I don't actually need. It's crazy how liberating it feels.
The 40 days plan is simple - the site I linked to has downloadable forms with blank spaces for each of the days. You write out what area you're going to attack and what your plan is for the stuff in that area in each of the blanks, then you go to each of those places and fill up bags of trash and donations. It's recommended that you only do one space per day, but I'm getting a lot done each day because I want to limit the amount of time I'm spending turning my parents' house into a landfill.
So far I've learned a lot about myself and about what makes for an effective decluttering attempt, so here are some tips for you:
1 - MAKE A PLAN: Sit down and think out a reasonable plan of attack when you ARE NOT looking at the room you're decluttering. My plan for my bedroom started at the foot of the bed, moved to the top of the bed, then under the bed, then to disassembling the bed and getting it out of the way. I think if I'd actually been standing in my room, taking in the magnitude of the mess that I was looking at, I never would have gotten past the foot of the bed. Instead I stuck to my plan and the bed is disassembled and taking up only 25% of the floor space it was when I started (it's probably getting tossed at the end of the project.)
2 - SORT SMART: One of the problems that I tend to have when I'm cleaning is that I'll find myself getting wrapped up in one of the books that I find, or digging around for an earring to make a set with the one that I've just found. Not this time. I'm traveling through my junk quickly and ruthlessly with several bags in tow. I have a bag for trash, a bag for Goodwill donations, a box for things that I'm keeping, and a small plastic bag for memorabilia. Anything I'm keeping can be sorted out later so I don't worry about it in the moment - just get things out of sight and out of mind so that you can move on to the next item. When one of your bags for donations or trash gets full take it out of the room you're working in and get a new one. When your box for "to keep" gets full put it somewhere out of the way and get a new one.
3 - MAKE A MEMORY BOOK: This is nothing so complicated as a scrapbook, nor anything as simple as a photo album. This is a disorganized jumble of small stuff that makes up a big part of your personality. I had started making my memory book about five years ago and then lost it in the junk of my room. Thankfully it was one of the first things that I found when I started tidying up. Mine is full of matchbooks and business cards and drawings I made and newspaper clippings and pogs and birthday cards and all manner of things. Anything that I find that is relatively flat and has some kind of sentimental meaning for me gets slapped on a page with other things that have meaning for me. You don't need to save the whole novelty tie someone gave you as a gag gift, you only need to save a swatch of the fabric. You don't need a dedicated box for movie tickets, you can scatter them among your other memories. I highly recommend the "magnetic page" type photo albums for this - they're large enough for almost any photo or card size, they don't require any glue or tape or photo corners, they take an enormous amount of abuse, they hold a tremendous amount of stuff, and they're cheap as hell. You can find them for under fifteen dollars at Amazon.Com. I've reduced entire boxes of stuff to a single gallon-size ziplock bag for my memory book, then reduced that ziplock bag to twenty pages in my book. It's seriously one of the best space savers I've ever found.
Things that I've learned about myself:
1 - I draw on everything. In some ways this is awesome, because I'm looking through all of these old notebooks and I get to go "oh yeah, I am a good artist" every few minutes. In other ways it's terrible, because I want to save all of this crap. Lots of stuff is getting cut up and put in my memory book so I don't drown under the sheer volume of sketches.
2 - I took photos of everything. I've found ten envelopes of photos, two canisters of negatives, and five photo albums and I'm only six days into my cleanup. Once again, more stuff for the memory book.
3 - I was lucky to make it to adulthood. A lot of the stuff that I'm finding suggests that I was a little shit until I was at least eighteen or nineteen years old. I'm pretty sure my parents thought about strangling me on a regular basis and, while I'm glad they didn't, I don't blame them.
4 - I have a bizarre obsession with rocks. I don't know where most of these rocks came from, but I've found at least twenty rocks of various sizes, shapes, and textures. I know I still periodically pick up and pocket rocks, I have no idea why. Most of these have been put out in the garden as I come across them, but I'm still having a hard time tossing some of them away, which is stupid because they're just rocks.
5 - About 50% of what I own is books. 50% of the rest of the stuff is notebooks. 50% of the stuff after that is rocks. I made a pile of books to donate to my mom's classroom and have classified two boxes as "to keep" but so far I've found about 100 books and I'm not even close to the side of my room where the bookshelves are. I'm probably going to have to have a serious book-sort at the end of this project, and see if I can find a used bookstore where I can do some sort of trade.
I'll post photos as I go along, and at the end of the project I'll do a photo of my truckbed loaded up with all of my donations.
Bag Count so far:
Trash bags - 7
Donations - 6 bags, a boogie board, and a bed.
Memory Book - 2 1gal storage bags
Cheers,
- Alli
No comments:
Post a Comment