#de-clutter

De-Clutter your Life – and your home

Spring is traditionally the time for some long-needed cleaning. Why not get to it already – all relaxed and fresh. No stress.

It’s the last day of this exercise and I’m exhausted. I didn’t think I would actually be able to accomplish all of this. It certainly seemed like a long shot when I first devised this scheme to force myself into re-examining my belonging and if I really needed everything or if I was just carrying around the same things from place to place with no thought. 

I’ve looked through my kitchen, through my closet, jewelry box, reading rooms, and holiday decorations and found 406 items that meant nothing to me. 406 items I had carried from house to house to house with no thought other than “I’ll need that some day” only the day never came and these things kept coming. With this last day I looked into some of the smallest things I have. The items you see in the picture below are the backs to earrings that I don’t have or haven’t had for a long time. Along with the random hardware in the middle which WTF were those things doing in my earring collection? Like seriously for over a decade I carried around these things that served no purpose. I’m so glad I had the time to sit down and go through everything this month. I also want to thank you guys for staying with me the whole time as this went down providing your support. It makes my attempts to go greener feel like they are the right steps in the right direction.

It was finally time to tackle the mess of papers in the reading room that my partner and I have carried with us from apartment to apartment in the last four years. We started cleaning them out and here are the initial results. 

I’m looking forward to this week! I’ve got some awesome work ahead of me at my job, my partner is heading into the second half of the school year, my son is doing well at school and has a spirit night this week, which means fast food! I was able to save up this past week to go out, eat some serious junk food, and visit family.

I’ve also noticed that the more I make a vegetarian centric menu with meat a one day a week splurge, the less I want to eat meat. For instance, this past week I grabbed a burger once and while the first bite was good, the rest was just so-so. I even had the thought “I should have just ordered extra fries and a milk shake it would have been a better use of my money”. This sort of astonished me as I’ve never really had that thought before. I think it’s coming from trying to be more financially and environmentally minded. Meat takes a lot of resources to bring to my plate and I either want the best of those resources (i.e. no hormones, grass fed, cage free, etc) than something cheap. It’s a real shift in my world view, and I think I can see my family slowly coming around to that perspective as well. 

 To Do:

Get to the gym twice this week.

Walk to get my groceries, and try to not buy anything packaged

Start my garden

I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to convince the kid to Konmari four boxes of his toys and the twelve items below are the result. While it was not a huge haul like mine have been, it did serve to reinforce that he has a lot of toys and that he doesn’t need to ask for a random toy when we are out and about.

We will sell some of the toys and pass others to our neighbor who has a 3 year old girl that loves playing with my kid’s stuff and who we’ve swapped toys with in the past. (I’m actually beginning to think most of our lego collection is actually hers that’s been left in lieu of payment for other toys taken).

My partner works in the school system so everyday they bring home more pens that three people could use in several lifetimes. So I went through our collection of pens and pencils to pull out a few to bring to work. At my job we have a post office and the one thing that always irked me was that there was only ever one pen available to fill out forms with. So during the course of my pen clearing out I reasoned that the mail room would be the best place to re-home these items, and I was correct because when I dropped them off this morning the pen pot was completely empty.