Here are some questions to ask yourself if you have a lot of nicknacks adorning your home. Usually a home full of nicknacks also has additional furniture to house those nicknacks. Pedestals and little tables for them to sit on, china cabinets and bookshelves crammed with them, open 3D frames hanging on the wall containing more tiny bits and pieces. Just the thought of it all makes me wheeze and sneeze. So here are my questions... How important can each and every item possibly be to you when they are crammed onto shelves where you can't even see half of them because they are hidden … [Read more...]
The easy things to declutter
In order to write this post today I took a look back to Day 64 of my declutter mission. This was the day that I first began to blog about my resolution to declutter 365 things. Since then I have often written that the simplest way to begin decluttering is to start with the easy things. Looking back on the photos and list of items I had decluttered prior to blogging proves that this is exactly what I did. Many of these items had never been used, hadn't been used for a long time, I didn't like for one reason or another or I had too many of. The items came from places all over the house, from … [Read more...]
Never Satisfied
Have you ever been in a relationship with a person who was just too hard to please. Someone that no matter what you gave them it was never enough. Your time, your effort and your hard earned money all wasted in vain, that person were never satisfied. You even went into debt buying the things they wanted and they would to be happy for a short while but then it was back to wanting something else. The stuff you gave them accumulated leaving you with the task of taking care of it or cleaning around it, a constant reminder of your foolishness. Was this relationship worth the effort? Was it … [Read more...]
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom ~ Organizing to Declutter
 Can organizing help you declutter? The tidier your stuff is, the more you can pack into a small space, that's for sure. But we all know that's not the same as decluttering! Nonetheless, organizing can help you declutter in a number of useful ways: When you gather together like-with-like to organize it, it's easy to see and find your duplicate (triplicate!) items. You can either give one of them away or have a use it up challenge, whichever is appropriate. When you decide that all your books must fit on the bookshelf in the traditional up and down style, then you must declutter … [Read more...]
Deprivation
Since I have brought us back to the subject of being open minded, now seems as good a time as any to write a post about our state of mind when it comes to stuff. I was reading a post this morning, which I will link to on Friday, and one quote really stood out for me... "Most of us have so much – much more than the majority of the world at least (and more than our primal ancestors ever dreamed of), yet we live with a misplaced sense of deprivation." ~ MARK SISSON This statement puts into words something I wonder about often. I think about it from all aspects. There is the "Have" side … [Read more...]
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom ~ Doing Christmas Differently Next Year
Cindy's Weekly Wisdom My girlfriend R stopped by my house two days before Christmas, looking mighty cross. She started spewing about how aggravated she was to be buying gifts for her many family members "just to be buying them something." Her family is Jewish, and they celebrate Hanukkah as well. She'd tried to tell her brother that they shouldn't exchange gifts, but his response was "Too late. I've already bought you something." In addition, they don't drawn names or limit giving to children, so everyone is giving a gift to everyone! R was definitely not feeling the holiday spirit. Here … [Read more...]
These are only so many hours in the day
We all know there are only so many hours in the day. How many of them do you want to spend… ...looking for things you need but can't find among your excess stuff. ...looking for things you didn't put away where they belong. ...choosing what to use or wear among an overabundance of stuff. ...moving things in order to clean your home. ...running around like a mad thing cleaning up every time someone is coming to your home for a brief or long visit. ...dusting trinkets that aren't even really that special to you. ...struggling to make things fit into, what ought to be, your more … [Read more...]
Change with the times
Many a time when I have put together the Monday Mini Mission posts I have included a mission about adjusting your possession to reflect your current situation. I mostly relate this to changes in locality, particularly ones that includes a climate change. For example thick winter jackets become clutter were you move to a warmer climate. I am very familiar with this concept having been through this process several time during the somewhat transient nature of my twenty five years of marriage. There is another perhaps even more radical change that families go through that warrants some serious … [Read more...]
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom ~ Don’t Over Buy
Cindy's Weekly Wisdom At the end of every school year, I volunteer to take home all the lost and found from my daughters' school. I look through it, sort it, wash it, fold it, and give it to charity. The amount of lost and found (or as the Head of School calls it, "Lost and Sometimes Found")Â is absolutely amazing. Â At the end of this school year, I had 20 expensive metal water bottles (one still had a clear $25 price tag on it), a dozen lunch bags in good condition, probably 50 items of clothing worthy of the thrift store, and 5 or 6 coats, including one very nice Columbia brand … [Read more...]
My garage declutter
My husband and I had a garage decluttering session the weekend before last. Let me just say that the garage gets regular attention as we get more and more ruthless with our decluttering. It is also the holding area for the items decluttered from the house ~ prior to trips to the thrift store and ebay auctions and for those procrastination items awaiting decision ~ so the landscape is constantly changing out there. There are also items that have been stored there for some time that, if we are to be honest with ourselves, are really just "I might need/want it someday" items. Some of those items … [Read more...]