According to a survey I saw recently, 67% of people said that paper clutter is their hardest area to deal with. Who knows if this is truly accurate, but I'm going to assume that it means that a lot of people, possibly including you, are having trouble dealing with paper. I think there are a couple of fundamental mistakes that people make regarding paper: Believing that every piece of paper is important or has the potential to be important Believing that if a piece of paper was important at one time, it's important forever Not intentionally minimizing the amount of paper that … [Read more...]
Organizing Your Recipes for a Clutter Free Life
I'm sure that some of you have all your recipes on-line and (could it be?) don't have a cookbook of any sort in your house. Most of you, I know, have from some to many cookbooks plus a personal recipe file or binder. As I wrote last week, I have a couple of cookbooks, and I have a rather large recipe binder, which I use almost exclusively. My binder is not a thing of beauty; however, it suits me perfectly. I made it from a 4" binder, plastic sleeves, dividers, and colored paper, all of which I had in our office supply cupboard. My divisions are Poultry Beef Pork Vegetarian … [Read more...]
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom ~ How do you store your books?
Cindy's Weekly Wisdom Books are a collecting weakness of many people. I know that in my early 20s I dreamed of having a library - ideally one with a rolling ladder. Then I moved every year for four or five years and put that foolish idea behind me. Books are heavy! I've been a library user my whole life. I remember when I was a girl going to a particularly library that kept the Nancy Drew novels separate from the rest of the books - heaven! And I have clear memories of Library Period in elementary school. Back then, I read biographies of famous females. Annie Oakley, Mary Todd … [Read more...]
He’s been at it again
The night time declutter has been at it again. I woke up last Sunday to find seven magazines, pictured above, in the recycling bin. My immediate reaction was to retrive them and take a photo and include it as a daily decluttered item but then I noticed something. The dates on the magazines were all within the date range from when I started my decluttering mission. This ment that they were not part of my mission because they were just a maintenance clean up of things bought in the last 16 months. As you can see I took the photo anyway because they held a more important significance. The thing … [Read more...]
Day 200 Sharing publications
I happened to see 5 minutes of an old Bewitched rerun this morning on television before I went to work. It struck me as amusing that this episode started out with a magazine subscription seller coming to Samantha's door. Bewitched was filmed between 1964 and 1972 and even back then subscription sellers were harassing people to buy their wears. I lived in Seattle between 2000 and 2007 and I remember how sad it was that these companies ripped these poor people away from their families to locations thousands of miles away in the vain hope that if they sell enough they will climb to the next rung … [Read more...]
Day 191 One area of doom half sorted
I think I mentioned some time back that one of the areas of doom when it comes to decluttering my house is my daughters bedroom. It is mostly awkward because for now she is living elsewhere while going to university so that adds a degree of difficulty I didn't really want to deal with. It is not for me to decide what she wants to keep and I cannot be bothered sending long convoluted emails or wasting precious phone minutes to have her decide long distance. Luckily for me she came to visit the week before last and I warned her ahead of time that she was going to have to help me do some … [Read more...]
Day 132 Give Away – Throw Away – Sell
Today I am giving you a tally of what has been thrown away, what has been given away and what has been sold on eBay since the beginning of my new years resolution of 365 less things. There is an upside and a downside to this count though. The upside is that most of the items I have uncluttered from my home have either been donated to charity, given to friends or sold on eBay. As I have mentioned before the advantage to this is that they have gone to new homes where they have the chance of being used to their true potential. The downside is that the reason behind the fact that there has … [Read more...]
Day 85 Magazines by the pile
I bet there isn't one of you out there that doesn't have a pile or two of magazines somewhere in your home that have some really interesting articles, pictures, recipes... so you are reluctant to part with them. I know I do. I was an avid scrapbooker for some time while living in the Untied States and as magazines subscription are so cheap over there I didn't hesitate to have a few. As these are reference material they never really go out of date and I have often looked back through them when trying to came up with ideas when creating my scrapbook pages. Needless to say they do tend to pile … [Read more...]