Personal clutter demons (long)

[channlluv]

+1 on Flylady

I did it for a while until I couldn't handle the volume of email anymore. My house is still pretty cluttered - it was hard to fit in all that daily maintenance cleaning in with the three part-time jobs and child's after school activity schedule.

The one thing I picked up from Flylady, though: If it's not blessing you, let it bless someone else.

That one statement awoke my inner Altruist and made it so much easier to let go of clothes, furnishings, baby gear, dishes, kitchen gadgets, and over a decade of accumulated stuff. I took eleven pick-up truck loads of stuff to the local battered women's shelter. They help women start lives anew, and I had some pretty good stuff that could make it easier.

My mother cringes when she thinks of me giving away what was probably tens of thousands of dollars' worth of stuff - she's a total packrat collector - but man, it was so freeing.

I realized how anchored we are by material things. Or how much I was anyway.

If it's not blessing you or your family, let it bless someone else, and then don't think about it again.

Regarding the paper, yeah, I open my mail over the recycling bin, too. I've also moved most of my bill paying online. I don't get a whole lot of paper mail anymore that really requires my attention.

Roxy

[Trek420]

I'm awful at house cleaning but pretty good with clutter.

All rooms have an "out box" which gradually moves downstairs and into the box by the door. Anytime I'll be going by Goodwill, Magic Johnson Thrift store, American Cancer Society Thrift Store, Habitat for Humanity ..... the trunk gets filled.

I keep a list of what I donated.

Turbotax has a system that will calculate the value of items donated. Clearing the home ahead of the remodel and getting ready to move I donate a lot. It helps around tax time and if the items help someone else and a charity it's good.

[Zen]

I'm selling my house. I've got a boatload of stuff to go to the thrift shop. my realtor wants me to have a moving sale but I can't be bothered and would just as soon give things away.
I will probably get rid of more stuff out of the "keep" pile before I move.

My ex was a huge pack rat and it was disgusting. It's nice to be able to know where things are.

Will check out the flylady.

[Irulan]

dealing with clutter starts with why you hold on to stuff. You can Craig's list and Ebay all you want, but if you don't deal with how it got there in the first place, you won't get any traction at all. However you got it ( garage sales, hoarding, just-in-case, I'll need it someday etc) is what you have to deal with, or you'll be back here next year with a whole new pile of stuff that you'll be wondering how to get rid of.

[ShubieGA]

The clutter gets overwhelming for me too. It kept me from having people over, etc. Once I had to pack everything for a move, I either tossed, donated or gave away alot via freecycle (www.freecycle.org). Since moving, I have really been trying to keep up the cleaner look. I have friends over more often to re-enforce it. I have a a stack of boxes that I have not unpacked yet (occupying a section of the garage), and am finding I need less of what I brought along. With freecycle, you belong to an e-mail group in your area (hopefully possible in your location), and you post items to get rid of. Those interested, reply back, and arrange a time to pick up. I got my moving boxes free this way, and was able to provide others household items that were usable and needed by them, furniture included. And I too do not pass up the calls for charity pickups. It has helped! Good luck!

[Grog]

I was having similar thoughts yesterday. I find our clutter oppressive.

By the sound of it, our apartment is not nearly as cluttered as what you describe, but the closets hide a lot of stuff (in a not-so-organized way) and tackling it will take time. (And I won't even get started about my closet-full of stuff at my parents' house, 5000 km from here, which raises a whole other set of emotions and issues.)

I don't want to move into a bigger place/condo/house in the future and carry that stuff. Yet there are certain things we do "need" or could need, and do not want to buy again ($$).

I also don't bother selling things too much. It just makes me procrastinate. I have freecycled things, which was quick and painless: ski boots, a teapot, etc. Thanks to Emily_in_NC I now know about Bookmooch, and have "mooched" away a (small) number of books that I was positive I will never want to read again. I actually PAY money (for shipping) to get rid of things, and it makes me feel GOOD! This is the concept that 1-800-Got-Junk is based on: http://www.1800gotjunk.com/us_en/wha..._we_price.aspx

I agree with others that the key rule is to check VERY closely what comes into the house. The corresponding rule is to get one thing OUT for each thing that comes IN. I do not 100% live by this yet, but I've made some progress, in particular with clothing.

I'll look at Flylady as a preventive measure. I know I'm going to have to buy lots of clothes soon (finishing grad school) and I want to control the process more closely I'm afraid.

[emily_in_nc]

I probably wouldn't bother with ebay if you have a lot of stuff that needs to go quickly. I've been selling on ebay for several years now, and I can't manage more than about five auctions a week, and those are only the weeks where I won't be traveling and have time to deal with it, so it takes quite awhile to get rid of quantities of stuff. A few things that are of value are worth it, but not a household full of clutter.

Craigslist is relatively easy and free, quicker than ebay, but you still have to figure out times to meet buyers and correspond with them via email or phone, which takes time. And I've found quite a few who initially express interest just flake out and never call or email back a second time. That said, we sold some too-large-to-ship items like kayaks with great success on CL.

We're in decluttering mode too and are taking a full long-bed pickup truck load (with cap, filled to the roof!) to my in-laws to have a garage sale with them this weekend. They have a much better location for one than we do, and they need help hauling their clutter out of their basement, so it works out well. A lot of the stuff we'll be selling would not be accepted at the places we usually donate (tools, yard and garage stuff, construction supplies, etc), so a yard sale seemed like a good way to deal with a lot of stuff at once.

We donate clothes and household items to a local mission.

We're finding it extremely empowering to get rid of stuff we no longer need or use. It's so much easier to find the stuff we do have, the house stays neater, and since we're probably going to be putting our house on the market next year, the staging effort will be much less.

Good for you for taking the first step -- realizing something has to be done. Do be patient and don't give up; a change like this doesn't happen overnight. We've been working on seriously decluttering for about six months, and still have a long way to go, but we are seeing huge improvements. You will too!

[shootingstar]

Geonz, will only disclose 1 pic shot strategically of a clutter area. One of our shelves with cycling/outdoor bks. There also piles of cycling maps lying on top and he has somewhere a mini-box of more cycling maps that he collects wherever he visits. Sometimes they are marked up for certain purposes or for future reference (sometimes). printing off electronic version from Internet is sometimes truly awful since some municipalities shrink it to an unusable font/resolution or the opposite, on sizes bigger than legal size (Size of a small engineering drawing, sheesh. Engineers don't think of the general public when they produce their documents anyway.) Not the paper size that homeowners with printers would normally have.

[VeloVT]

I highly recommend David Allen's book "Getting Things Done." It's about productivity, not decluttering/organization, but I think many of the strategies he advocates are useful for reducing clutter as well. For instance, if you have a partner, make sure each of you has a work station, and mail/other items get put into the correct inbox, so you are responsible for your stuff and he is responsible for his stuff, and there's no random unassigned floating "stuff."

I also go through my closet/dresser every six months or so and come up with a bag to go to Goodwill or consignment (stuff that I don't wear but is in pretty good shape), and if applicable a bag to be trashed or made into rags.

I have sold a number of things on Ebay, but mostly it's been bike parts with very little wear. I usually set a fixed price a bit lower than I actually think the item is worth. All of the bike parts I've listed on Ebay have sold. Other items have been more hit or miss... I went through a ballet flat buying spree last summer and bought a few pairs of shoes that I realized after only 1 or 2 wearings weren't right -- I sold one on Ebay to a happy customer but the other wouldn't budge. If you're pretty sure what you have is marketable, it's worth the effort -- if you're not so sure, it can feel like a waste of time and listing fees.

When I "clutter", it's usually a sign of some emotional issue I'm avoiding. But that's just me .

[Cataboo]

Ebay fees for fixed price listings ahve gotten pretty cheap & you get 5 free listings a month now or something. I don't ebay anything that I don't think will sell. If it's a large item like a kayak or bike, it goes on craigslist... If it doesn't sell on craigslist, it might move to ebay, but I'm more likely to just list it again and again on craigslist and eventually it will sell. If you set the price low enough, it'll sell on craigslist quickly.

Smaller items I'm more likely to put on ebay as a buy it now or best offer, the listings last 30 days and I can just renew them if they don't sell. I basically will go through the ended listings, see who's had the same item & what they sold for - then I'll list at sort of the medium price for buy it now.

Electronics or books, I tend to just put on amazon marketplace. That works pretty well.

You guys inspired me to tackle my guest room closet. It has been my "returns" closet for the last year or so... Anything I need to mail back to bonktown, backcountry, wherever has been stashed into there. Steepandcheap/chainlove/bonktown moving to 30 days only for returns has pretty much killed any urge of mine to actually order from them lately - so that's been good for curing that "addiction" I watch those sites much less and I only buy if I absolutely know I need it.

So now I have a huge box of returns to go back & I just need to get packaging tape to tape it up & drop it off at UPS.

[shootingstar]

I took eleven pick-up truck loads of stuff to the local battered women's shelter. They help women start lives anew, and I had some pretty good stuff that could make it easier.

My mother cringes when she thinks of me giving away what was probably tens of thousands of dollars' worth of stuff - she's a total packrat collector - but man, it was so freeing.

I realized how anchored we are by material things. Or how much I was anyway.

If it's not blessing you or your family, let it bless someone else, and then don't think about it again. Roxy

11 truckloads of donated stuff --wow. And you weren't moving households?

I'm probably due for some material purging. When I moved from Toronto to Vancouver, I did sell off 40 books to other employees for $1 each. Gave away another 50 to a fundraising book sale for one of the church colleges.

Donated several bags of brand new fabric ends to a women's shelter/support service. I did used to sew and accumulated an extra box of brand new uncut fabric.

We no longer buy any knicknacks for home. Admittedly I vaguely cringe when we get one for a gift from others. We have more artwork than you can imagine, stuff he and I have bought from artists, paintings I've done and what his daughter had done in past few years and given to him as gifts. He won't throw it out..for obvious sentimental reasons, even though some of it I know she would write off by now, as purely experimental. I have discarded some of my own artwork..which confounds some family members.

And I have a ton of art supplies. I know for certain to whom I could give some of the stuff as well-appreciated gifts that would be used properly. But I'm hoarding the stuff since I know Muse attacks me at unexpected times in life.

In Canada, our tax laws don't allow claiming this type of hand-me down goods to charities for our personal tax saving purposes. So latter is not a motivator when we donate used personal goods.

He is neat but now it's problematic since he started up his own business. That requires some paperwork that must be kept even though he's highly disciplined going electronic as far as he can....which means more computer peripherals crowding about.