Personal clutter demons (long)

[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!

[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.

[sgtiger]

SlowButSteady, I have had similar issues with clutter. I'm a pack rat by nature and tend to accumulate stuff and it doesn't help that I'm a procrastinator too. I'm still working on my clutter demon but I've gotten so much better.

Here are the steps that worked for me:

1) Identify most common clutter traps. Find a system to deal with those, like sorting the mail over the recycle bin that someone else suggested, so that you don't add to the existing clutter. For me it helped to ask my neat freak friends about their habits and observe them in their homes.

2) Restrict what comes into the house. This may be hard to do since you're not the only one who's responsible for the clutter. And you've already mentioned that the other members of the family are resistant. You can't force anyone else around you into change but you can work to change yourself. Let them keep their man cave to do what they want with it. It's the one room that you don't get to criticize. Just ask them to keep the door shut to it and respect that you are trying to get the other parts of the house clean and to please not clutter out there anymore. Someone already mentioned that before you bring in anything into the house that you have to get rid of something first. That is a great idea. However for the clutter situation that you described, you might want to start with letting go of three things for every one item that comes in. Once you're into the maintenance stage you can do go down to 1:1.

3) In the beginning, work in 1' x 1' sections. It is overwhelming to take that kind of clutter as a whole, so work in small sections. As you get better you can work in larger sections. It helped me to lay down something that I could use as a border for the section I was working in, like an embroidery hoop or a small box with the top and bottom cut out. Sort the items by keep, throw out, and giveaway/sell. It helps if you have bags or boxes at hand while you sort. When you're done, you have to find a home for all the items that you've decided are staying. It was very difficult for me to do this in the beginning. My natural inclination was to put many of these items in a new pile in another part of the room, so the piles where just moving around. Ug! Sometimes the part of the house the items belonged is was so cluttered that there was no space to put them into without cleaning out that first. If that's the case put them into a box or bag and keep them in a place where you can easily pull them out once you're ready to organize that space. Plastic see through bins are nice because you can view the contents, but the cost of those can add up quickly if you need a lot of those. I used a lot of paper grocery bags since they can stand up by themselves and I could write down what was inside. Keep a container for each room or category of items. Keep like with like. It's so much easier to see if you have multiples of the same thing. I also kept a box for those items that belonged to Dh that was placed outside his explosion room and asked him to put those items away. If they stayed in the box over a week than I assumed that it was alright to throw out. I felt like that was a reasonable amount of time for him to either take care of it or pull the items into his man cave. I did make exceptions for the things I knew he would miss eventually and placed them into his space. That way it was on him if he couldn't find them: "I placed it on your desk, honey. What happened to it after that, I do not know." He never missed the items I threw out. He probably forgot he even owned them.

4) Or for a small space, such as a bathroom or linen closet , pull everything outside onto the lawn. And only bring back things you need or want to keep. For the items that are not a necessity, ask yourself when was the last time you used it. If it's more than a year or two then reconsider your decision to keep it. If you can't get yourself to part with some of those thing, put it into a box dated six months in advance. If you haven't used those items in that time, then chances are you don't need it. Get rid of it.

5) Before starting a new section, maintain the section you've worked on first. It takes getting used to but it's so much easier to do maintenance once an area is clutter-free.

Remember that it's easier to replace a bad habit with a good one than to break yourself from a bad habit cold turkey. If you find yourself feeling guilty or playing the shoulda, coulda, woulda mind game with yourself, that is the time to just do the thing that's on your mind instead of beating yourself up about falling into old habits. Another thing I do is to watch shows about dealing with clutter. They show homes that are way worse them mine which makes me feel a bit better about my mess. And are a reminder of what could happen if I let things go too far. I pick up tips in the process. My favorite is How Clean Is Your House produced by BBC. I don't watch it often, but every time I do, it makes me want to scrub down all the surfaces in my home.

[Geonz]

++++1 on the "stuff in organizing books is for people who are organized."


Flylady was way too much for me.

I've had people say they were going to try to help me get organized, but they always forgot. If I were organized, I would have reminded them, but that's the point. HOnestly, it wasn't self-sabotage. I can't tell you how many times I've found the evidence of a sorting system or memory system that I forgot I'd started. I do remember to clean out my dryer lint and pencil sharpeners... I think because they scream "fire hazard!" at me. (Or maybe because I'm a closet pyro and really want to collect it all and burn off all that clutter )

So, given that, For *me* craigslist or ebay would be too taxing on my lack of organizational skills. Keep track of pictures of the stuff? Ack!

However, if you don't like the clutter because it keeps you from getting organized... then organize the sale, get rid of the stuff, and keep your simplified life more organized. Simplicity has its value

So... I *do* somehow find a way to blog. So I started a "clutterblog" a.k.a. a "CLOG" after my brother's wedding end of May. It's inspired me to *start* cleaning several times and of course, if somebody wnated to join forces and mandate "No, you need a picture of the target area every Sunday night," hey, I'd be game because yea, abotu now (last posting was 7/5) it may die off... http://clog-theclutterblog.blogspot.com/

[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.

[PamNY]

If you saw my house, you wouldn't want my advice. However, since I do understand the problem, I will tell you that what works for me is defining a specific task: e.g., clean a particular closet or drawer.

I adore Freecycle, though you don't get a tax benefit and occasionally people don't turn up when they say they will. But it's wonderful for getting rid of "special interest" items and I've gotten warm thank-you notes which makes the entire process less annoying.

[melissam]

Great thread! I appreciate the Flylady link and its tips on decluttering. It's inspired me to address my work email Inbox this week. At the beginning of the week I had over 14000 messages, and now I'm down to 5, using the simple discipline of Put Away (File), Throw Away (Delete), or Give Away (Reply, I guess).

Next on the list is my work cube. Baby steps...

[Zen]

I took a huge laundry basket of clothes to the hospital auxiliary thrift shop today.
More will go, I'm sure.

[Dogmama]

Inability to throw anything away can be a sign of fear of being able to produce replacements. In other words, we don't throw stuff away because we have an irrational fear that we will be pushing a grocery cart someday. It makes sense in this economy that people would hang onto stuff too long.

My husband is a pathological pack rat. When his stuff starts to creep into the rest of the house, I shove it back into "his room" and shut the door. Hooray for doors.

"They" also say that if you have a closet full of...say shoes...you won't buy new shoes. So, you'll be stuck wearing those old clunkers that hurt your feet & went out of style 10 years ago.

I, too, monitor what comes in. But as somebody said, I'm not always in charge. I can make rules, though. I tell DH to pick what he wants on the bathroom counter. No, you don't get 5 different deodorants on display.

Now, of course MY STUFF is important. I NEED several different types of brushes, colors of nail polish, face creams (day, night and retin-a). You know the drill. Seriously, I do catch myself cluttering too.

My problem with clutter is that my mind is so busy, I need my surrounding to be very simple. Otherwise, I go into overload.

[SlowButSteady]

Thanks, everyone, for your input!

This morning I did a quick (15 min) horizontal surface purge--emphasis on books.

I took paper grocery bags--they will stand up and open by themselves and color coded index cards. On each bag I stapled a card with an authors name on it.

Sorted by

TOSS
KEEP
Fiction by Author name (resale on Amazon?) - nice hardbacks, read once
Nonfiction
Cookbooks

I am also using brown paper grocery bags with color-coded index cards to sort clothing for my local Hospice store.

This is my own system invention. Yay for me!

For next weekend, when my SIL and brother come, I have a goal of one specific room. I want to see the top of my dining room table again.

One thing I want to do before they come is maybe get some easy peel off adhesive stickers, again, color coded. Green for GO, Red for STOP (keep)??? I can do a quickie run through and apply stickers so nothing I want to keep gets inadvertantly tossed.

[Trek420]

Books: I go through those, the stuff I've read and will not read again I either take to a local used book store and trade them in which gets me .... yep, more books or drop them off at the local library for their book sale.

Excess sheets, towels I drop off at the Animal Shelter. They always need them for bedding.

If you have excess furniture here's an organization to donate to:
www.furniturebanks.org

This is mostly California but a ton of useful links:
www.stopwaste.org

[roadie gal]

I don't have a HUGE clutter problem, but I do tend to collect some stuff. One way that I've found to make myself get out that stuff to donate is to make an appointment with one of the charities that picks up from your house. Around here it's the Salvation Army or the MS Society. Once I've made a commitment to them I feel like I have to get the items out. I don't end up rethinking and putting them back on the shelves or in the closet.

I'm a terrible bookaholic, but about once a year I go through all of my books and ask myself if I'm honestly going to read that one again. If I can't say yes, then out it goes, either to a charity or the local library.

[Trek420]

The best way to get rid of the junk mail is not to get it in the first place. Disclosure some of these links are Bay Area specific:

www.stopjunkmail.org

[Dogmama]

The best way to get rid of the junk mail is not to get it in the first place. Disclosure some of these links are Bay Area specific:

www.stopjunkmail.org

Thank you!