Personal clutter demons (long)

[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!