Personal clutter demons (long)

[SlowButSteady]

My home (and office) are suffering. And it's driving me nuts...has been for years.

Everything is so cluttered. I have difficulty throwing things away and organizing my living space. We do have "open floor space" so we can walk through out house without having to hack a trail with a machete, but all horizontal surfaces are a mess. The dining room, well, we can't walk in there.

I have gone as far as to organize old clothes into bags--three each for men, ladies and boys clothing. Into one I put tops, another bottoms and another misc. Some of these things are new w/ tags and never worn. Some are designer names.

I have cd's, dvd's, all kinds of papers. Old electronics and small appliances. And books. Way too many books, and this with me bagging up a huge sackful of paperbacks about twice a year and donating them to Friends of the Library.

I have bought 3 books on conquering clutter and usually can't find them...because of all the clutter. My husband never throws anything away either and gets mad when I suggest we do something about this problem. He and my son are both slobs. I'm so stressed about it that I hardly ever go into their man cave any more. If we pared down our home/barn/possessions, we would possibly remove tons of stuff.

In the past I've donated items to the local Goodwill or Hospice stores. Get a receipt for my taxes (and promptly misplace it in the clutter). We don't have a local consignment store. Nearest city w/ upscale resale type stores is close to an hour away (in other words, too time-consuming to be worth it).

Has anyone here had experience w/ selling things on ebay or other on line resources such as craigslist? Is that more time-consuming than I need to fool with? Would it be possible to find an ebay seller who would be willing to do all the work and give me a cut? How?

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do? I think my SIL is going to come in 2 weeks to help with a purge

[Cataboo]

Periodically I do a clearance and set things aside to sell on ebay or craigslist... It really isn't that bad for the money you get. Just take a picture of everything and ebay has software called turbo lister that lets you create listings offline, and you can just duplicate listings, etc.

That being said, I've got a box full of stuff I've been procrastinating on.

As for clutter... I have a tendancy to clutter. It makes me feel better making sure that i have a certain number of rooms clutter free - so my upstairs I try to keep clutter free, and I can make all the mess I want downstairs...

I did recently buy a huge filing cabinet off craigslist... all my papers are currently in there, but I cannot claim that they are in any sort of order. that is for another time.

[sfa]

Keeping organized is a work in progress for me. Five or six years ago I realized that the methods in organizing books simply would not work for me--they are designed by people who are sensors, not intuiters (for anyone who goes by Myers-Briggs). In other words--those organizing systems work great for people who are organized. So I came up with my own "good enough" method of keeping the house relatively under control, while also realizing that I'll never have a home that looks like something in a magazine (and honestly, I wouldn't want it that way--anyone with lots of hobbies and interests is going to have clutter).

Number one rule for me: if it's too complicated to follow, I won't follow it. So I made simple rules--I open my mail above the recycling and dump all of the junk and catalogs into there immediately, then throw bills in a box next to the computer, and anything else goes in front of my place at the dining room table. I "file" bills and important papers by year, and that's it--I pile everything up for a year then stuff it all in a box, put the year on it and stow it in the attic. If I should ever really NEED something, I'd be able to find it. After seven years, I can toss the whole box. I tried to organize papers by type, but that only lasted about a month before I gave up. I'm a piler, not a filer, so this works for me. Same thing with papers coming home from school--each child gets a pile in the dining room and at the end of the year I keep the best stuff, box it up, and throw out everything else.

Other clutter: whenever anyone calls asking for donations of household goods or old clothes, I always say yes. Then I go around the house the night before they are due to pick stuff up and I put together a couple of boxes of things to give away. There are three places that call for donations regularly, and they each call about four times a year. This got rid of all of the old clothes, toys, household appliances, etc. over the course of a few years (oh, and the receipt goes in the box with the bills next to the computer, which is my dumping ground for anything I might need like that) You could probably get the same effect by eBaying it all on some kind of schedule. Don't think about it too much--just do it.

Books are my biggest problem, and so far I'm just not doing anything about it. I tried once to go through my shelves and get rid of books, but I only managed to eliminate about a dozen. DH went through his a couple of months ago and decided he was just going to get rid of 25% of his books, and he did! So now there's more space on the shelves for my stuff.

My house is still pretty messy, but not so messy that we can't spend a day going nuts cleaning it to the point where we're happy to have company over. There will always be piles of things in corners, and piles on the dresser, and piles on the desk by the front door, but they are at least relatively recent piles and a sign that real people live in this house, not magazine people with no hobbies!

Sarah

[Irulan]

One word: FLYLADY

www.flylady.com

You can take what you want and leave the rest ---but their system for eliminating clutter, and LEARNING HOW TO NOT CREATE MORE CLUTTER is totally awesome.

If you can get past the cutesy-ness of the program, it is really worthwhile to get the email reminders for a minimum of one month, and learn some of the new ideas.

They really target those of us who are overwhelmed by our clutter; or don't even know where to be begin when trying to get rid of things; they acknowledge the emotional aspects of clutter and give tips for that...

29 item flings rule.

I found this system very very helpful. It gives you really small chunks of things to do so it's not overwhelming at all. I really like this, as compared to the weekend long purge that leaves us exhausted emotionally and physically.

I give a thumbs down to craig's list or Ebay. Why? Getting things ready to go on sale or waiting to get the right price is just another excuse to keep it hanging around. One of the things I learned from Flylady it to either Goodwill it, or throw it away. And don't keep those Goodwill bags hanging around either.

[HappyTexasMom]

One word: FLYLADY

www.flylady.com

+1

We've loosely followed Flylady on and off for years now. Our house is not where I would want it to be, but it's better than it was, and without Flylady it would have been worse instead of better.

For me a huge thing is dealing with things as they come in, as I'm bad about putting stuff to the side "for later". I'm far from perfect at it, but a lot of crap that comes through the door gets circumvented (junk mail, and wrappings from things we buy comes to mind).

[Grits]

There are shipping places here (Ship On Site) that will list things on e-bay for you. They will take the picture, post it, help you price it, and handle the sale and shipping for you. There is probably something similar where you are.

Something I have found helpful is to try not to tackle it all at once. Make a goal to do one thing a day. Tomorrow you could take the bags of clothes to Goodwill or some other charity. Or take the designer clothes to a consignment shop. Sometimes I end up giving stuff away just because of the hassle factor of selling it, and I need to get it out of the house!

[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.