I was digging in the archives of 365 yesterday looking for another post when I came upon this little gem. I decided to share it with you again because this strategy has proven useful, at times, in convincing my loved ones to declutter some things. I hope it will work for you. Recently I was let in on a strategy on how to state a case or perhaps even get another person to come around to your way of thinking without their sensibilities being offended. The idea is to get people to think rationally about a subject without them realising that you are leading them in a direction they may not have Continue reading
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom ~ Doing Christmas Differently Next Year
Cindy's Weekly Wisdom My girlfriend R stopped by my house two days before Christmas, looking mighty cross. She started spewing about how aggravated she was to be buying gifts for her many family members "just to be buying them something." Her family is Jewish, and they celebrate Hanukkah as well. She'd tried to tell her brother that they shouldn't exchange gifts, but his response was "Too late. I've already bought you something." In addition, they don't drawn names or limit giving to children, so everyone is giving a gift to everyone! R was definitely not feeling the holiday spirit. Here is Continue reading
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom – Alternatives to Gift Wrap
Cindy's Weekly Wisdom I am coming to the end of a multi-year Use It Up Challenge: To use up all the copious amounts of wrapping paper that I purchased on sale after Christmas like clockwork every December 27. TreeHugger has a great article on holiday waste and sites estimates of 4 million tons of wrapping paper and gift bags thrown away. My girl friend Corinna has made cloth bags that she reuses year after year. She does a lot of sewing and cloth crafts so my guess is that she was able to make these bags with remnants. Here are great step-by-step instructions; even a non-sewer can follow Continue reading
Mini Mission Monday ~ Get ready for Christmas
Mini Mission Monday is about finding ten minutes a day to declutter. To make it easy for you, each Monday I set seven declutter missions, one for each day of the week for you to follow. It takes the guess work out of decluttering and makes it easy and "fun" for you to achieve some quick decluttering. This week at 365 Less Things we are launching a preemptive strike on the Christmas/holiday season. Time to do some pre-holiday decluttering and organising so when you break out those decorations, the guests arrive and the presents are opened, there is enough room to accommodate them. The more Continue reading
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom – Decluttering Christmas
Cindy's Weekly Wisdom Please don't call me Scrooge, but I hate decorating for Christmas. In fact, I hate decorating for all holidays. To me, it falls under the category "another darn thing I have to do." So last year, I decided it was time to change that. I pulled everything out of the attic at one time. My hope was to get everything back into just the plastic bins and get rid of the boxes; that seemed like a reasonable level of reduction to me. I started early in December, wanting to be sure that anything that went to the thrift store had time to be resold before the end of December Continue reading