ITEM 120 OF 365 LESS THINGS

This grooming set is a prime example of where communication is important when it comes to not cluttering up your home.

I assumed that this was a gift to my husband from perhaps his grandmother and therefore  had sentimental value as well as being functional. This week on a whim I took them out of the laundry cupboard and asked my husband if he still wanted them. His response was “No I don’t,  I thought you used them”.

So they have been sitting in cupboards moving from one house to another for heaven knows who many years and nobody has used them in all that time. Needless to say they won’t be residing in our house any longer.

It just proves the odd little saying – ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME.

Here is another area in your home that needs to be gone through on a regular basis to avoid the clutter of unnecessary paperwork that has become irrelevant over time.

Firstly all warranties and manuals should be stored together in a safe place where they  can be easily located should a situation arise where it becomes necessary to refer to them. We keep ours in a hanging file box in the bottom of our linen closet with other documents such as lease/phone contracts, vehicle registration info etc.

Over time these documents become redundant, warranty periods expire and  you no longer own items that you are still holding manuals for. Therefore the paperwork becomes clutter taking up valuable space.

I suggest visiting these files once a year to weed out the documents that are no longer relevant and dispose of them. I am considering scanning the manuals so I can dispose of them altogether but that is a project for another day.

I went through my file today and found a small batch that have become unnecessary because of the culling process we are going through with our 365lessthings project. I will not be photographing these and adding them to the list of 365 because I have so many other things to document at the moment that I just can’t be bothered with this one little thing but I am glad it is one more area of my home that is uncluttered.

ITEM 119 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Todays’s item is one of those things that in my opinion is just made wrong. It feels too small and compacted making it uncomforatable to use so in the garbage is goes.

Just thought I would share a little story about some cheap luggage we once owned and how we off-loaded it.

My mum bought us a set of luggage and the first time it did the cycle through the airport wheels fell off and things broke. We only used them one more time and that was as excess baggage when we moved to America. They then got stuck in a cupboard until the first unsuspecting visitors came over to stay with us.

Since America is a great place to shop the visitors had a lot more stuff to take home than their suitcases could carry  so we gave them one of our dodgy ones to take their excess stuff home in. After a couple more lots of visitors came and went we were rid of the entire set of luggage and went out and bought some better ones to replace them.

I have  a couple of tips I will share with you about buying luggage and this comes from experience.

1. Do your homework before buying new luggage and buy a brand that has a good reputation of producing quality product.
   
2. Don’t buy suitcases that when full of clothes will weigh more than the standard baggage allowance per case unless you like paying the excess weight fee.

ITEM 118 OF 365 LESS THINGS

With air travel in mind this remote control chopper is today’s offering to the 365  things I hope the little boy I gave it to has lots of fun with it.

I finally got all the snow clothing out of the cupboard on the weekend (one of those jobs I have been avoiding) and put it all on eBay.  All that is except the pair of men’s pants that had a hole in the leg and a ripped lining – I don’t know why I hadn’t already tossed them out- and 2 pair of goggles that the foam fining had perished while stuck in the cupboard unused.

The auctions are going well 5 out of 10 things already have bids on and anything that doesn’t sell will be going to the thrift shop.

While writing this I realised that I forgot to put the other pairs of goggles on eBay so I had better take care of that shortly. I think there may be another jacket in my son’s closet as well so I have better check that out.

That certainly freed up some room in one cupboard.

I don’t know why I had been avoiding this job for so long but it is a good thing I decided to do it now because Australia is about to move into winter and the ski season will be starting soon so now is the perfect time to put ski gear on eBay. That is a good tip to remember – Consider the seasons when selling on eBay some things will sell better at certain times of the year.

ITEM 117 OF 365 LESS THINGS

These are the pants I had to toss because they were torn.

Today’s item is this rusty shower caddy.

How many of these items have passed through our home over the last 23 years I couldn’t say but it has been quite a few. I am yet to find one that didn’t go rusty after about 2 years. There must be one out there in the market that is made of a substance that doesn’t perish  with such monotonous regularity.

I know they only cost about $20-$30 but I’m stingy and I expect more for my 30 bucks. So I have come up with a cheap alternative to this design. I have purchased 4 plastic coated hooks with screws on the end at a grand total of $2 and I have screwed 2 of them into the bottom of my shampoo and conditioner bottles and hung them upside down on the edge of the shower screen.

The beauty of this design apart from the $2.00 price tag is that the liquid in the bottles is constantly in the ready position, that is since they are hanging upside down the liquid is always nearest to the exit hole so it is as simple as flip the cap and out it comes.

I will keep you posted as to how well this invention is working but for now I am quite happy with the result.The other items that used to reside on the old shower caddy were my razor and a comb for applying conditioner to my hair. The razer is also hanging over the edge of the shower screen and the comb is sitting in the channel above the door of the shower which works quite will.

I might add that the shower in question is very small and this new hanging method has freed up a Little moving room as well.

My posts from day 110 and yesterday got me thinking about a combination of the basis of those two subjects., oversized homes and unnecessary cars. What about unnecessarily large cars.

How many people own cars far greater in size than their everyday needs. When we lived in America we owned a V8 Mustang and a seven seater van. We loved both these cars, the Mustang because, well it was a V8 Mustang convertable, who wouldn’t and the Van because whenever we had visitors from Australia this vehicle had enough room to fit everyone in and it was roomy and comfortable and handy to have when we needed to haul large items.

Not very good reasons for owning such terrible gas guzzlers. Instead of owning the big van we could easily have hired a similar vehicle when we had visitors or needed to haul stuff  which only happened maybe once a year if that. The little Chevy Cavalier we owned before the Mustang was far cheaper to run, more reliable and had one extra passenger space and didn’t bottom out on speed bumps.

Ah, the crazy things we do for vanity and convenience.

Now we own two motorbikes one is my husband’s one is my son’s and a small Ford Fiesta. That has not doubt reduced our cardon footprint to a much smaller size not to mention the savings in running costs.

ITEM 115 OF 365 LESS THINGS

The modern cars today have inbuilt security systems rendering the car useless when you don’t have a key to start them so this little item is of no use to me.

Last year we decluttered the garage by one whole car. Now I know you thought this post was going to be about cleaning out the garage and in a way it is because  we  made a whole lot more space by getting rid of one of our cars.

Granted this car was only bought because my husband had to work 500km away from home for almost a whole year and only came home every other weekend but never the less we could have kept the car for the convenience when he came back but we didn’t.

The money we have saved not paying for insurance, licensing (rego to you Aussies) and  maintenance alone never mind how much more we would have spent on petrol (gas) just because it was there and we could is insane. My husband rides a motorbike to work which is way cheaper to own and run than a car and I live about a 20 minute walk to my work so it is no effort to get there if my husband needs the car so it really hasn’t been difficult to manage without it.

I am sure we could even cope if my husband sold his motorbike too and maybe that is an option if I committed myself to using man power rather than horse power more often.

Choosing our home with a location convenient to shops and work has saved us a whole lot of cash because of the lack of the necessity for expensive travel costs.

ITEM 114 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Today’s item, a car sun shade was in the old car when we bought it and somehow managed to be left in the garage when we sold it I did attempt to find it useful at one point be kept forgetting to use it so out it goes

I read forums and posts on other blogs and I can’t help but think that people put themselves under too much pressure when it comes to decluttering. Below are a few suggestions I have to help release that pressure…

• The clutter didn’t appear overnight so don’t expect it to disappear overnight.
• Don’t look at the big picture it’s too scary sometimes.
• Pace yourself, there is no hurry.
• Don’t set a deadline.
• Save the hard to decide items until last. I find the further I get into this the more ruthless I become.
• Be rational, way up the pros and cons when it comes to what stays and what goes.
• One step at a time, whether that is one room one cupboard, one drawer or one item just so long as it is something at a pace you can handle.
• Give yourself a mental pat on the back with every item you send on it’s way.
• Stay focused on what you have achieved not the size of the task ahead.

One thing you must remember is to not replace the items you are getting rid of with some other thing that will soon become tomorrows clutter making your efforts useless because you are taking one step forward two steps back.

ITEM 113 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Following on from yesterday’s post there are always those gadgets in our homes that were made for one use but when you explore the possibilities there are so many other fuctions they can perform.

For Example, we own a coffee grinder, nothing unusual about that except that when I bought this item I sellected one that had a detatchable grinding bowl. The idea behind this function is to make it easy to clean but the reason I wanted this feature was so I could purchase a spare grinding bowl that I could use it to grind spices to make my own spice blends for cooking curries etc. I thought it was advisable to have a separate bowl for this so the strong spice favours wouldn’t taint the flavour of the coffee.

I have since found several other uses for this extra bowl such as whipping  small quantities of cream, making bread crumbs and grinding nuts for a cake recipe. I am sure that I will discover many more uses as time goes by but already I am very happy with the functionality of the object.

If anyone out there has a similar story of a gadget they have found an “outside box” use for I would love to hear about it so I can share it with my readers and maybe we might all learn to get more use out of some of the items we own and possibly eliminate the need for other items that only duplicate the same function.

ITEM 112 OF 365 LESS THINGS

As I am clearly not about to part with my coffee grinder this pair of GP boots is today’s contribution to the 365 less things

The word gadget alone conjures up images of items with more of a novelty factor than any real practical use and for the purpose of this post it is meant to do so.

How many things on your “really don’t need or use” list come under the Single Function Gadget title. For example, my contribution for today to my 365 things are a set of plastic ice cubes. I am sure they were bought for their novelty factor but after using them both to keep liquids cool and in an icepack I really didn’t feel that they radiated the cold as well as the real thing.  I could find no science to back up my claim here but never-the-less I don’t find them useful and they are out of here.

Another thing I found quite useless are those silicon cup cake baking cups. What a pain they are to get clean. I soon went back to using the disposable paper cups.

If anyone out there has a product that they have found to be next to useless please contact me and I will make of page of  Single Function Gadgets as a warning to other innocent consumers.

ITEM 111 OF 365 LESS THINGS