It is such a hard task these days choosing five and having to let the others go. I would hate anyone to miss the great wisdom that my readers have to offer but there has to be a limit.

Marilyn in NM in response to Mini Mission Monday – Once again, these missions are great! I’ve gone through the bookcase… Read More

Annabelle in response to Reduce Reuse Recycle – I volunteer at a local thrift store; and more than 90% of the stuff we are given is TRASH… Read More

Kelley in response to Reduce Reuse Recycle – I love this post! I am packing for a move later this month… Read More

Meg in response to The Black Hole – Hi guys–my black hole used to be the big island between the kitchen and dining room… Read More Here is a link to Meg’s beautiful clear Island – Minimalistcook – Living-with-an-uncluttered-kitchen

Melissa in response to The black Hole – I do have a black hole….I just can’t find it!… Read More

This weeks favourite five post I read or blogs I have discovered this week.

Raptitude – How-to-make-trillions-of-dollars

The Uunblogger – Dogging-the-wag-putting-my-blogospheric-imagination-in-its-proper-place

Becoming Minimalist – 8-essentials-for-a-successful-marriage It is worth it just to take a minute to look at the lead photo in this post. It made me smile to see their joy.

Minimalist Cook – Getting-to-the-bottom-of-leftover-condiments

Modminimalism – Check out this new blog it promises to be very useful indeed.

Today’s Declutter Item

I don’t need coupon folders any more because Australia doesn’t do coupons like they do in America. Pity about that but since I don’t shop much any more it doesn’t matter.

Things I am grateful for today

• I am not my neighbour two doors down – it got to 43°C again today and their air-conditioner isn’t working.
• That the Cyclone that hit the North Queensland coast wasn’t as destructive as they feared – It is heading inland now which is a bit odd because they usually die out once they hit the coast. Let’s hope it peters out before it get too far because homes aren’t built to cyclone standards in there.

• A game of scrabble with some neighbours – I lost of course but that is partly because I refuse to use words I have never heard of and because I just like to play games and don’t care whether I win of lose.
• I am grateful to all the lovely readers that leave comments for Cindy and me – it really spurs us on to our next posts and even inspires posts on a regular basis.
• A book borrowed from a friend that has great historic photos of the city where I live – It is only a lone and will be going back once I’ve had a good look.
  

It matters not how fast I go, I hurry faster when I’m slow.

In some ways digital clutter seems to me to be the opposite in character to physical clutter. Let me explain myself.

Physical clutter is clearly a problem that you are all reading my blog to get tips and tricks on clearing. It is obvious what it is, and we know we can have some trouble convincing ourselves to remove it regardless of our desire to be free of it. It is the stuff that lingers in our home even though we no longer use it, need it or love it. We stash it away in any empty space we can find. There is no escaping it though because even if we can’t see it we know it is there.

Then there are the everyday items in our homes that we use/admire/enjoy regularly. These are the alive items mentioned the in last weeks post – Is your stuff alive or stagnant.  If we could just narrow down our belongings to the items we see and use every day we would be happy right?

Well to me digital clutter kind of works the other way. For example, there are text files, photo files, recipe files, DXF files, old emails…  that I refer back to occasionally maybe even rarely in some cases but because the space they take up fits neatly in a tiny little external drive I am more than happy they are there in case I might need them some day.

Now Blog  feeds and email subscriptions that I read every day are a whole different story. Essentially, they are my everyday digital  items equivalent to my everyday household items I mentioned above. I like to read them for various reasons not the least being that they often give me inspiration to write my own post and absorb the information contained within to expand my intellectual horizon. BUT my goodness do they clutter up my day.

Summing up what I am saying here goes something like this…

Hidden Physical Clutter = Bad while Hidden Digital Clutter = Good

Physical Everyday Items = Good while Everyday Digital items = Bad

I had my doubts about admitting this because I would hate for you my lovely readers to see this and think – “Yes you are right” and delete 365lessthings from your email/blog feed subscriptions. I just wondered if anyone out there had come to the same conclusion. Do you spend too much time in your day reading all those blogs you just can’t live without?

Today’s Declutter Item

I found a new owner for these silver cake forks through Freecycle. It was a challenge. There were plenty of people who wanted them but they sat on the door step for a week waiting for the first guy to collect them. I gave up onhim and offered them to another lady who was more punctual and grateful.

Things I am grateful for today

• Having success with a new vegetable curry recipe today – The men about the house were impressed so it must have been good.
• Having the car today – I had so many errands to run and I got at least half of them done . There’s always tomorrow.
  
• A swim with a friend at the baths on the beach yesterday – It was such a hot day and the water was so refreshing. It was also nice to catch up with my friend.
• Finding a new good place to eat
• Digital technology (Regardless of what I said in today’s post) – It has freed up space once needed to store music, photo albums and paper files just to name a few.
  

It matters not how fast I go, I hurry faster when I’m slow.

Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom

Black hole – In astronomy- an object so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitation.  In modern usage – a place where things get lost; a place or thing into which objects disappear and are not expected to be seen again.

Do you have a black hole in your house? I bet you do. Maybe it’s the kitchen or dining room table, the chair in your bedroom, your desk, or the bench by the front door. It’s the place in your home that attracts everything that comes into your house and once there is difficult, if not impossible, to re-home.

I have a friend who believes that every single counter or shelf in a house is a black hole, waiting to happen. His ideal house (so he thinks) includes no horizontal surfaces. I guess he’s going to store his underwear in a pile on the floor. For the rest of us, we have counters and shelves and probably appreciate their utility, even if we don’t always appreciate their tendency to attract clutter.

We have a bench by the front door that is the first line of defence against clutter. It stays remarkably clear, holding only the girls’ backpacks and string instruments. I think it doesn’t get cluttered because once the backpacks and instruments are on the bench, there’s not even room for a dust bunny to hide.

But what makes it past the bench to the island in the kitchen, well cue the scary music. We have a big island, a beautiful island, a cluttered island. When I wrote this post it contained the following items, only a few of which actually belong on it: folder, ball of yarn, small pile of papers, clean wine glass that belongs to my Mom, jar of cat treats, watch with broken wrist band, bowl of fruit, bowl of decorative little pumpkins, spray bottle of water (neatly labeled “hair drawer”), two bags of Halloween candy, hair brush, diabetes kit, laptop and power cord (in use), 3 prizes from Halloween party, 4 pieces of mail received today, a bracelet. Yikes! (Note: This column was written in October. The Halloween stuff isn’t still there in February; there’s new clutter instead.)

At our house, we combat the black hole that is the kitchen island by re-homing objects once or twice a week. I quickly pile everything up according to owner and in a scramble, it’s all whisked away, although I would prefer it didn’t land on the island in the first place.

How can we avoid black holes? The bench seems to offer one clue. If the surface is just the right size for our purposes, then extra doesn’t have a place to hide. But since our goals and desires change frequently, and we can’t buy a new piece of furniture to exactly accommodate each change, right-sizing is probably not a realistic solution to most clutter problems. However, if a new furniture purchase is in your future, consider your needs when selecting the new table or shelf. Bigger may not be better.

My friend Julia suggests putting a large plant or other object on the problematic surface. I think this would only work if the black hole was small enough to be mostly covered by the plant; otherwise, I fear you’d just be adding a plant to all your other clutter. But if your black hole is a small one, a large decorative item might help.

I think the solution with the greatest likelihood of success is this one: A place for everything and everything in its place. You walk in and drop the mail, your purse, keys, and sunglasses on the table because that’s their home, even if you don’t want it to be. Find another home. Get a key hook for the door, reassign your purse to your bedroom and put your sunglasses inside. The mail needs a place on your desk. When you shop, put your purchases away, promptly. If they don’t have a home, should you have bought them? If yes, then make a home. Now, before the table becomes their home.

Still feeling the pull of the black hole? Desperate times call for desperate measures: Can you cover the table with a cloth or crumpled newspapers – anything to remind yourself “Danger! Black Hole Ahead!” Perhaps you could lay the table on its side until the gravitational force dies out? If the black hole is a chair, can you get rid of it or move it to another room until your break your black hole habit? And if the black hole is a table in the dining room that you don’t use except to store clutter, is this the best use for this room? Maybe you should get rid of the table all together and add something to the room that you really will use and enjoy. It’s your house. Just because the real estate brochure said it was a dining room doesn’t mean you have to use it that way.

Where is your black hole, and how will you be fixing it?

Written by:- Cindy Bogard

Today’s decluttered Item

And the items just keep on coming. This socket set is excess to our needs and was sold on ebay for $10.50.

5 Things I am grateful for today

• Google Calendar – Life can get very organised with this little internet tool.
• I am finally getting ahead with my blog posts – hopefully I will need to scramble less in future and not make so many typos etc.
• That none of my readers point out my bad spelling, typos, grammar, and bad sentence structure – Thank you lovely readers.
• That I am not employed outdoors – The temperature reached 43°C today that is 109.4°F my friends. Youch!
• T-Bone roast for dinner – This is a T-Bone  steak cut at about 2 inches thick and roasted for one hour on 200°C with potatoes, sweat potato, pumpkin, carrot and onion in the same pan. Yum! How outrageous Sunday dinner on Tuesday night. 😆

One of my golden rules for decluttering is…

Don’t waste it just because you don’t want it.

There is no doubt that during the course of decluttering your home you are going to have to deal with what to do with all the items you are getting rid of.  We have spoken quite a lot over the last thirteen months on how to go about rehousing items but it never hurts to refresh our minds of these details.

On my page Give away-Throw away – Sell – Use up, I list what became of all the 365 items I decluttered from my home during 2010. I will use the info from that page here to explain what was involved in the disposal of these items and other methods that you could utilise to achieve the same result. The title of each topic speaks for itself but there is more to some of them than meets the eye…

Give Away (237 items)

Thrift Store – Most were taken to my local thrift shop where they were more than happy to take them off my hands. Now the thing with thrift shops is that they can’t take everything, and you really should speak to them first to make sure you aren’t just adding to their rubbish removal costs. Even when we think an item is still usable there maybe a health or safety reason why thrift stores can’t take these items for resale. Please click on this link to read about how some charities in my area are pulling their bins because of this problem and because some people just abuse the system.

Freecycle – Because of the inconvenience of having to arrange the pick up I generally only use Freecycle to offload the items that are not suitable to give to the thrift store. For example I have had three separate baseball card give-aways because baseball isn’t popular in Australia and these would just be a burden to the thrift store. I also had a lamp that required rewiring that one lovely lady was happy to take away because her son was an electrician. Once again this item would have been useless to the thrift store.  I have also given away a couple of American voltage electric appliances that people were happy to run from a step down transformer. As you can see these would not only have been useless to donate but also difficult to sell.

Friends – I have also given away about a dozen things to friends who were glad to have the use of them. In some cases the item would have had to be purchased new had I not been able to step in and help. My friends soon learned to see me before running off to the store.  We are doing each other a favour here and I thank them for taking the items off my hands.

Other Organisations – I managed to find homes for all of my 237 items just using the three avenues mentioned above but there are many other organisations out there that would be glad to accept donations. Scout groups I am sure would be happy to take camping equipment, schools would be glad of the generous donations of craft and stationary items, sporting clubs can always use extra equipment. Just use your imagination and I am sure you will find someone happy to re-purpose your unwanted stuff.

Sell (58  Items  sold on eBay at a total of $1533.65)

On-Line – Although all of the items I sold were sold on eBay there are other online selling options that you can chose from such as Craigslist.

Newspaper – You could advertise to sell in the classified section in your local newspaper. This is a good option if you have items that are too big or cumbersome to sell on eBay. Although eBay and the like do have a pick up only option that targets local shoppers I think you may find a bigger audience through using a non-online selling venue. In Australia, we have an online/local newspaper combo selling option called the Trading Post that I am going use to try to sell some musical instruments soon. I will let you know how that pans out.

Notice Boards – I don’t know if you have ever seen notice boards in your local shopping centres where people paste up photos and contact details to sell, rent or give-away items. I have seen a few in my area perhaps there is one in yours.

Garage Sale – I have had several garage sales in the past though none of my 365 things were sold this way because I was purging slowly and did not want to store the items until I had enough for a garage sale. One thing to remember with garage sales is that you have a very limited audience, and they are looking for a bargain but if you were only likely to donate the stuff anyway then you could end up with a few hundred dollars in your pocket instead.

Market Stall – This is much the same situation as a garage sale but you have a larger audience and have to haul the stuff to another location to sell. Like garage sales I have had great success in the past offloading my stuff this way.

Use Up (Only 3 items of my 365 were declutter this way)

Even though 3 is a very small quantity over the year there were many other items that were used up that I didn’t include. Items such as clothing that wore out that I didn’t replace and cleaning items that I didn’t like that I persevered with rather than cluttering up my cupboards with a duplicate in another brand. As you in know I call this Natural Progression Decluttering. I really hate waste and I would rather find a way to use something up rather than throw it away because that is a crime against the environment in my eyes.

Throw Away (67 Items)

To me this quantity (67) seems like far too many but it isn’t as bad as it looks. I scanned back through my records on my Google calendar to find out what was among these 67 items. Some of them were sent to be recycled such as paper products like old magazines, files and boxes while many of them were items that were simply used beyond there usefulness, just plain old worn out, rusty or perished in some way. There was nothing thrown in the trash just because I was too lazy to deal with it and that should never be the case for anyone. If an item still has use in it please please find it a new home.

Today’s Declutter Item

Today we have another mystery item which fetched $10 on ebay. Actually they are parts to an old wood plane.

Things I am grateful for today

• Getting through the housework quickly – So I could go out for a coffee with a friend.
• That it cooled down before we went for our afternoon walk – I would also be grateful if these 35°C plus days would go away for the year.
• Space in the freezer to put the water bottle for a quick cool down.
• Online product reviews – My stab blender is dying and I want to be sure to get a replacement that will perform admirably.
• Having fun with my guys – They are a pair of mischievous devils but lovable ones. (I speak of Steven my husband and Liam my son of course.)
  

It matters not how fast I go, I hurry faster when I’m slow.