Well folks I have spent the last two days hectically decluttering and organising for my friend and I have to say it was hard yakka (Australian for hard work). Call me strange but I really enjoyed it and was a little sorry to have to drag myself away so soon when there were still things to be done. I am very happy to be home with my husband though. And extremely grateful for my wonderful apartment that, considering I haven’t done my weekly clean for the last two Mondays’, was there to welcome me home looking tidy and cleaner than I expected. It will be Monday before I bother to do much in the way of housework because it still looks so good.
But I digress.
I really enjoy decluttering because of the space it opens up and the reduction in general cleaning it results in. However I also love to organise. I love the flow of it and the results and spending two days doing that has revitalised me as much as exhausted me. The only thing I regret is not taking before and after picks as I felt that was too much of an invasion of privacy. It is enough that I am writing about it without naming names. But I can assure you the transformation was nothing short of amazing.
My friend has been so open to the process and cooperated wholeheartedly. Although I have to remember that the pace I do things at is not the pace that most normal human beings operate under. I can be a dynamo in the relentless pursuit of a finish line. Which is ironic considering my own slow approach to decluttering. However my home, when I started my declutter journey, mostly consisted of hidden clutter where as my friend’s, although not a hoarder case, was in an obvious state of too much in and not enough going out, to the point of dysfunctional.
I am please to say that my friend can now begin to take a slower approach. Although I think she is keen to tackle a few more obvious jobs before truly slowing down to the fine tuning. And there is plenty of fine tuning to do. As I am now intimate with contents of her home, I will be sending her weekly missions to achieve.
Now let me tell you about some of the tasks I have tackled over the last two and a bit days.
I arrived in Sydney at about 3:10pm on sunday and my friend picked me up from the train station to go to IKEA. Her closet had fallen apart in the move and she needed another to begin the reshuffle. Once that was achieved, not so simple because the boxes of parts weighed a ton and we had to not only get them into the SUV but out again and into the apartment. I am glad she lives on the ground floor.
Before unloading a space had to be cleared in the bedroom which required the take down a reassembly of her bed which had structural integrity issues after her attempt to assemble it earlier. I also changed her mind about where the best spot was to place it in the room. Once this task was complete it was off to dinner. Once home again we decided to tackle the new wardrobe because there would be no time in the morning as she had to go to work. Job complete we had a nice hot cup of tea before turning in for the night at around 10:30pm.
Then, for me, it was up at 6:30am on Monday to welcome the new day as my friend left for work. Alone to face the monumental task my first full day was spent doing some serious fitting in of stuff still packed in boxes and plastic crates. Every room was cluttered with hastily placed loads of stuff and too much furniture to comfortably fit the space. As a result my first day was spent following a cascade effect style of organising. This had to go there before this went there, so I was going from one room to another putting things away and shuffling things about. It was a whirlwind of continual improvement and I was in my element.
Tasks ranged from unpacking boxes to deconstructing furniture that we had, the previous night, decided weren’t going to fit. There was also the washing machine to set up before doing a few, much needed, loads of laundry. There were items that needed cleaning before putting into place and some serious dusting to continually do in order to begin the new uncluttering life in cleanliness. I was given carte blanche to make any decisions on placement, although I did run ideas by my friend via text messaging. By the time my friend returned home there was already much more visible floor space in every room than when she had left in the morning. We then went out to dinner, but on our return there was a shelf full of items that decluttering decisions were now to be made on. She performed admirably with that task and yet another crate full of stuff was ready to go out the door. By which time I was about ready to drop. Fortunately navigating my way to the bed was much easier now.
Day two dawned and I was itching to get started on the craft room, it was still piled high with stuff however there was plenty of furniture into which to organise it. That isn’t to say that I ignored the rest of the house. Oh no, as the floor cleared in there, other possibilities opened up elsewhere and although I focused most of my attention in the craft room I deviated off on other projects here and there.
I arranged, rearranged, labeled, repurposed furniture and piled up a massive quantity of stuff for my friend to adjudicate on once she returned home for the evening. Fortunately, as I have mentioned before, my friend and I do very similar crafts, so deciding what was useful and what wasn’t was a fairly simple task, so no time was wasted procrastinating over what I should fit in and what I thought she would be willing to part with. The only interruption to my hectic pace was the cat who had decided that she would like extra attention and kept climbing into my lap whenever I sat to work. And sitting there wasn’t enough, if I didn’t pet her she would nip at me and gently stick her claws into  me. In the end she found herself at the receiving end of a gentle tap on her nose with a sheet of Halloween stickers, when her attention seeking actions got somewhat out of hand. Needless to say, when she fell asleep in the chair I wanted to work in I let her have it and fetched a dining chair instead as I was just grateful for the chance to work in peace.
The changes were obvious to my friend the minute she walked in the door. However there was that massive pile of potential clutter, I had amassed during the day, to be sorted through before the day was done. A home cooked meal and a bottle of sparkling rosé later and we were ready to tackle the task. I joked that this would have to be complete even if it took till midnight. She quickly made choices while I listen to her reasoning and assisted where I could. At one point she was deciding whether to set aside some free grocery store cooking mags when I gently chimed in with all the logic of the, then upcoming, Tuesday post titled ~ Why keep cookbooks. She soon agreed to this logic and threw them onto the recycling pile without even glancing inside.
This task was finally complete as the clock ticked closely to 11:30 pm, by which time I could barely keep my eyes open and thinking was a struggle. Â Two ibuprofen, some teeth brushing and goodnight wishes later I collapsed into bed, exhausted yet happy.
With much of what I needed doing done we had a more leisurely start to Wednesday morning. After much needed cups of coffee my friend cooked us a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried tomato. Then it was back to the task. Firstly I relocated a bookcase into the hall to be used as her transition point for future decluttering. She then packed another two boxes and two bags of clutter into the SUV to be later delivered to the thrift shop while I made a couple of trips to the recycling bin. This required climbing up onto the fence to compact the contents down with my foot in order to fit it all in. I was feeling a little guilty for taking up most of the precious little recycling space the apartment block was afforded. But it had to be done and I am sure no one else was in greater need of that space than we.
The next task was to rearrange some of the living room furniture in order to open up the space. Then while my friend unpacked yet another box into furniture in this space I helped buy wiping and dusting. And then the one box of kept items, from the previous nights sorting, had to be shuffled into the craft space before we called it quits for the morning in order for me to prepare for my journey home.
To be continued….
Today’s Mini Mission
Work on a collection of similar items so that you might be able to eliminate the excess and reduce the size container/piece of furniture they take are housed in. (I said I wouldn’t bring crafts into this weeks missions but craft is an area where I hope to achieve this this week. In fact I am hoping to eliminate one or even two small wheeled storage carts in the process.)
“If we do not feel grateful for what we already have, what makes us think we’d be happy with more?†— Unknown
It matters not how fast I go, I hurry faster when I’m slow
Subscribe by RSS