Cindy
Cindy’s Weekly Wisdom
Except for the garage, my home is mostly decluttered. Well, except for the garage and those few scary areas too intimidating to attack. One of these areas consists of several boxes of photographs and memorabilia. Another is the picnic basket I brought back from my Grandparents’ house after my Grandfather’s death. It is filled with photos and mementos that I had to have but have conveniently stored on the floor of my closet for the past seven years. Last, I have a deep drawer full of art, most of it framed, and some of it quite expensive. It was taken off the wall for the remodel and never rehung.
What happens when I try to approach these areas? In the case of the photos and the basket from my Grandparents, I just swerve around that area like it’s not even there and keep going on my merry way. In the case of the art work, I have twice taken it all out, stacked it all around the room so I could see it all at once, got the feeling of jelly legs, stacked it all back up, and returned it to the drawer. Two other times I have opened the drawer with the sincere desire to tackle it once and for all, squeaked in panic, and slammed it back shut.
Clearly, I am intimidated.
Since it’s been well over 100 degrees (35 C) for more than 70 days, there is no way I am going to work on the garage. I’m going to have to tackle these intimidating areas if I’m going to continue making decluttering progress.
I know how to handle the photos and memorabilia. It’s really the same way I handle everything else: one thing at a time, one decision at a time. I think it can be too hard to make every decision the first time through. On my first pass, I’ll get rid of duplicates (triplicates) of the same event, the same child doing the same thing, people I can’t even remember. If that hasn’t winnowed down the photos enough, then I’ll make a second pass and reevaluate. After that I’ll have to decide how I’m going to store them. Everything doesn’t have to be in a coffee-table worthy scrapbook. Sometimes a well labeled envelope in a box is good enough.
For the artwork, I have decided to get the girls to help me. My plan is to pull out one piece of art per day and with their help, decide 1)Â if we’re going to keep it and 2) where we’re going to hang it. Having their help and the weight of their often-strong opinions should help bring the fear factor down to a manageable level.
What’s intimidating you, and how do you plan to tackle it?
Today’s Declutter Item
Some more fabric gone to the thrift shop. It is good to be honest with yourself that you aren’t likely to use something and just send it on it’s way. One less thing cluttering up  the place and your mind for that matter.
More Fabric (Aspiration Clutter)
Something I Am Grateful For Today
Some days it is just good to have a day that is just ordinary. Nothing spectacular happening just calm and simple. Yesterday was one of those days and I am grateful for that. It was also a good day for blog comments, that kept me busy most of the day. Lucky Cindy does today’s post or it may not have happened. 😉
Old diaries were scary to me. I had a big box of “mementos” at my dad’s storage which we cleared out this summer. From the box I kept some photos that I took out of the big albums and some letters from family members. I tossed the albums and random junk, burned the pictures I didn’t want to keep and started looking through the journals. It didn’t make me feel good to be faced with my teen age angst all over again. I didn’t want to read them, I never did and never will, and I sure as heck would not want anyone else ever reading them, so I burned them all.
Finally. And I feel that much lighter for it.
Hi Cat’sMewo,
what a load of your shoulders that must have been. I was never one for keeping diaries so I have never had to face this issue. I could just imagine how embarrassing it would be to read what was written all those years ago. I know for sure I wouldn’t want anyone else reading my thoughts from when I was a teenager. I know that anyone with a real love for history would think it a shame to burn them but some history is meant to be kept secret.
I recently found “Cindy’s Most Private And Personal Stuff. Do Not Open If Your Name Is Not Cindy.” I read about 4 entries, said “No way!” (a bit more colorfully than that), and shredded the whole thing.
What’s intimidating? Certainly the CDs. Think a four figure number. It’s intimidating because I know it will take lots of time to go through. There’s a lot of emotional attachment. There is money I’ll never get back even IF I can let go of some things. There are CDs to be revisited because decisions need to be made whether they still have a meaning for me. There are songs to be put on the computer …. and so on!
And probably the worst thing: They are all in order, neatly stored in a cabinet with glass doors and I love to look at them. But I know they have to be sorted out because even if some clutter looks good to you it doesn’t necessarily feel good. I tackled the books quite a long time ago. I still have a lot of books (two bookcases) but now I feel fine about them again because I know I kept what I really wanted to keep, deal with new books by just not keeping them (unless I know I’ll read them again but that’s one or two books a year, I can cope with that), I’ll revisit the “keepers” from time to time when I feel the urge to do so but in general I devoted the space of two bookcases to books and feel good about it. I hope I’ll reach that status of a decluttered collection for my CDs, too. But I know it is quite a long term project 🙁
ps: for those who might think: Kindle! Itunes!! Library!!! I largely agree, but get quite some of the things for my work and they do come in physical form. So sorry, no easy way out for me.
Re: your last paragraph
That also only works if you have the money to invest. You still have to rebuy them, or spend the time and energy ripping digital copies to keep on your computer instead. It’s a great idea for *future* purchases but not so much to convert your current collection! (Why yes, I AM speaking from experience.)
Hi Ideealistin,
that is a lot of CDs and I can imagine your trepidation but just like any decluttering you only have to deal with one item at a time. Pick a CD any CD maybe just once a week(one a day if you are game), listen to it and make your choice, stay or go. Maybe you will keep them all in the end but if you just tackle one at a time you will get the decisions made quicker than if you just ignore them and hope they go away. Good luck!
I agree with Colleen. It IS a lot of CDs, and one at a time is the only way to make your way through. I also agree with Lynn (how agreeable I am!) that re-buying everything is not a good use of money.
I also wanted to say Colleen’s advice is spot on. One at a time, no more. I cannot express how grateful I am to have found this website and learnt that little piece of wisdom, which gives me the necessary incentive to move forward *every time* I feel I’m stuck (and not just with clutter 🙂 ).
Hi Ornela,
I am so glad that my blog has been a help to you. It is nice to know that what I am doing is making a difference in peoples lives. Thank you for your kind words.
For me the intimidating stuff is the plastic shoeboxes full of little things. Bookmarks, old notes, sticky pads, etc. Really, most of what is in them needs to be thrown out but that feels wasteful. So I ignore them. There are quite a few floating around though and I’m working on “horizontal clutter” right now – stuff on top of dressers, tables, desks, etc.
Save me from my stuff, ahhhh!
Lynn, I’ve gone through my share of boxes or bins filled with little things. They’re so…little. It takes a long time for not a lot of obvious reward. But I don’t agree that everything needs to be thrown away. All sorts of little office supplies can be donated. There’s a future home for nearly everything. If you get stuck on a specific item, let us know what it is.
Wellll I guess I am thinking of a couple of specific boxes where the stuff in them is honestly trash if I’m not going to keep it. It can’t be used up, someone else can’t use it and the best I can do is recycle (which I’ll try to do).
I’m sure there are some small boxes in the closet that have stuff I can give away but I’m staying far far away from the closet right now. Maybe that’s my real intimidating area, hmm…
I can so relate to this post Cindy. There are still areas in my home that I have managed to avoid so far but the day of reckoning is coming for sure. One day I will run out of other stuff to declutter and I will have to deal with the really intimidating things. Although I must say I have tackled plenty of intimidating things already but the scariest ones have been saved till last. Photos would be one of them and the keepsakes need another go through and consolidation effort. They are probably the only two areas that I am avoiding and even then we have performed small kulls on them already so they haven’t been ignored altogether. But that is the beauty of slow and steady decluttering, I will get to them all in good time. So long as something is being decluttered in the meantime I am happy to prolong the agony.
You Colleen? Wow I wouldn’t have suspected! I think photos and momentos are particularly hard because they’re small, so you can get so many in a box, and because they evoke a lot more emotion (for most of us) than just a shirt or a extra pad of notepaper. I’ve got three girls at my house this afternoon, so I look forward to getting a couple of pieces of art hung or culled.
Hi Cindy,
that’s why I’m leaving it to the lucky last. Then I will have nothing else left to devote my time to and I can take my time and do the job properly. Good luck with the girls and the picture hanging!
Intimidating? My father’s been gone 18 years and we still have an envelope box full of little things. I keep putting it off because Mom wants money for the things and I odn’t think we will get enough to make it worth the hassle. So I put it off.
I recently recycled all of the pages from my journals. I was never very good at journaling. I had all these journals that were boring stored in the storage shed in a big tub. Now that tub is gone. I don’t think most days are worth writing about and the occasional one that is interesting I have decided to keep in a file on my computer with a backup.
Photos. When my father died he had 12 of the round trays (100 per tray) full of slides and enough in boxes to fill 12 more trays. Then we also had a box of photos. We moved about 3 months after he died and a few months after that we sat down once or twice a week when I got home from work and went through them all. Some were trashed. Some were kept. Some were given to the family members in the pictures. One full tray was given to the church where I grew up for their historical scrapbooks. When it was all over we had about 200 slides and maybe 30 photos. About 10 years later and I had the time and money I turned all the slides into photos and put them either in our scrapbooks or into nice photo albums. All are now marked so that we know who they are and what year they represent. It took a long while but it is pretty well done. Now I just have present day things to deal with and I try to do that quickly.
Hi Deb J,
that sounds like a Herculean task but one that deserves doing. I am getting to it I promise, stop nagging me. 😆 🙂
when I strated getting rid of stuff, I used to panic I would run out of things to get rid of each day. But like you, I can always find one more thing, and I truly think it will always be this way EVEN THOUGH I would love to have run out of things to get rid of. Love your blog.
Thanks Tasmanian Minimalist,
when I was about half way through the 365 Less Things Challenge my husband asked if I thought we would have enough things to make it to 365 day. Ha! Even then I knew we would still be finding things well after that. Now it is exactly eight months and I am still at it. i do look forward to the day when I think I am done but that will be a while away yet.
It’s hard to imagine where the end will be. There will always be some maintenance, and kids – by their very ever growing and changing nature – are a big source of things that need to be regularly evaluated. When my cousin lived alone, he had a fork, a spoon, a knife, a bowl, and a mug. I think he was done!
Hi Cindy,
yes, children will continue to grow out of things but as you say maintenance will take care of that. There will always be maintenance even for us adults so I will consider myself done once we get to the maintenance only stage.
Oh I feel the same way about certain boxes. I have 3 boxes and my scrapbook stuff that make me feel squeamish. I’m so into this decluttering/minimalizing my stuff that I feel restless and a little out of sorts if I don’t go through stuff daily. Urgh. I almost feel a little crazy about it.
Hi Bree,
have you ever heard the expression “Make hay while the sun shines.”. If you are in the mood to declutter go for it while you are keen. It could be worse, you might know you need to do it but can’t bring yourself to make the effort. So rejoice and be glad you are keen and make the most of your eagerness while it lasts.
Cindy – and Colleen!
You make me feel so much better!!! My “intimidatory” areas are the library upstairs (the length of a large house, in floor to ceiling bookcasing, full with high piles along the floor as well) and genealogy photos, notes, and mementos. Still, I have enough to attack, so I can ignore those for now – I still have three bookcases downstairs still full!
Ann.
Wow Ann, that does sound more like your Achilles heal than your Achillies heal. Why not start decluttering a book a day. Just browse a shelf and choose just one each morning after your first cuppa. Just pretend like you are in the book store shopping but in reverse. Before you know it spaces will start to appear.
Yup, a number of books have gone, unread, already, and I have been reading my way through – boxloads gone, a few books saved. Trouble is, every time a space appears, I fill it from the piles on the floor! (At least those have shrunk).
Ann
Hi Ann,
You have made your choice about how you want to deal with this area of clutter which will naturally make the progress slow. So long as you are happy with your choice then just be happy with the rate of progress. If you read as slow as me you would have something to worry about. 😉
Hi Colleen,
If I were a slow reader (both my mother and my husband are) then I would have to ditch most of the books unread =, but luckily (probably because I’ve been a bookworm all my like) I am a quick reader, so a paperback novel would almost never take more than a couple of evenings, and smaller ones would take just two to three hours (annoying when you’re enjoying it, good when you want to clear the pile). And if I don’t read before parting with them, I might miss some really really good ones!
(how do you do your smily faces) Ann.
Hi Ann,
I have never been a good reader. I like to read but I am slow and my mind wanders off sometimes and even though I know I haver read every word on a page they haven’t actually sunk in. I think I might actually have been borderline dyslexic as a child and not that much better now. That is one of the reasons why I make so many mistakes when writing my blog. My lovely readers forgive me that so I am OK with it. Getting me to sit still long enough to read is also a challenge at times.
As for the smily face here is a link to WordPress friendly emoticons http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Smilies
We “forgive” you, because your blog is way more than just the grammar or spelling, and we all enjoy your blog and gain from it (or we wouldn’t be following it!)!!
Reading has always been a joy for me – housework and tidying, on the other hand, have not! Which is how I’ve got myself into the pickle I have to clear myself out of – it may be two of us living here, but the bulk of the clearance needs to be mine!
So, thank God for all our differences, we get each other through. 🙂
Ann
Hi Ann,
I always think it is the difference between my hubby and I that make the relationship work too. Isn’t that funny. We make up for each other’s shortcomings but basically have the same principles so it works.
Hi Ann I thought I responded to this last night but it must have gotten lost in the air somewhere. I will just answer the bottom question or I am never going to get anything done around her today. Here is a link to WordPress friendly emoticons http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Smilies
I think it’s important to move the books from the floor to the shelves Ann. Visual clutter, particularly floor clutter, is very jarring. Just having books off the floor will make your home look much more attractive.
Cindy,
I sooo agree with you – but …. the shelves are already choked full, but other books lying across the tops, where they can. A lot more departures due before that becomes possible. 🙁
I still drool when thinking about a large in-home library. I can’t help it. 🙁
Lynn,
I’ve loved having it, but just think about packing it up and moving it!!!
Ugh, I know! That’s why I’ve given up the dream and pared down to one! bookshelf. One! For both of us!
The smilies are automatic if you type them out. : with a ) is :). 😉
Arrgh,
yesterday’s sudden internet failure ate my lengthy comment about my masterplan how to attack the CDs … and as I actually am stealing the plan from a friend who went through similar amounts it seems to be a good one. Exhausting but doable. Will be a long term project starting in fall.
3 steps
Step 1: Everything that evokes “What is that?”, “why did I keep that beyond the 90s” or “Embarrasing, I don’t ever want to be related with that – not even for a good laugh” goes out in the first round. Obvious no need for digital copies here …
Step 2: non-original CDs, CDs with no real attachment but nice music and CDs that for any other reason don’t make it to the favourites category get digitalized and then thrown out
Step 3: digitalizing the ones that are kept (no space gained here, but easier to declutter in the future should my attachment to them change and also nice to have all of them ready to go for using on electronic devices)
The CDs that don’t make it will most certainly be sold (I find amazon convienent there), given to friends who’d enjoy them (lots of music lovers round here 😉 and the rest then will be donated.
Excellent plan. Step by step gets the work done.
My intimidation areas are too-small clothes, and art I’ve created.
My husband and I each have several sizes of clothes stored, and we keep thinking that we’re going to be thinner any day now (ha!), so I keep all the sizes.
When my husband lost a lot of weight a few years ago, we got rid of all the too-big clothes, then he regained the weight, and we had to spend a lot of money re-buying clothes that we had gotten rid of.
You can see the problem there.
Art that I’ve created is another challenge, but sometimes it just gets in the way, and I can always make more, so I might just toss a bunch of it to free up space.
Everything you store also costs you money. If you lose weight (because you want to), then you deserve to go buy new clothes that fit your new body shape. Just my unsolicited opinion. 🙂
I can see why it would be frustrating to rebuy a wardrobe, especially since men’s clothes seem to stick in fashion longer, but did he really go back to just exactly the same size? Would the other clothes have fit him anyway?
I am not an artist, but my children are. When they get tired of a piece and it’s on canvas, they paint over it and start again. drawings on such on paper get recycled. Scuplture and 3 dimensional objects would be harder to deal with, but they have produced very few of those.
Photos! My nemesis! I did do a first go through and tossed all the really bad pictures and all the duplicates. Now I’m at the stage where I need to scan them. It makes me cringe with intimidation.
I have been working through my yarn stash. While maybe no one else would notice, I see that it has decreased and people have been gifted with handknit things.
Photos seem to be a rough spot for a lot of people. We just have to chip away slowly. If there’s a TV program you like, maybe you could even shift the scanner to a location where you could scan while you watch your program. A little every episode would make it a little less tedious.
Can you believe it, I’ve been thinking about this post all this time and trying to decide what my most intimidating items are. And realized today that my absolute worst items have been right in front of me for the last month – the leftovers from my last yard sale, sitting in my living room because I refused to box them up and once more put them in the basement. These are items that have been through several yard sales and didn’t sell, they didn’t even go when I put them in a giveaway pile.
I decided I had to look at things from a different angle. I keep seeing these objects through my own eyes and that means I still somehow see them the way they were when they were new and useful. I had to ask myself, if I was in the market for this item and I saw this very item, in this condition, at a yard sale or thrift shop or even on a giveaway pile, would I want to take it home? If not, out it goes. IF it could be cleaned or repaired, and IF I am both ABLE and WILLING to clean/repair it, it gets kept and dealt with. (All items are subject to throwing out if I don’t actually get around to doing that very shortly.) I decluttered 15 of 18 items that I’ve been struggling with for a long time. Three items made it back into my household, one “as is”, and two for re-purposing. These are also subject to donation if not used shortly.
This process or something similar to it has been written about before. But for me, I discovered I had to do one more thing to make it work. I have tried to process these items before, numerous times over the years, including in the last few weeks, but every single time I felt defeated just looking at the pile and gave up. So today I physically took one item at a time into a different room, and wrote down the question and answer because it forced me to focus on one question at a time. As I went through the questions, the fate of the item became clear quite easily. As I decided on each item, I immediately took it to the garbage or the donate box or clean/repair pile, before getting another item. I am embarrassed to admit how hard this process was for me, that I had to break it down into such small parts. But it worked, and that is a huge relief, and if this helps someone else, it was worth putting it out there for them to see. I was starting to think I was not capable of making the decisions I needed to make, and getting quite desperate. Now I realize that despite reading about decluttering one thing at a time, I STILL wasn’t able to put it into practice for my intimidating things because their very presence in the same room all together made it impossible for me to focus on one thing at a time.
Thank you Colleen – and other commenters – because I don’t think I could have figured this out without the ideas here, AND also the gentle nudging to focus on the “why”, when dealing with problem areas. It took a long time, but I am so happy to have arrived at the answer to my particular problem. It may not work for anyone else, but it works for me 🙂
Hi Jo,
congratulation on reaching a satisfactory conclusion to the problem that was hindering you from progressing. Taking the time to analyse your thoughts first helped you find your way to the root for the problem and then lead you to the solution. It really does pay to stop and focus on your feelings rather than the objects themselves because that is usually where the roadblock lies. I will keep an eye on this comment and see if anyone notices and responds. If not I will cut and paste it to be my Simple Saturday feature for this week. I’ll be in touch for a few more details if that is OK with you.
Hi Colleen,
If there’s any way I can help, let me know. Some feelings are easier for me to identify than others. This was definitely a hard one.
Jo
(I’ve also responded to you by email, not realizing in time that you were commenting, not emailing)
Hi Jo,
thanks. I will keep your original comment in mind for the weekend post.
Hey there,
first of all: I love your blog, this is amazing reading up at night in order to make a plan (maybe even purpose) for the next day…
second: I tackled the CD problem recently… 16 years of music (I kept my first CD of course) of me and my brother, all neatly collected in my mums house. I got so annoyed by just looking at this huge pile of (mostly burned) music, knowing that I NEVER EVER will buy a CD-player again, because I have a laptop and really good speakers for it. So here is what I did:
1) sort the CDs in 2 piles: “keep” and “giveaway”.
2) put the giveaway CDs in a box and put it on the street with a huge sign “FOR FREE” (the box is gone after 5 hours)
3) tackle again the pile you want to keep: the ones you will keep forever (for me original CDs, CDs of bands I know personally, and those CDs that make the “soundtrackofmylife”) and put them immediatly back into the shelf, where they will stay for the next couple of years.
4) Take the other ones and keep the music (uploading into your messy library on the laptop) but let the CDs go, meaning: straight into the “FOR FREE” box up to the streetcorner…
(optional 5) realize what stupid idea it was to upload 3 hours of really loud and angry punkrockmusic from 10 years ago and put those iditotic CDs immediatly in the “FOR FREE” box, without further regrets.)
I am not sure if this is helpful for anyone, but knowing that I am not the only one having this problem, I thought I share it.
Now I have two questions:
first: how do you declutter stuff that is not yours but somehow ended up in your shelf (like my brothers CD collection) and second: how do you declutter digital data (like pics and mp3s) or how do you store them effective?
have a good night and keep up the great stories and ideas and comments… good night and greets to all of you,
Lena
Hi Lena,
I could not work out if this is your first comment or if you are one of my existing Lenas with a new email address. If you are new I would like to say welcome to 365 Less Things and thank you so much for your comment. If it is your first, you went all out I must say. I will be sure to include it in this week’s favourite five. I am sure the other readers will be grateful for the tips you have given here.
In answer to your first question: ~ I do not declutter other peoples stuff. If I think they have stuff that needs decluttering or reclaiming in your case I firstly make them aware of its existence. Once they have responded we either work on it together or one or the other of us takes care of it. In the case of your brothers CDs I would suggest you let him know they are there and give him a gentle nudge to come and collect them. If he neglects to take heed I would then give him the ultimatum of come and collect them or I will dispose of them as I see fit. If he can’t collect them right now I would set boundaries as to how long I would put up with them being there and act after that time.
The quick answer to your second question: ~ Delete what you don’t want. You will of course have to plough through all your files to find the ones you don’t want but you can do this systematically in short intervals. I would suggest doing ten minutes a day and just keep plodding along until you are happy with the outcome. After that try to maintain them on a regular basis. I delete stuff all the time as I come upon it during my daily computer use. As for Storage: ~ We have an external harddrive (with big storage space) where we store backup copies of all our files so they are protected from computer viruses and ready to grab in the case of an emergency. Cindy has a post on this very subject coming up on Wednesday I believe so stay tuned.
Hey Colleen,
Sorry, I forgot to say that I am fairly new here, a “new Lena” sotospeak, because I just found “minimalism” as my new feel good strategy for life. (Basically I moved out of a 8sqm room with 4 huge suitcases and somehow found myself disgusted of all this stuff that I collected. I have been sorting and decluttering since and I am as happy as someone can be…)
I find this blog and so many other ideas so inspiring and really helpful.
Thanks for your answers, I had the little chat with my brother the other day, he wants to do it himself he says, but everytime he is here, he is busy with something else… Not such a devoted declutterer as me I guess.
And the second question: yeah I have the harddrive as well… My problem is the procrastination of that one. Whenever I sit withe the good resolution to declutter the data I get lost reading in blogs about decluttering. 😉
btw: just a little add to the CD thingy: While sorting I changed the broken CD covers to new ones and kept whatever white paper was left (I am a fanatic todolist-writer and I need a huge amount of little papers) and kept those CD covers that were ok, because I am in desperate need for those, thinking of all the loose CDs lying around, partly without label… So my next plan is to collect all those loose ones in this house (that might even take a week) and go through them piece by piece with a big waterproof pen and my leftover CD covers and get them sorted out as well…
greets from germany,
Lena
Hi Lena,
I don’t have a lot of CDs personally but my husband and children do. Rather than declutter the CDs my husband minimised the amount of space they took up by eliminating the covers. He saved the papers in one small box and filed all the CDs alphabetically by artist in three other small boxes. Everyone uses computers and iPods to play their music in our house but legally one should own the CD or have paid for the download so we have kept most of what we had.
As for your procrastination over deleting files ~ Make a rule for yourself that you have to work at cleaning up your files for ten minuted before doing anything else on your computer at least once a day. Here is some incentive. Practise this discipline every day, master the art of sorting and decluttering files, experiment with different strategies and come up with a system that is the most efficient. Then write a post about it for me that I can share with our readers. Hopefully this will give you extra incentive to get the job done and learn as you go. What do you think about that idea?
Good luck and thank you again for joining us here at 365 Less Things.
Hey Colleen,
that is a very good idea, I will start as soon as I am back home again and in front of my laptop…
I will keep you updated on my progress 😉
greets from the oktoberfest in munich and cheers 🙂
Hi Lena,
I look forward to hearing about your progress but for now I am jealous. I have been to München and of course had beer there and we had a great time. Have fun and we will hear from you when you get home.