Imagine my surprise today when I went to put some clean laundry away in my son’s room and discovered he had decluttered one of his drawers. There was a big wad of shoe laces and other items in his trash can. I retrieved it of course and sorted it into donate and throw away piles but WOW!

If that isn’t amazing enough you will be surprised to know he had done this once before. I had just mentioned it today in a reply to a comment Loretta left on my Half way there post. At the end of high school last year he decluttered all the old school papers he no longer needed. There was no prompting from me he just did it. I think the inspiration was just to expel any evidence of a period of his life he would rather forget but that is another story.

I must remember to make a fuss about it and try to encourage him to start on another area of his room. I am sure there must be a number of clothing items hanging in the wardrobe that he no longer wears.

ITEM 185 OF 365 LESS THINGS

These are the items  my son decluttered that are going in the donation box (actually it is more of a donation pile at the moment I haven’t been to drop items off for a while). If you are wondering why so many shoe laces, he is a skateboarder and they go through a lot of shoes and the manufacturer usually supply more there one pair of laces with each pair.

I really only touched on this subject with my post Decluttering Pessimism but it seems to have evoked some interesting responses from people who have been subjected to the unfortunate position of dealing with a lost loved one’s clutter. And nobody wants to be forced into the very awkward position of having to broach the subject with an elderly relative that they need to consider paring down their possessions in order to avoid this very situation.

I remember when I was a child rummaging through drawers, cupboards and sheds at my grandmothers house and being intrigued with the interesting things I found. It was mostly just clutter that she hadn’t used for years. Stuff that belonged to my grandfather still lingered in all these places especially the sheds even though he had died several years earlier.

My grandparents owned and operated a bakery during and after WWII. My grandfather would not include the secret family sponge cake recipe with the sale of the business when he was ready to retire so no one would buy it. They just shut it down, stored all the equipment and fittings in the back shed and it was all still there thirty years later when my grandmother died.

We lived 500 miles away and my parents had to go and clear everything out when she died.  My parents had a business to run and didn’t have the time to spend going through all the stuff properly and deciding the worth of everything. They kept the good crystal and china, some tools, jewellery and a few other odds and ends. Then offloaded the remaining stuff quickly in a huge garage sale. I always thought it was such a shame.

It is never to early to get your clutter under control because that old person will be you soon enough.

So far I have focused on the inevitable event of old people passing on but there is an even more tragic situation yet to explore. Anything can happen any time to any of us and it is an even bigger shock for those left behind when someone is taken suddenly and unexpectedly. I am not saying that we should give away all our beloved possessions just in case but we should at least give some thought to keeping them at a level that is reasonable to expect someone else to have to sort through during such a tragic time. Maybe the things you own that you think may be a burden to someone else could be considered declutterable.

I am still not sure whether I am comfortable sending this post out it feels like it could be a little raw for some people. I hope no one is offended by it and if so please come forward and voice your opinion. I would be more than happy to withdraw it if you feel I should.

ITEM 170 OF 365LESSTHINGS

Another ebay sale only $3.00 this time but every little bit counts.

I received a comment from Loretta yesterday and here is what she wrote…

I’ve got a question for you: since your children are now grown, what advice do you have for those of us with younger kids with regard to keepsakes and clutter? Is there anything you regret not keeping for your kids, or did you (and they) keep ‘too much’ childhood stuff?

I recently went through a big box full of cards my mother kept for me from the time I was born: birthday, Christmas, invitations. I had 40 years worth! Tossed most of them, but realised I was doing the same thing for my kids. It is quite liberating to think I don’t NEED to keep this stuff any more!

Much to my Mother-in-laws horror I have never been one to keep too much of this kind of stuff. Because we move around every now and again due to my husband’s job I have continually decluttered over the years. My approach this time around is different, it is more of a case of minimising with the intent never to accumulate again. Below is  a list of some of the items I have kept for and of my children.

• Baby cards (birth and Christening) Confirmation and First Holy communion cards and mementos (rosary beads etc.)
• A few special outfits they used to wear ( Unique items I and my mum knitted for them)
• One or two special toys. (a silver rattle and a music carousel)
• My son’s Thomas the Tank Engine & Star Wars toy collections.
• Some examples of their school work.

Which when you write it down like that it sounds like an awful lot. These are just the things I have kept for them. Once they were old enough to choose things they wanted to keep themselves that is when things started to pile up. I have always encouraged them to sell their old toys whenever I have had garage sales over the years and they were happy to make a little pocket money from that. Nevertheless, here is the list of what has accumulated over the years and is cluttering up every spare bit if space in their wardrobes….

• Every band t-shirt/hoody my son has ever owned. (my children love their music)
• Skateboard and Sports Illustrated Magazines
• Travel souvenirs
• KISS dolls
• Every note slipped between friends at school that my daughter ever received (there are a lot)
• A doll or two
• 2 Build-a-bears
• Every Rolling Stone magazine she received by subscription
• Both have piles of CDs
• Mariners Baseball souvenirs ( both children)
• Photos frames with friends and other odd stuff (daughter)
• Both have a sleeping bag (huge) that came from I don’t remember where but came in handy for sleep-overs and school camps.
• A box of Little Golden Books and Dr Seuss books they were particularly fond of.

And I am sure there is other stuff but I have scared myself enough already with this lot. I think I have mentioned before that this is my area of doom when it comes to decluttering.

The beauty of my decluttering strategy is to leave the hard things until last but the day of reckoning is coming and I do plan to minimise these items. My daughter is visiting next week and she is aware that I am planning on going through her stuff while she is here and hopefully she will be prepared to part with some of it.

As much as this list of stuff is large and scary and I really would like to see it minimised I do believe you shouldn’t force you children to part with things they are not prepared to let go. I suppose the best thing is not to over indulge them in the first place. There isn’t anything I regret not having from my childhood but then I didn’t have much in the way of possessions we made our own fun those days building cubby houses, fishing with the family, and other physical stuff. I wouldn’t change that for anything.

Anyway I digress. In a couple of weeks I will let you know how things went with my daughter and I will speak to her and my son about this subject and how they feel about their clutter and if there is anything they wish they still had.

I would like to think that if you set a good example of living with less maybe your children will follow suit and feel the same way but you never can tell.

Thanks Loretta for such a great question. I know I have only given you half an answer but when I have actually dealt with my children’s clutter I will give you some feedback on how that went.

ITEM 166 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Another ebay sale $6.50. I guy from the local post office and I are on a first name basis now.

When we first returned to Australia after living overseas for some years there were a few household appliances that need replacing. As luck would have there was a Homemakers Expo on in our new location soon after we arrived so we attended hoping to get educated on what were the best appliances to suit our needs. To cut a long story short the only thing we came out of it with was a membership to the Wine Selectors Club.

As a result every three months a dozen bottles of wine, six red and six white, would appear on our doorstep. this isn’t a large quantity to keep up with but we don’t drink much only on social occasions and maybe a bottle every now and again together just as a treat. Then my husband moved 500km away for eleven months due to work commitments. Needless to say the wine started to build up with only one person at home to drink it and less social events to attend at weekends because we took the time to enjoy each others company as it was in short supply.

We decided to cancel our membership but at that point we had accumulated at least a few dozen bottles mostly red. Life being as it is my husband then went to work overseas for four months and that just left me at home to take care of things. When I decided to make a start on the decluttering quest one of the things that soon caught my eye was this stash of wine. So I took it upon myself to make an effort to slowly but surely reduce the number.

There was the odd social events to attend to which I took along a bottle or two and I gave a few bottles as gifts. However the stockpile was still quite large so I felt it was my duty to make the sacrifice to polish off several myself all in the line of duty of course. Yes I know, it’s was a tough job but someone had to do it. Sometimes decluttering is far from being a chore and in my defence I didn’t include any of the wine in the 365 less things.

Now there are just four bottles in the cabinet, quite a manageable number and when they run out we will just buy wine as we want it so it doesn’t accumulate again.

ITEM 147 OF 365 LESS THINGS

We dug up another snowboard from the murky depths of the garage cupboard and sold it on eBay for $33.00. Our son was very happy as we gave him the proceeds because it was his board and he is a poor art student.

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.

Sometimes we can end up with multiples of certain things hiding in several places around the house. The Allen Keys that are today’s discard are a perfect example. They seem to have bred like rabbits throughout our house, some in the garage, some in the office desk, some in the kitchen drawer and some in that useful tool kit we keep in the laundry. This causes a two part problem, firstly- that there are just too many of them and secondly- that when you do need one you may forget some of the places they are hiding and end up having to buy another because you can’t find the size you need.

This problem is in part due to buying flat pack furniture as there are tools provided with every piece you buy. The idea is to use them and throw them away. In our case though we move around a lot due to my husband’s job and this kind of furniture survives a removal better if it is disassembled. What we should have been doing is comparing the new tools supplied with the ones we already have and toss them away if it they are duplicate of others. Also we are too lazy to walk the extra few metres to the garage where it makes the most sense to store tools of this nature instead we like to keep them handy “just in Case” hence why they accumulate in every corner of the house.

My point is that a little bit of sensible organisation can help cut down on the clutter and save a few dollars simply by knowing where something is when you need it, putting it back there when you are done using it and discarding it if you don’t need it.