With fear that lately I have started to sound like some of the nuns I remember from my school days, preaching hell and damnation day in day out, I thought I might write something a little more upbeat today.

I’d like to point out the joy that can be found in decluttering your home. This joy can be appreciated from day one, not just at the end of the journey. See if you can identify with the joy of…..

• A Fresh Start – It is never too late to begin a new phase in your life. Cut yourself some slack and don’t dwell on the past. Acknowledge the things you got right and learn the lesson of your follies but either way do not dwell on the regrets, just enjoy the fresh start you are making.

• More Space – It really does feel good as the clutter starts to disappear and you begin to feel the freedom of the empty space growing around you. This feeling can be appreciated from the very first item and increases over time. Take a moment to focus on that freedom with every little piece of clutter you choose to remove and the process will be one filled with joy rather than dread.
• Less Maintenance – It stands to reason that the fewer items cluttering up your home, the easier it is to keep your surroundings clean and tidy. Every item you remove is one less thing you need to maintain in any way whether dusting, cleaning or storing. Also house cleaning will be simpler if there are fewer items to be moved in order to access the surface under them such as benches and floors. And ya gotta love that!

• Guilt Relief – We generally carry a burden of guilt for every item associated with the waste of money involved with its acquisition and lack of use. For every one of these items that leaves our home there is a relief from that guilt so long as we have learned the lesson of needless waste.

• Giving Back – Whether we sell items to grateful buyers on eBay, donate items to charity, give items away to friends and family or find a way to recycle them there is an good feeling that accompanies that action. Focus on these good feelings and it will spur you on in your quest.

• Appreciation – You will find that you have a higher appreciation for the items you choose to keep and their role in your household.

• Being Environmentally Responsible – For every unnecessary item you don’t purchase and for every item that you liberate to someone who might need it, you are doing a small deed to save the environment. For every item that is manufactured there is a cost whether in natural resources or carbon emissions, so the less you contribute to the supply and demand of these products the better hope there is for our planet’s survival.

• Simplifying -There is more to this topic than the title implies. I will elaborate in a separate post tomorrow but rest assured there is plenty of joy to be found by simplifying.

ITEM 284 OF 365 LESS THINGS

A few more odds and ends for the donation box

5 Things I am grateful for today

1. Sick pay – I couldn’t work yesterday as it is a bit hard to sell furniture without a voice.
2. Freedom of choice – This is something we take for granted in Western society.
3. Roast dinner – They are so easy to make and so yummy to eat.
4. Art – This is something everyone in my family enjoys and can share the interest.
5. Kisses – They really are the cure for everything.

Everyone seems to have at least one clutter weakness. Mine was paper crafting supplies and magazines. Even when I was at the height of my paper crafting days I think I was more addicted to shopping for supplies than I was to using them. I did do quite a bit of the craft but I bought a whole lot more than I was ever going to need even if I had continued at the crafting pace I was at.

I am not sure what really turned me off my addiction but I think it may have been photo clutter. The beauty of digital photography is also its downfall. You can take as many photos as you can fit on you DS card, Compact Flash or your computer hard drive for that matter. Add in an external hard drive and all of a sudden you are drowning in photos. I think I just got tired of sorting through them to find the “best ones” for the a album I wanted to make. Photo burnout was inevitable.

For some people their addiction is books. I always used to think this was where they would read a book and not want to part with it but I have read recently on more than one blog that people buy books and don’t even get around to reading them. Much the same as my craft supply clutter I suppose.

I would like to challenge my readers to admit to what their clutter addiction is today, google for some advice as to how to overcome it and do something to start working on the problem this week. Meanwhile I will make the effort to get some of my craft supplies up for sale in eBay.

I feel like I should be saying…”my name is Colleen and I am a paper craft supplies addict” but I am not any more. I am just Colleen who needs to do something about ridding myself of the substance of my old addiction. There is no better time like the present so I am going jump over to eBay now and start listing.

ITEM 223 OF 365 LESS THINGS

This batch of scrapbook magazines are today’s offering and I have listed 3 other paper crafting items on eBay. Wish me luck!

For the last 207 days finding things to declutter has been a reasonably simple task due to the sheer volume of stuff that needed to go. Now it is time to tackle the tricky stuff. The stuff that so far I have avoided simply because I didn’t want to make the hard decisions.

Things like…

• Those craft items that I keep telling myself I will eventually use one day but after years that day has never arrived.
• Some of the sentimental items that deep down I know are just clutter that no one but me would ever want.
• Items that I know I don’t want but have been struggling whether I should give away or sell.
• Even some items I should sell on ebay but am getting a little tired of dealing with pricing, photographing, describing, watching, mailing and just taking the gamble as to whether they will sell or not.

You know, I feel better just having admitted these things to myself and I am now eager to get started. I am tired of this stuff sitting around taunting me with the guilt of having wasted the money on it in the first place. Other stuff that  I must admit I have been too lazy to deal with so far. Realising that I can risk a few eBay insertion fees because we have done well enough on eBay so far it won’t matter if the odd thing doesn’t sell.

It is amazing how even though I declutter and write about decluttering every day I can still manage to forget the rules. Still manage to fall into the psychological pitfalls that I advise everyone else to be wary of. Well luckily I caught myself before I was too far gone. Maybe now I am getting a little melodramatic but you get the idea sometimes a person needs to stop and take a good look around them and at themselves and get back on track.

If you are off track with your decluttering stop and think what is worse, the task at hand or the bad feelings generated day in and day out by being surrounded by the clutter. Do yourself a favour just get rid of it.

ITEM 208 OF 365 LESS THINGS

On refection maybe I should have kept this dream catcher and hung it over my bed. Maybe it would have done it’s job of filtering out the bad dreams and only letting the good ones through like the dream of a clutter free home.

I found this clever shopping deterrent strategy when reading my comments yesterday and I thought I would share it with you.

Here is what Jacquie, who was inspired by Gogol’s buy it back approach, had to say…

Along the same lines as Gogol, if I am thinking of buying something new, I use an ‘earning money’ analogy.
I use a basic hourly rate and say to myself “If I had to work for (how ever many hours to earn the cost of the item) and at the end all I was given was this item – do I like it enough or want it badly enough to do that? Often the answer is no.

I can now use the same formula for uncluttering along with Gogol’s idea – if I had to buy it back from the pawn shop with that many hours work, would I? I don’t think I would for much of my stuff.

I must admit I run this scenario through my head occasionally too. Especially when it comes to paying for a service that I can just as easily with a bit of effort do myself. Why pay someone $20 an hour to do your ironing if you only earn $16 an hour in your day job. You would be better off cutting your work back by a couple of hours and do your own ironing.

Maybe we should also think about the paltry some of money paid to the sweat shop workers who make most of the stuff we clutter up our lives with while they are barely about to put a meal on their plates. I suppose the flip side to that is that then they won’t have a job at all, but maybe just maybe if enough of us stopped messing up the world with all this consumerism we might just change the world and the general focus may turn to something more productive. Who knows?

ITEM 202 OF 365 LESS THINGS

A piece of Australian History sold on eBay for $15.50

R E C Y C L E         R E C Y C L E

R E C Y C L E

The Word for Today  is so simple yet so important. If you are not using something then it is just taking up space. There are so many ways to RECYCLE your unwanted goods that very little should go to waste.

• RECYCLE by giving things you don’t want to a charity, friends, family or even a casual acquaintance.
• RECYCLE by selling your items on through web sites like ebay or advertise in you local newspaper or through you work Intranet.
• RECYCLE by putting all unwanted items made of cardboard, paper, metal or recyclable plastic in your recycle bin. All those old tax papers, storage boxes, school papers etc fall into this category.
• RECYCLE by sending your old computer components to companies that dismantle, recycle and dispose of this items responsibly.
• RECYCLE by re-purposing an object. I used the fabric out of an old pair of my husbands jeans to make a patchwork calendar holder. My mother-in-law uses old fabrics to make handbags. You know I use old cardboard boxes to make my ebay packaging. An old teapot makes a lovely planter pot. This is just a drop in the bucket of ideas for re-purposing.
• RECYCLE by repairing items rather than throwing them away. Sew on a button, stitch up a hem, replace a hinge, put a new clasp on that old necklace you love, re-paint an object and give it a new lease on life. Take a class and learn a new skill you can use to carry out these tasks with ease. Hardware stores often offer free classes on household repairs and there are no end to the places in your local community where you can learn skills of all kinds.
• RECYCLE by googling. This may sound strange but there is so much you can learn with a little investigation on the Internet. Search for “How to repair…” or “Alternate use for…”  or “local charities” it is that easy.

So when it comes to RECYCLING your clutter the choices are endless so please don’t just send your unwanted items to landfill let someone else get the most out of them if you aren’t.

ITEM 177 OF 365 LESS THINGS

One more for the donation box

I live in a city on with a population of about 160,000. So far I have explored very little of the area and have decided it is about time I made a bigger effort to find out more about the wonderful ways to spend time in this fascinating city without it involving shopping.

I meet a friend for coffee at least one day a week and usually we get together at the local shopping centre because it is convenient and there are plenty of cafes to choose from. The problem with this arrangement is that once we have finished dining there is nothing else to do there except shop. As you know I have no desire to buy anything other than food and other necessities these days so shopping just isn’t my thing and I am getting the reputation of being the “Shopping Nazi” because I am always telling my friend “you don’t need that” so I need some interesting alternatives.

I will start investigating immediately and have something nice to do this Wednesday when she calls…

…pause here to investigate on the internet…

…I have visited churches and cathedrals all over Europe and yet I have never been inside the big cathedral in my own town perhaps this week would be a good time to do that. In future we could take a stroll on the beach, go to the art gallery, take a drive to one of the small outlying towns to explore or even do some kind of city tour and learn some history of the region.

ITEM 165 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Another record sold on ebay this one went for $15.00

As you know we have been selling a bit of stuff on ebay since the start of this 365lessthings challenge. I have mentioned before how I hate wasting our ebay earnings on costly packaging so I do my best to recycle otherwise unwanted resources to make my own thrifty packaging.

After telling a friend of mine how well I had been doing recently selling snow gear on ebay she asked if I would sell some snow gear for her. During this exercise I took some photos to show you the process of creating my thrifty packaging.

I used a box from a piece of furniture from the store I work at. I cut out T-shaped blanks and then folded them into the box shapes I needed.  I usually take an educated guess as to the size to cut. I bend the cardboard over the edge of my desk to get nice straight folds. I use glue to set the side seam and clamp together with bulldog clips to dry then use packing tape to hold it all together. I usually wrap these boxes in inside-out gift wrap as I have a supply I don’t use much due to the fact that I prefer to give non-clutter  gifts to friend and relatives these days.

These boxes were used to pack ski goggles. My items always arrive in good order and condition and I often get feedback comments on how well my items are packaged. Tonight my husband and I used an old moving box to wrap 4 packages of old records that he has just sold on ebay and will be shipped off over the next few days.

ITEM 160 OF 365 LESS THINGS

This scanner bed went to be recycled

This week I used Freecycle for the first time and was delighted with the results. First of all I was amazed that the place I live even had Freecycle and secondly I was pleased that it gives me an outlet for items that would otherwise be difficult to find homes for. Let me explain…

I listed three  items, two if which were a box of baseball cards and a guitar amplifier that doesn’t work. As you can see neither of these items is suitable to send to a charity because they only want stuff in working condition and baseball cards would be a bit obscure to say the least for an Australian thrift shop to off load (baseball isn’t that popular here). I didn’t think these two items would float on ebay either so I put them on Freecycle along with a CD/DVD rack that didn’t sell on ebay.

I was expecting that the CD/DVD rack would be the most popular item but lo and behold the first thing to be claimed was the baseball cards and there was more than one person dare I say excited at the prospect. The amplifier which I listed as “for parts only does not work” was the next item to go and once again more than one person was willing. Then finally the lady who is picking up the baseball cards emailed and asked if she could also have the DVD rack if it was still available.

I am so pleased that I have now an outlet to find new purpose for items that are too good to throw away but not suitable for other methods of disposal. Just because something doesn’t work doesn’t mean it’s parts can’t be salvaged and just because something is a little obscure doesn’t mean there isn’t someone out there who would love to have it. I love Freecycle and will utilise it again in the future I am sure.

ITEM 156 OF 365 LESS THINGS

This is the CD/DVD rack that went to a new home today thanks to Freecycle

With today’s item which sold on eBay for $36.00 we have hit a milestone. We have broken the $1000 mark for selling unwanted items. I am pleased we have managed to redeem some of the money that in some cases was wasted in the first place. In other cases though we had got more than our money’s worth out of the items and the cash was just a bonus while other items we made a killing on.

A quick story regarding an eBay auction not relating to this decluttering quest but something my husband nearly threw away last year but put on eBay as a last minute decision. It was a kick start for a Ducati Motorbike which was a spare part given to him when he purchased an old bike for $1000 some years back. It sold for over $1200 on eBay and he was a very happy man.

Here is an article I ran across which I felt was relevant to today’s post

Empty your closets, fill your pockets

ITEM 154 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Some old fishing gear that we never use as mentioned above it sold for $36.00 on ebay tipping us over the $1000 mark

Decluttering is a much easier task when it is a team effort. I can’t imagine what it is like when the effort is one sided or worse sabotaged with one person doing all the work while the other is under-minding their efforts by bringing more clutter into the home.

That said, I want to take the opportunity today to give credit to my husband for the way he has embraced my resolution to remove 365 items of clutter from our home this year. This would be a much more difficult quest if I had to do it alone and especially if he was not prepared to co-operate because the clutter is not all mine

It was his idea to start the blog in fact and he reads and edits it everyday. I am glad of that because I am guilty of a lot of typo and spelling mistake clutter and he is very good at removing it for me. I had no idea how to go about starting the blog which is why it was day 67 before it got underway as he was overseas due to work commitments.

This week I actually told him he needed to slow down a little as I am the one who has to come up with something to write about each day and it is not easy when I am not exposed to subject inspiration because he is doing all the decluttering. He took it in good humour as it was meant to be – but really love,  slow down!

He is very good at revisiting areas that he has worked on before and being more ruthless at each pass. This is especially so with the sentimental items. He is also having some success with eBay having sold numerous items that would otherwise have gone in the trash or been hard to part with had there not been some monetary gain.

So thanks Love you are doing a great job. XXX

ITEM 143 OF 365 LESS THINGS

This robotics kit was one of those items I am sure my husband would have had a hard time parting with if he could not have sold it on eBay. He only got $105.00 for it but that was better than having sit in the garage where wasn’t being used.