Mini Mission Monday is about finding ten minutes a day to declutter. To make it easy for you, each Monday I set seven declutter missions, one for each day of the week for you to follow. It takes the guess work out of decluttering and makes it easy and “fun” for you to achieve some quick decluttering.

Sorry folks I thought I had set a post up for today but alas I did not. Fortunately there are plenty in the archives to rehash. I thought this one was a good one as it is a category of clutter that most people struggle with to some degree. I hope you find it helpful.

I think it is time to take care of some more obligation clutter. That would be those things that you keep not because you want to but because you feel obligated to keep for one reason or another. This is not a good reason to keep anything because these items weigh you down emotionally. I will give you an example of a different kind of obligation clutter each day and you see if you can identify something in your home that matches and declutter it.

Monday – A family heirloom that you don’t appreciate.  Do your best to find someone else in the family to take it on otherwise it may be time to sell or donate it or perhaps loan it to a museum. Just remember heirlooms can be tricky as they may not technically be yours to give away. Do your research first to make sure they don’t actually belong to someone else in the family.

Tuesday – Grown children clutter ~ This is something long ago left behind by your grown child. Your home is not a storage unit, ask them to collect it and let them know you are going to get rid of it otherwise. With a little diplomacy this is possible without alienating them.

Wednesday - A guilt item ~ Don’t feel obliged to keep something just because you shouldn’t have wasted the money on it in the first place. Try to sell it to recoup some money or just find a way to pass it on. Forgive yourself and move on.

Thursday – An unwanted gift ~ No explanation necessary, sell, donate or regift it.

Friday – Anything that was given to you by someone else. If you no longer want or need it offer it back to the person who gave it to you, sell or donate it. You don’t have to keep things just because they came from someone else. I might seem a little repetitive on this advice but that is because people get very stuck on keeping this kind of stuff.

Saturday – Something you keep for another’s benefit. This often happens with grown children. For example Dad has a bunch of useful tools that he no longer uses but his three sons often come over to borrow them ~ In this case divvy them up between the sons and let them borrow from one another. If they don’t want to do that then feel free to sell them or give them to someone who does want them. Once again your home isn’t a storage unit or a free hiring service.

Sunday – An item you keep out of tradition that you never care to use. This might be the usual stuff like the good china and crystal but it could be like my old BBQ ~ It is almost an Aussie tradition to cook lots of BBQ meals but if you don’t you don’t need to have a BBQ just because everyone else in the neighbourhood does. This also goes for a collection of tools when you really aren’t much of an handyman or a sewing machine when you send all your clothes out to be altered or mended. (Personally, judging from the price my friend was recently quoted to have the hem sewn up on an apron, I would suggest you learn to use it and save your money but that is just my opinion.) Some of these items actually seem to double up as aspiration clutter.

Good luck and happy decluttering

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

I received the following email from Jeff a week or so ago which is really what inspired me to focus on obligation clutter again this week. It is amazing the desperation we sometimes feel when faced with the dilemma of “I don’t want this thing but it’s family history so I really can’t declutter it. What am I to do?” Anyway read Jeff’s comment, where you will hear that desperation, and we will go from there.

I really appreciate your wonderful posts. They, as well as other sites and books, have spurred me on to GET RID OF STUFF! I (we) have been successful in a lot of areas, but the one that gives me the most problems is inherited stuff. I’m an only child, and both my parents are gone now. I have in my garage a trunkful (and other containers) of sentimental and historical stuff that I seem paralyzed to dispose of. Diaries, WWI, WWII memorabilia*, PICTURES!!!! (even one of Lindbergh standing on the wing of his plane), and family stuff for over one hundred years. Nobody in my family ever threw anything away! I have no other extended family remotely interested in the items, and my own children are thoroughly modern and don’t care (yet.) I find myself almost wishing for a tornado (I’m in Oklahoma) to come and take away the stuff so I don’t have to worry about it anymore! To top it off, my wife will have the same situation when her parents pass on.
Jeff

Being an only child makes this situation both easier and more difficult for Jeff at the same time. At least he knows the items are his alone and it is his decision as to what to do with them. But if he had a sibling who cared to have the items it would be so much easier to pass them on. Then there is the complication of whether Jeff’s children will change their minds in the future and want the stuff themselves. As I see it there are many things Jeff should consider…

1. If his children are old enough to make rational decisions about the items ~ that is not to young to realise the significance of what they are being offered ~ then he is free to let them go. I would suggest that anyone over the age of 25 has enough of their own individual personality to make this decision. It doesn’t guarantee that they still won’t change their mind but they will however be old enough to remember they were given the choice.
2. If the items are from beyond Jeffs parents generation ~ that is his grandparnents, great grandparents… ~ then it is fair, and maybe even a legal requirement, to offer them to any existing family members ~ uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews… ~ before making the decision to hand them on any other way. If someone else in the family wants to carry on the tradition of handing these items down then that is a good thing. Should Jeff choose this option perhaps he could give them with the proviso that they come back to his children should they wish it in the future.
3. Should there be no other family members to take the items then another method of keeping possession of them while having them enjoyed by others is to loan them to a local preservation society or museum. By loaning items they remain your property to be retrieved when desired. In Jeffs case military museums would be a good choice to loan his WW1 and WW2 items to.
4. If Jeff is happy to hand them on permanently he could outright donate them to the local preservation society or museum of his choice.
5. Should all these other options be exhausted then Jeff might just choose to sell the items.

*I will say that I personally think that military medals  should remain within the family if possible. For personal reasons I do have a rather bias opinion on this though.

Multi generational family heirlooms deserve special consideration when decluttering. I am not talking about a few fancy tea cups your mother once owned that have no real story attached except that they are pretty, made by Royal Dalton and might be worth a few bucks but real family history~ items of great personal value and possible even great monetary value. While thinking about this post I began doing a little research and found a web post that I though covered the subject of handing on heirlooms quite well and I implore you to read if as just a start to researching this subject. Here is the link

TLC .howstuffworks.com ~ 5 Things to do before passing down heirlooms 

From a financial point of view I would always investigate the monetary value of any heirloom item before making the decision to sell or donate. The more information you are armed with the better decision you stand to make. How many stories have your heard where someone has picked up a half million dollar item for $50 at a garage sales. I know I have.

Today’s Mini Mission

Declutter some grown children clutter ~ This is something long ago left behind by your grown child.  Your home is not a storage unit, ask them to collect it and let them know you are going to get rid of it otherwise. With a little diplomacy this is possible without alienating them.

Today’s Declutter Item

It would be a lie to say I have no grown children clutter to get rid of because I have three boxes of it in the garage and that is only the start. One of the children is still at home while the other isn’t settled enough to expect her to collect her stuff yet. So I have no examples to declutter today but I do however have these two little bits to clutter from my own teen years. One is an elastic ankle support from my days of several sprains playing softball while the other is a leather bat grip. I am at a loss to explain how these things have stayed in my possession for so long especially since they were in our first aid kit that has been decluttered several times already. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Sport Clutter

Something I Am Grateful For Today

Aborting my continually interrupted attempts to get the house work done and going instead to a friends place for coffee and cake. Gotta love resorting to plan B.

“In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.” Brother David Steindl-Rast

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

Mini Mission Monday is about finding ten minutes a day to declutter. To make it easy for you, each Monday I set seven declutter missions, one for each day of the week for you to follow. It takes the guess work out of decluttering and makes it easy and “fun” for you to achieve some quick decluttering.

I think it is time to take care of some more obligation clutter. That would be those things that you keep not because you want to but because you feel obligated to keep for one reason or another. This is not a good reason to keep anything because these items weigh you down emotionally. I will give you an example of a different kind of obligation clutter each day and you see if you can identify something in your home that matches and declutter it.

Monday – A family heirloom that you don’t appreciate.  Do your best to find someone else in the family to take it on otherwise it may be time to sell or donate it or perhaps loan it to a museum. Just remember heirlooms can be tricky as they may not technically be yours to give away. Do your research first to make sure they don’t actually belong to someone else in the family.

Tuesday – Grown children clutter ~ This is something long ago left behind by your grown child. Your home is not a storage unit, ask them to collect it and let them know you are going to get rid of it otherwise. With a little diplomacy this is possible without alienating them.

Wednesday - A guilt item ~ Don’t feel obliged to keep something just because you shouldn’t have wasted the money on it in the first place. Try to sell it to recoup some money or just find a way to pass it on. Forgive yourself and move on.

Thursday – An unwanted gift ~ No explanation necessary, sell, donate or regift it.

Friday – Anything that was given to you by someone else. If you no longer want or need it offer it back to the person who gave it to you, sell or donate it. You don’t have to keep things just because they came from someone else. I might seem a little repetitive on this advice but that is because people get very stuck on keeping this kind of stuff.

Saturday – Something you keep for another’s benefit. This often happens with grown children. For example Dad has a bunch of useful tools that he no longer uses but his three sons often come over to borrow them ~ In this case divvy them up between the sons and let them borrow from one another. If they don’t want to do that then feel free to sell them or give them to someone who does want them. Once again your home isn’t a storage unit or a free hiring service.

Sunday – An item you keep out of tradition that you never care to use. This might be the usual stuff like the good china and crystal but it could be like my old BBQ ~ It is almost an Aussie tradition to cook lots of BBQ meals but if you don’t you don’t need to have a BBQ just because everyone else in the neighbourhood does. This also goes for a collection of tools when you really aren’t much of an handyman or a sewing machine when you send all your clothes out to be altered or mended. (Personally, judging from the price my friend was recently quoted to have the hem sewn up on an apron, I would suggest you learn to use it and save your money but that is just my opinion.) Some of these items actually seem to double up as aspiration clutter.

Good luck and happy decluttering

Today’s Declutter Item

I don’t have any heirloom clutter that I can think of to add here today. Letting go of obligation clutter was one of the first lessons I learned way back at the beginning of my mission. Every now and again something surfaces but not too often these days. So I will document this craft decluttered item that I recently eliminated during the big craft room reshuffle.

Craft Clutter

Something I Am Grateful For Today

I love it when the sun is shining and streams into the living spaces at the back of my home all afternoon, warming it up. I saves me having to put on the heater and therefore saves electricity.

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

The mini mission for today is plant related clutter. This could be potted plants that have seen better days, potting supplies and tools, gardening equipment, or even wild overgrown garden plants. But the thought behind the inclusion of this post was people receiving potted plants as gifts and not being able to part with them even when they have become straggly and unattractive as potted plants often do over time. This can happen if they are kept in the wrong environment with poor lighting or harsh conditions like in an air-conditioned office.

Let me create a scenario for you. Mary works in an office with no windows and thinks it needs a little sprucing up with a plant or two to add a little Mother Nature to the atmosphere. She generously gifts the office some lovely potted plants. Neither Mary nor her colleges have green thumbs but do remember to water the plants so they stay alive at least. The lighting is poor and the plants grow stringy trying to reach the light as plants do and they are never fertilised so they don’t thrive. Mary eventually moves on to a new position in another firm near by but drops in often to visit her old work friends. These friends realise that the plants are looking pretty sad and frankly detract form the otherwise cheery atmosphere of the office but are now reluctant to replace them because they were a gift to the office from Mary who drops in on a regular basis and would notice them gone. So it would be wrong to get rid of them right?

No! Mary probably thinks they look dreary too and is probably wondering why they are still there. My advice would be to give them a holiday from the office, take them home and see if a little tender loving care will revive their previous healthy condition. If that doesn’t work just replace them with similar plants using the old planter pots.

* * *

I gave my mother a plant for Mothers Day once, it was a golden cypress bush. I must have been about ten at the time. She planted it in the from yard at our house. My father later decided to put a driveway in down the side where the cypress was growing. Instead of just cutting it down he moved it to a new position. I don’t know if he did this under mum’s insistence because I had given it to her, until now I have never given it a thought. Anyway the cyress thrived in its new position and soon grew to about ten feet high. A couple of years later they sold the house and moved to another and the tree was left behind. So I bought my mum a new golden cyress for her next mothers day gift. She seemed to like the first one so why not. About three years later we moved from that house too but we never continued the tradition of the golden cypress plant and it didn’t matter to either off us. It never did matter, the original gift was just another gift the second one just seemed appropriate and by the third house I probably came up with better gift ideas or had more money to spend.

* * *

My daughter bought me an indoor plant for mothers day just after we moved into the house in which we currently reside. It had been in the same position for four years until this past Christmas. I used the planter I bought for it to hold the Christmas tree (twigs) and put the plant outside in a shady part of the garden for a little holiday. Alas its leaves got burnt by the sun and I had to trim it back so much that it no longer was big enough for the planter so I bought a new plant and left the other in another spot in the garden to see if it would recuperate. If my daughter noticed it gone when she visited last week she certainly didn’t mention it. I just went out to check and the plant has actually sprouted a new shoot, something it has never done indoors. Had it died so be it. I am sure my kids haven’t kept every gift I have given them either.

* * *

One last story. A friend gave me a blueberry bush as a thank you gift because she knows I don’t like clutter. I liked this gift simply because I like blueberries and hoped it would grow into a thriving bush and yeild a bountiful crop. I realise this could take a while and wasn’t expecting miracles in the first year. It took me a while to plant the bush but since then, probably thanks to the abundant rain this year, it has indeed thrived. Keep in mind it was only a tiny bush and now it is three times the size. My tiny bush yielded me only three delicious blueberries last year but I am hoping for a bigger crop next spring. If next year the rain is not so abundant and my blueberry bush dies from neglect because I am a lazy gardener it will be not big deal. If this was the case and my friend asked what became of it I would tell her it didn’t survive my brown thumb. I have a natural culling process in my garden, that is if it survives my neglect it must be a good hardy plant meant for the local conditions and belongs in my garden. She would understand, not that I think she would even ask or that it is going to die because I have actually taken particular care of this plant.

So the moral of these stories is a plant is just a plant. Like humans they live and die and sometimes it takes more expertise than you have to take care of them properly. So do your best and if it doesn’t work out don’t loose any sleep over it. And if you work in an office with sorry looking plants offer to take them home and give them some tender loving care and if that fails just replace them and either admit to your failing or pretend the replacements are the old plants that have thrived from your green thumb.

Today’s Declutter Item

What’s worse than real plant clutter? That’s right, fake plant clutter. This pathetic example  was “decorating” the top of my kitchen cupboards until I was up there cleaning them off a couple of weeks ago. It was so caked in kitchen grime and I didn’t like it anyway so I threw the plant in the bin and donated the pot and stand to the thrift store.

Fake Plant Clutter

Something I Am Grateful For Today

A break in the weather so I could walk to the post office to mail some ebay sales.

“In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.” Brother David Steindl-Rast

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