On day 119 I spoke briefly about sorting through my warranties and manuals.  I received a comment from Jen who suggested using Manuals on-line to source the manuals on line and saving them to a file on your computer for when and if you need them. You could also just access them online when you need them saving room on your hard drive but you relying on the fact that they will be available indefinitely.

Steph said:-I spent the afternoon tossing old manuals and finding the rest online. Now I have a Google Docs folder with PDFs of everything I still own. I found most of them on the manufacturers web sites.

I was having trouble accessing IKEA assembly manuals on the Australian website but using google I found this web address  for IKEA where I found most of the ones I needed.

Sometimes you need to google what you are looking for and plough through a few web sites to find exactly what you want but it is worth the effort so you don’t have to store gobs of paperwork that takes up valuable file drawer space.

ITEM 123 OF 365LESS THINGS

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.

I finally got all the snow clothing out of the cupboard on the weekend (one of those jobs I have been avoiding) and put it all on eBay.  All that is except the pair of men’s pants that had a hole in the leg and a ripped lining – I don’t know why I hadn’t already tossed them out- and 2 pair of goggles that the foam fining had perished while stuck in the cupboard unused.

The auctions are going well 5 out of 10 things already have bids on and anything that doesn’t sell will be going to the thrift shop.

While writing this I realised that I forgot to put the other pairs of goggles on eBay so I had better take care of that shortly. I think there may be another jacket in my son’s closet as well so I have better check that out.

That certainly freed up some room in one cupboard.

I don’t know why I had been avoiding this job for so long but it is a good thing I decided to do it now because Australia is about to move into winter and the ski season will be starting soon so now is the perfect time to put ski gear on eBay. That is a good tip to remember – Consider the seasons when selling on eBay some things will sell better at certain times of the year.

ITEM 117 OF 365 LESS THINGS

These are the pants I had to toss because they were torn.

My posts from day 110 and yesterday got me thinking about a combination of the basis of those two subjects., oversized homes and unnecessary cars. What about unnecessarily large cars.

How many people own cars far greater in size than their everyday needs. When we lived in America we owned a V8 Mustang and a seven seater van. We loved both these cars, the Mustang because, well it was a V8 Mustang convertable, who wouldn’t and the Van because whenever we had visitors from Australia this vehicle had enough room to fit everyone in and it was roomy and comfortable and handy to have when we needed to haul large items.

Not very good reasons for owning such terrible gas guzzlers. Instead of owning the big van we could easily have hired a similar vehicle when we had visitors or needed to haul stuff  which only happened maybe once a year if that. The little Chevy Cavalier we owned before the Mustang was far cheaper to run, more reliable and had one extra passenger space and didn’t bottom out on speed bumps.

Ah, the crazy things we do for vanity and convenience.

Now we own two motorbikes one is my husband’s one is my son’s and a small Ford Fiesta. That has not doubt reduced our cardon footprint to a much smaller size not to mention the savings in running costs.

ITEM 115 OF 365 LESS THINGS

The modern cars today have inbuilt security systems rendering the car useless when you don’t have a key to start them so this little item is of no use to me.

Last year we decluttered the garage by one whole car. Now I know you thought this post was going to be about cleaning out the garage and in a way it is because  we  made a whole lot more space by getting rid of one of our cars.

Granted this car was only bought because my husband had to work 500km away from home for almost a whole year and only came home every other weekend but never the less we could have kept the car for the convenience when he came back but we didn’t.

The money we have saved not paying for insurance, licensing (rego to you Aussies) and  maintenance alone never mind how much more we would have spent on petrol (gas) just because it was there and we could is insane. My husband rides a motorbike to work which is way cheaper to own and run than a car and I live about a 20 minute walk to my work so it is no effort to get there if my husband needs the car so it really hasn’t been difficult to manage without it.

I am sure we could even cope if my husband sold his motorbike too and maybe that is an option if I committed myself to using man power rather than horse power more often.

Choosing our home with a location convenient to shops and work has saved us a whole lot of cash because of the lack of the necessity for expensive travel costs.

ITEM 114 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Today’s item, a car sun shade was in the old car when we bought it and somehow managed to be left in the garage when we sold it I did attempt to find it useful at one point be kept forgetting to use it so out it goes

I read forums and posts on other blogs and I can’t help but think that people put themselves under too much pressure when it comes to decluttering. Below are a few suggestions I have to help release that pressure…

• The clutter didn’t appear overnight so don’t expect it to disappear overnight.
• Don’t look at the big picture it’s too scary sometimes.
• Pace yourself, there is no hurry.
• Don’t set a deadline.
• Save the hard to decide items until last. I find the further I get into this the more ruthless I become.
• Be rational, way up the pros and cons when it comes to what stays and what goes.
• One step at a time, whether that is one room one cupboard, one drawer or one item just so long as it is something at a pace you can handle.
• Give yourself a mental pat on the back with every item you send on it’s way.
• Stay focused on what you have achieved not the size of the task ahead.

One thing you must remember is to not replace the items you are getting rid of with some other thing that will soon become tomorrows clutter making your efforts useless because you are taking one step forward two steps back.

ITEM 113 OF 365 LESS THINGS

The word gadget alone conjures up images of items with more of a novelty factor than any real practical use and for the purpose of this post it is meant to do so.

How many things on your “really don’t need or use” list come under the Single Function Gadget title. For example, my contribution for today to my 365 things are a set of plastic ice cubes. I am sure they were bought for their novelty factor but after using them both to keep liquids cool and in an icepack I really didn’t feel that they radiated the cold as well as the real thing.  I could find no science to back up my claim here but never-the-less I don’t find them useful and they are out of here.

Another thing I found quite useless are those silicon cup cake baking cups. What a pain they are to get clean. I soon went back to using the disposable paper cups.

If anyone out there has a product that they have found to be next to useless please contact me and I will make of page of  Single Function Gadgets as a warning to other innocent consumers.

ITEM 111 OF 365 LESS THINGS

I know I am getting slightly outrageous today but I just wanted to plant this thought.

Now that you have created space in your home do you really need it? That much space I mean. How many of us live in homes that are far to big for our needs.

Is your home just a status symbol with more rooms than you need that just cause you a whole lot of wasted time doing housework.

When I was a child with four siblings and a mum and dad, we all managed to live quite comfortably in a four bedroom house with one bathroom, a kitchen, a lounge room with a rumpus room under the house.  One of the bedrooms was actually used as a spare room and Mum’s sewing room as she did dress making from home for extra cash.

When I was 21 we moved into a house with four bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a billiard room, a study, a kitchen and a formal dining room. At this stage three of my siblings had already left home. Now my parents have “downsized” to a house with four bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a billiard room, a study, a lounge room, a kitchen and a dining area and they live together alone in this house.

I know my mum likes to think we can all fit into this house should we all come to visit at once but now that the grandchildren are growing up and starting to get married and have children of their own is she going to  buy a hotel to fit everyone in.

It was just a thought, please don’t thing I have gone completely off the rails with the whole decluttering thing.

ITEM NUMBER 110 OF 365LESS THINGS

Clearly this has nothing to do with the topic of  the day but it is however my contribution for day 110

When retrieving my vacuum cleaner from the linen closet this week on cleaning day I paid a little attention to the number of towels on the shelves that I really don’t ever use. They were sitting there taking up valuable space simply because they were still in reasonable condition or I thought they might come in handy one day for rags or if some incident happened where I would need to mop up a large spill that I wouldn’t want to put in my washing machine.

After giving it some rational thought I decided three things…

1. since I have discovered microfiber I would never use lint filled old towels for any cleaning job.
2. the likelihood of any incident occurring that required such a large mop up other than a pipe bursting (that only contained clean water) was highly unlikely.
3. I would rather be able to fit the useful towels easily on the shelf than have to cram them in with half a dozen towels that I never use.

So goodbye unused towels, hello to more cupboard space.

ITEM 109 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Now I know that uncluttering your ironing basket doesn’t actually remove anything from your house but it sure would lighten your To-Do List leaving more time for real de-cluttering. Speaking from someone who spent at least three hours slaving over a hot iron today, I am up for any suggestion as to how to reduce this workload.

It would certainly help if we bought clothes with less cotton content and more in the way of  poly/cotton blend.

I put fabric softener in all my loads to try to cut down on the wrinkles and I am sure that helps but not enough. I also hang the clothes on an airing rack inside the house so they aren’t out going stiff in the wicked heat of the sun. Drying them in the clothes dryer isn’t an option either because I have a washer dryer combo (all in one model) and I find it wrinkles the clothes even worse than hanging them. In a way this is a good thing because then I am not tempted to resort to this method because that would be a huge waste of electricity.

All I can hope for as that the current clothes will wear out and we can all buy replacements with a higher polyester content or that someone will leave home so there is one less person to iron for. The chances of that someone ironing their own clothes is about as likely as the clothes ironing themselves (now there’s a dream).

ITEM 107 OF 365 LESS THINGS

Since a photo of my pile of ironing is not an example of real de-cluttering you will find below today’s actual contribution. Yet another couple of toiletry items I unearthed when raiding the cupboards for the out of date medications from day 103

Colleen’s Helpful Hint of the Day

Denture cleaner in warm water makes a great silver and gold jewellery cleaner.

(Always test method first and never use this method on pearls)