The intention for this post is to help you choose the best way to dispose of the objects you are decluttering. Some objects will be just trash but for others you will be endeavouring to find new homes either by donating to a charity, giving them to someone else or selling them.

There are often emotions involved when it comes to clutter. Finding the right home for your things can make the decision to let go a lot easier. For example it feels easier to let go if you…

• Know that the procedes of donating your items to charity will help someone in need.
• Get a little money back by selling your items.
• Know your items will be appreciated when giving them to family or friends who have admired them.
• Doing the right thing for the environment by finding a way to recycle items you thought were good for nothing.

Donating to charity is simple. In some places it is as simple as making a phone call and the charity will come to you to collect your items. In some cases you just amass the objects until you have a car load and then drop them off to a charity near you.  I won’t go into specific details as to what charity to use because that will be different depending where you are in the world. I am sure everyone is aware of a charity in their area that you can either drop off or phone for a pickup.

Be mindful of what you send to charity. They will not accept certain item because of safety and/or hygiene reasons. They may or may not accept mattresses or sofas that are stained. Some won’t accept mattresses at all. They usually will not accept underpants, for obvious reasons, unless they are new with tags on. Also, please make sure any items that you send to a charity are clean and in useable condition (working order). Soiled and broken items will be rejected and the charities end up having to pay huge fees to send loads of these uncharitable donations to landfill. If in doubt about what the charity will accept just phone them and ask.

Selling is a great way to eleviate the guilt of having spent money on an object that you didn’t get good value out of. It is also a good way to redeem a little cash to help pay off credit card debt that you probably shouldn’t have racked up in the first place.

I mostly sell on eBay but there are also other world wide sites like Craiglist. These are not the only options though. My husband’s work place has a on-line community board where employees can post For Sale ads, maybe you have such a resource. Australia has Trading Post and Gun Tree and others I am sure. Most places will have newspapers that also have on-line classified. My daughter once sold some old clothes using Facebook as her advertising medium. Just use your imagination or google something like “Selling Online” and see what comes up.

It is important however when advertising items to give a detailed description of exactly what the item is you are selling and what that includes. Just as important is to be honest about the condition the item is in. Just because something doesn’t work or isn’t complete doesn’t mean someone won’t want it. Parts can be just is valuable to people as the whole. If you think an item is worth selling why not give it a go.

Giving to family and friends is can be a very satisfying way to pass things on. Particularly things that you have held dear for some time. Perhaps things that have been handed down to you from other family members. If someone you know admires something you have decided to declutter they would be a good candidate to offer this item too. Always make certain that the person you offer it to only takes it if they truly want it. Make sure you explain that there is no obligation and you won’t be upset if they turn down your offer.

Giving to family and friends isn’t always about precious objects it can also be about useful objects. My father recently gave my brother his ride-on mower because my father no longer lives on a large property but my brother has a vacant block of land to mow.

Other ways to give stuff away.

• Freecycle is a great resource for giving things away. Especially those odd things that aren’t suitable for charity or for selling.
• Putting stuff out on the footpath with a free sign on it has also worked well for me in the past.
• One of our readers occasionally leaves a box in the foyer of their apartment building with free items in. You could possibly do this at your place of work or at a community group that you visit like a children’s playgroup.
• When I lived in the US there was a homeless man that was often begging at my freeway exit who I used to give things to every now and again. One day I even brought him a hot meal, he was very happy about that.
• Rachel, one of our readers is having a give away morning on the 20th of August to reduce her stuff before moving into a smaller dwelling. Hows that for ingenuity.

The options are endless. Once again just use your imagination. Today I googled “Give stuff away” and came up with some sites I didn’t know about like ozrecycle.com, scoodi.com and altruists.org. I didn’t check to see how good they were but I did find those and many more.

Recycling is an important aspect to decluttering. Anything that can be recycled should be disposed of responsibly. There are several way I go about this….

1. I put any items, that are suitable, into my recycling bin. Your local government department in charge of the collection of these bins will most likely have a web site giving clear instruction as to what type of items are suitable to go in them.
2. Larger items that may have some potential for recycling get saved until our local council has a curbside pick-up day. This is where you put the bigger items that won’t go in the trash or recycling out on the street for pick-up. Old mattresses, furniture, televisions, building materials and many other items are suitable for this type of collection. Many of these items will have components for recycling. I find that, in my area, the piles of stuff awaiting pick-up are well picked over and deminished in volume by the time the actual collection day happens. What is collected is sorted into trash and recyclables and treated accordingly.
3. There are often designated drop off areas or special drop of days for the recycling of certain items. Batteries, paint, electrical goods, chemicals etc are often disposed of in this way. Once again you can utilise your search engine by typing something like “recycle batteries (name of your city)” and helpful information will likely pop up.
4. Once again Freecycle is also a good way to recycle or repurpose items that are no longer in working order. I have given away pieces of furniture  and electrical items on Freecycle. There are often folks out there who are happy to fix of use the parts for these items.

I hope this post has helped you find some ways to responsibly rehouse or recycle your unwanted items. You will have peace of mind knowing your once precious things are going to good homes. And I can not stress enough how important it is to do the right thing by the environment, by keeping perfectly good stuff out of landfill and by decreasing the demand for the production of new products.

Here is a link to a guide I am slowing adding to that gives you ideas and web sites that will help you find appropriate places to donate and recycle.

Today’s Declutter Item

Some more t-shirts off to the thrift store today when I go to do my volunteer work. 

My husbancs T-shirts

Something I Am Grateful For Today

I love how fast my donations leave the house now that I am volunteering at the thrift store where I drop them off. Last week I even dropped something off for my neighbour. I am grateful the the lovely people at the thrift store have made me feel so at home there already. I look forward to going each time. It is wonderful to see the stuff walking out the door to be reused by someone else.

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

Sixteen months into my declutter mission and thirteen months blogging about it and I still have the odd stumbling block when it comes to decluttering.

• It isn’t staying away from shopping I mastered that discipline very quickly but then again I was always a bit thrifty.
• It isn’t obligation clutter because I feel no compulsion to keep things just because someone else thinks I should.
• It isn’t bringing stuff back into the house that I had already decluttered to its departure point. I don’t think in all this time that I have ever done that.
• It isn’t I might need it some day clutter. I think I knew from the get go that this is often what gets most people into this mess in the first place so I don’t play that game any more.
• In isn’t guilt clutter because I have certainly gotten rid of plenty of that.

And yet in a way it is guilt clutter. Not clutter I can’t make a decision on because guilt makes me feel I should keep it. Or like obligation clutter I would feel guilty getting rid of something someone gave me. Not even straight ~ I can’t get rid of this because I paid good money for it and I haven’t used it to it’s full potential. What it is is this..

I spent good money on this item and I would like to recoup some of that money by selling it. Sounds easy and it is, that’s the point. All I have to do is retrive the item from its hiding place take a few photos, write a blurb, choose a selling price or starting bid depending on how I intend to sell it and leave it in the lap of the Gods to decide whether I am successful of not.

I have written similar posts about this at least twice already over the last fifteen months and I still can’t convince myself that this is as easy as it sounds. There are items in my house that have had every intension of decluttering right from the very start that I have done nothing about them simply because I don’t want to deal with the selling process and all that that entails. I think as much as anything else it is the fact that once I have dragged these items out of hiding I have to put up with having them in plain sight until the sales has reached completion and I can send the item on its merry way.

Here are some of the items in question

• Daughter’s ski jacket ~ I somehow missed this one when I sold all the other ski gear and now is the best selling time again because we are about to go into ski season in Australia. It is just a case of listing it on eBay and even though I am sure it will sell well I am still unenthused. I have actually taken it our of the cupboard and taken the photos already but haven’t listed it yet.
• Paper craft supplies ~ Granted this one is a little trickier because my intention is to have a sales table at the Air Force base craft group gathering. This happens once a month, I think, and I have never attended so it requires me to get in contact with the people running the group to get the OK to do this. I have to weed out all the items I want to sell, price it all, travel forty minutes to get there, have someone meet me to get me through base security… blah blah blah. But oh the benefits of having an interested captured audience and the freedom of getting rid of the over abundance of supplies cluttering up my office/craft space. I really do need to use the excitement of the end result to spur me on with this task.
• Daughter’s keyboard ~ I have only just asked her if she wants to keep this even though I have had my eye on it from the very beginning. She has now told me she no longer wants and is keen to reep the extra cash at my inconvenience. It is a bit inconvenient (shipping cost) to sell on eBay but I have other local options which I think would be successful. My only hold up here is the effort dragging it out of her bedroom cupboard and photographing it and come up with a selling price.
• Son’s Coka Cola collection. Awkward to list, lots of photos involved (already taken, mind you, but I still haven’t done anything about it). Awkward to ship (I think this is my actual stumbling block here) and not sure how well received it will be on eBay. Not sure whether to sell items separately or one job lot… What I really want out of this is a few dollars back in my boy’s pocket which is why this box of items haven’t just been given away already.

As you can see there is more to this than meets the eye but you know what, I have no shortage of stubborn determination. I have hit this wall before and I dare say I will hit it again but in the end my determination wins out and I sell sell sell. Just like when I sold my iRobot cleaners, shelf unit, Kiss dolls and much more. You are probably thinking why not just do yourself a favour and donate these things. Why not indeed? Because like I said every now and again an item comes along that I just want to recoup a little money back on or a want to make a few dollars for the kids and for that I find the will.

What is your decluttering stumbling block or Achilles’ heal when it comes to decluttering? Share it with us by leaving a comment maybe myself or someone out there will have the perfect solution for you or at least some much needed encouragement.

Today’s Declutter Item

If I could just work out why I keep getting holes in my t-shirts I wouldn’t be forced to declutter them. I wouldn’t mind so much if they were old but I only bought this one last August. Not happy. I think it is one of two things ~ my laptop or the seat belts in the car rubbing the t-shirt against the fly of my pants. Either way the solution is simple and I have to ask myself why I haven’t done anything to fix the situation. The think the word I am looking for is Apathy. 😳

My Gratitude List

• Something that made be laugh ~ My neighbour was telling me he has his chicken well trained but they only speak Macedonian. We laughed together.
• Something Awesome ~ Greek Yoghurt ~ there are so many ways you can use it. My hubby has it on his cereal, it is great in and along side a curry, it is delicious mixed with honey with a sprinkling of muesli (granola) on top, as a raising agent in Naan bread, for making tzatziki sauce to have with crumbled fetta and Greek fries…
• Something to be grateful for ~ That Liam’s motorbike started OK this morning. He had a slight problem in the morning yesterday then flattened the battery in the evening to end the day on a low note. He would have been a very cranky boy had the bike not started this morning as he has a lot on his plate at the moment.
• Something that made me happy ~ Oddly enough getting to the bottom of a box of tumble dryer sheets made me happy. I don’t believe they make a significant improvement to the softness of my towels and they are most likely bad for the environment on many levels so to me they were wasting space in my laundry cupboard. I am not counting them as a declutter item but I am nevertheless glad to see the back of them.
• Something I found fascinating ~ My neighbour left Macedonia when he was nineteen be must be in his sixties now but he still speaks Macedonian to the chickens. I thought that was cute. He also told me he has been tempted to put bells around a few of the chicken necks to remind him of the sounds of the home country when he used to herd sheep. He told me it was very hard for him to leave his country and come to Australia all alone so long ago. It makes me wonder about the affect leaving America has had on my children. Even though we moved as a family they still miss what to them had become their home country and I know they miss it greatly. If my neighbour can still feel the pain forty plus years later (though his situation was very different) I imagine the memories will never fade for my children either. Funny how something that made me laugh at first has now made me equally sad but it is fascinating to me to make this comparison which didn’t even occur to me at the time when I was speaking to Jack.

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