Decluttering “challenge” for November

Posted by louisa on Monday 24 October 2011 in decluttering | 14 comments

I’m going to set myself a decluttering “challenge” for November – and I’d love it if some other people joined in.

It seems a good time to do it – the season has definitely turned now (to cold up here in the northern hemisphere, to warm down on the flip side) so we can sort through our summer/winter gear to put it into storage and clear out the surplus at the same time. In the northern hemisphere as well, we’re retreating into our homes more – more time to get annoyed with all the junk and more time to deal with it. And for people who celebrate Christmas and other holidays, it’ll help with the pre-family-descending tidying preparations and a reminder about how this year’s new gifts can be next year’s clutter if not chosen with care.

The “challenge” will be a pretty simple one: get rid of one thing every day In practical terms for me that’ll mean consigning one thing every day to our “to go to the charity shop” box, actually giving it to someone else in person or, for the odd thing, list on eBay/Gumtree.

I’m calling it a “challenge” rather than an actual challenge because, to be frank, it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m going to set myself mini-“challenges” each week too, in addition to the main one, to focus my attention in a few specific areas – but even still, it’ll probably be quite easy. The reason I still want to do it though is to help start to form a habit – to change how I look at things around our home. I don’t know about you guys but I get really blind to certain things around the house then suddenly I see them and think “why on earth have we left that there for so many months?”. Instead, I want to be see everything and think “do we need or even just want that in our lives still? could someone else make better use of it than we do?”. That change of outlook has to start somewhere.

I also want to actually do it every day, rather than just saying “get rid of 30 things in the month” because I think that’ll be more useful for building the habit. With the mini-“challenges”, it’ll probably be about 50 things in total – and if I get my partner John on board, he has to find his own dang 50, no sharing ;)

Anyone else up for it?

Realising “Kept for best” is wasteful

Posted by louisa on Friday 10 December 2010 in decluttering, frugal | 1 comment

Yesterday, our friend Strowger tweeted a link to this article by “essayist and programmer” Paul Graham about “stuff”.

I would urge you to read it if you’ve got five minutes. If you haven’t got five minutes, the message is “stuff, clutter, is bad, m’kay?” but it says it somewhat better than that.

It’s a topic I’ve touched on a few times on this blog – and it’s a concept I believe even if I don’t always live it. But this paragraph leapt out at me:

The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don’t use much because it’s too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.

Paul Graham on “Stuff“

I think this not only applies to “fragile stuff” but anything that’s “kept for best” or “kept to be enjoyed at a later special time, not now, not all the time”.

We don’t have “good china” or a pristine room solely for entertaining guests. We don’t have a fancy car that we worry about parking it on the street or in bad areas. We don’t really have “Sunday best” clothes – we have items we don’t wear every day, that are a bit smarter, but we don’t wear them because we prefer to wear other things, not because we’re saving them for a special occasion.

But on smaller things, I’m guilty of wasteful behaviour when “keeping stuff for best”.

For example, I frequently delay pleasure to, in theory, enjoy it all the more at the end. Sometimes this pays off: I finish a meal on my favourite bit of it so the taste of the delicious, seasoned meat stays in my mouth rather than the overcooked, watery carrot.

But other times it promotes waste. John gets annoyed when I save a piece of cake or sweets until I really, *really* want it/them – but it goes stale or sticky before that time arrives. Or, slightly different but part of the same thing, a craft project sits half finished forever because I worry I haven’t the skills to complete it PERFECTLY (when I could finish it in a “good enough” way immediately).

It’s funny, I knew I wasted cake sometimes. And I knew exactly why I wasn’t finishing that half-made quilt. But it was only after reading that paragraph that it really drove home to me quite how bad the habit is – how wasteful it is of the world’s resources, of money and of my mental resources.

Definitely something I need to change about myself!

New books in, old books out

Posted by louisa on Friday 8 October 2010 in decluttering | 0 comments

I went on a bit of a book buying spree one evening last week – a combination of Amazon new & used, and Abebooks. Unusually for me, all of the books were fiction – I think I’m subconsciously preparing for a winter of reading in front of the stove.

Six packages arrived one morning – our poor postman – and to make the most of it, I stretched out opening them over the next few days. I love opening parcels containing brand new books – the flatness of the pages, that fab new book smell – and compared to that, opening new-to-me used books is a more varied, often disappointing experience if the books are in a poorer condition than expected — but that’s usually fleeting and I’d prefer to have cheaper, used books than that new-book experience any day.

When I was talking about the hidden costs of hoarding a few months ago, I decided that I’d have a new policy when it came to buying books to avoid our (extensive) book collection spinning out of control: for every two books I buy, I have to get rid of an existing one.

So I got nine books in and this is my five out:

A couple of old fiction books, a judgemental poor man’s Louis Theroux book about the US, a how-to book on soft furnishings which I bought at the wrong end of my interest in soft furnishings, and a coffee table book on Art Deco artefacts/ornaments.

With Dan’s great suggestion for using Library Thing as a way to remember books rather than keeping the physical copies, I don’t have to worry about forgetting the fiction ones, so all these will be heading off to a charity shop soon!

Realising why we have so many books – and what we can do about it

Posted by louisa on Monday 20 September 2010 in decluttering | 2 comments

(Apologies if this is stating the bleedin’ obvious but it was a revelation to us! ;) )

Our rather nomadic friend Dan popped by our house on Saturday to meet the dog and the chickens and say a passing hello to us before he moves on again. Between various post-grad studies, jobs and that crazy little thing called love, Dan’s moved around a lot over the last few years and he revealed that ahead of/during his moves, he’s pared down his book collection considerably, from about 500 tomes to just 100. Since we’re book-y people (we met on an English Literature course) to get rid of that many is quite an achievement.

Even with my new anti-hoarding policy (of giving away a book for every two new-to-me books I buy), I still find it difficult to give books away – but it was only while talking to Dan that I realised why. Most of the time, I don’t have any particular attachment to the physical books but I have great affection for the stories contained within. And a considerable amount of the time, I have no desire to read the story again any time soon, I just don’t want to forget it exists — seeing the spine on my shelves reminds me of the story and often reminds me of the time of my life when I read it etc. The example we both used were Ben Elton’s early novels – the environmental ones, Gridlock, Stark and This Other Eden. Not exactly literary masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, not books I’ve read in the last decade and not books I see myself reading in the next five years or more – but I remember finding them interesting as a teenager and still think about some of the ideas regularly to this day. It was the first time I’d really consciously realised the current purpose of a considerable part of my book collection (and to a lesser extent, our media collection too).