Declutter November – final things and thoughts

Posted by louisa on Thursday 1 December 2011 in decluttering | 2 comments

After personally getting rid of bags full of clothes, craft supplies, a broken bucket and many books in the last four weeks, our little Declutter November challenge has come to an end.

My last three items for this last half week have been: a time-sensitive book from 2000 (so well out of date now), three VHS videos (saved from our main video clearouts because they’re a bit obscure from my film-student days, but we haven’t had a VHS player for years and years, so it doesn’t matter how obscure they are, I can’t play them) and a cardigan that I thought had gone in a much earlier clothes clearout.

My plan with the challenge was to get into the habit of seeing things and asking myself “do we still need, or even just want, that?” – and while I haven’t quite done it every day as intended (NaNoWriMo distracted me), I think I have done it enough to start looking at things in a new light. Some things were obvious contenders but some days I had to seek out something that needed to go – but as I said at the end of week 3, as soon as I picked something, I didn’t wobbly about it – I think I’d been blind to them then as soon as I saw them in a “I could get rid of that” light, it made perfect sense.

In some ways, it doesn’t feel like I’ve got rid of that much stuff – lots of little things. A few small bags of beads here, a handful of books there – but it does add up. We’ve got eight bin-bags and two carrier bags of clothes to go to the charity shop, plus two cardboard (banana) boxes of books and misc. We’ve got rid of three old computers (for their collectable-ness rather than their function) and a small bookshelf will go to the furniture charity shop next time we’re out that way. A few things have gone to/gone back to my mum and John’s dad, and a big box of misc has gone in the bin (thankfully it was mostly papers/card so it could be recycling/composting, very little has gone to landfill). Looking at it like that, that’s quite a lot of stuff out of the house! And it sounds like many of you have had similarly cleansing experiences — I’ve read all the comments, blog posts and tweets, and it sounds like an awful lot of packed charity/thrift/op shops have been getting stock boosts over the last few weeks!

I’ve also found stuff I’d forgotten about/lost and shifted lots of stuff from high concentration area to more out of the way locations (for example, our spare crockery and preserving jars now live in the porch/garage) so I’ve gained even more space.

All in all, I’ve very glad I did the challenge and am tempted to have another focused month next spring.

How has your decluttering gone? Any particularly noteworthy items that have gone bye-bye? Anything you found hard to let go – but you were glad about once it was gone?

November 2011 – end of month review

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 30 November 2011 in goals | 3 comments

I’ve surprised myself by how focused I’ve been this month. I’ll talk about it more below but this is what my 105,000 NaNoWriMo words looks like:

(It’s slightly bigger in “real life” ;) )

Goals in 2011 progress

I’ve been so focused on NaNoWriMo this month that I’ve done little else. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that some stuff just isn’t going to happen in 2011. Nevermind.

November mini-goals

I completed three of my mini-goals – the Declutter November challenge (I’ll post more on that tomorrow, when I’ve got rid of my final things!), the batch cooking (mostly a really nice lamb stew) and NaNoWriMo. I’ve loved doing NaNoWriMo – it’s taken up a lot of my time but I hit the 50,000 word mark on Day 11, which both surprised and delighted me. As it’s set before I was born, I’ve had to do a lot more research for this story than I have for anything else and that has been a lot of fun too – I have read about such a wide variety of things and come across some amazing resources online. My one regret is that the story still isn’t finished (which was the whole point of doing it for me) but I’ve got enough weight of it behind me now that I really do want to finish it, so I’ll continue through December. I’m still not sure whether it’s going to be worth editing and polishing but I’m glad I’ve written it anyway. It’s also helped me smash through my extended writer’s block and I’ve actually written a short theatre piece, and planned another two, during the month as well.

The problem has been that I’ve enjoyed NaNoWriMo far too much and not made time for anything else. The bacon hasn’t been made, the crochet tops still only half-finished, and not all my winter to-do to-did – but I think it’s been worth it over all. I’ll do them in December :)

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

I came into November having bought 11 things in 2011 and while I’ve randomly seen a few “oooh!” things this month, I’ve been very clearly telling myself “if you buy that skirt you’ll probably never wear etc, that’ll be the last thing you can buy in 2011” — and that’s been a surprisingly good motivator for keeping my purse in my pocket. I’ve bought no new clothes* so I’m still on 11 in 2011!

* I did buy some exempt socks as my sock drawer has seen a good number of comrades fall over the last few months – in the summer I don’t mind holey socks (and generally don’t wear socks that much anyway), but in the winter, I get annoyed when I can see more feet than cloth. I did go out of my way to find better quality socks than just replacing them with cheap ones – who knows how they’ll last but they certainly feel better quality (thicker, better stretch) at this point.

Growing & Chickens

The garden is asleep for winter – well, it should be, I’ve seen a disturbing amount of new growth out there — buds on trees, spring bulbs starting to peek through… There are a few leeks still to pick but everything else is finished for the year now. The chickens helped me clean up the last of the green things earlier in the month – and we discovered that if they eat a lot of achocha, it taints their eggs. Unfortunately we discovered that the day after I’d dragged the whole massive wall of achocha down to their run – Lily-dog got the next day’s eggs so we didn’t accidentally make them into a cake. She didn’t mind one bit :)

Two of the chickens – Ginger and Ms Mauve – have had partial moults but seem to be on the home straight with that now. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t start laying again until the new year though (or after that if it gets cold). Because of them being out of action, the short days slowing things down generally and our team getting that bit older (the ISAs are nearly two now), we’ve only been getting two or three eggs a day this month — 73 in total (or 2.43 eggs on average a day). Not the end of the world, still enough for us but we can’t give as many away as normal.

As always happens at this time of year, my mind is turning to next year – I need to decide on what fruit tree (choices: plum, damson or cherry) to add to the garden, which boring shrubs to replace with more soft fruit bushes (probably raspberries), and whether to get more staggered season strawberries or whether I should go for a glut for jams… Decisions, decisions!

Spending

Another reason I’ve loved NaNoWriMo – it really helped curve my spending after an expensive October. I was too focused on my writing to spend time browsing online shops or getting tempted on eBay. No expensive new books or craft supplies! At £128.01, it was by far my lowest month of spending all year – hurrah!

My biggest spending was on transport (taking the little stray dog to the vets and I missed the last bus home after class two weeks in a sodding row – meaning expensive taxis, boo) – £52.80/41% – and eating out (£34.70/27%). We’ve had a couple of lots of take-out and eaten out at restaurants a couple of times too. I’m annoyed about the taxis but I don’t mind so much about the food as it’s all be good food, not just junk. The other things I spent money on were socks, some things for work, and the vet’s bill for the small lost doggy.

All in all, it’s felt like a productive month – but I think December needs to include more bacon & crochet, and if I can stick to spending just as little as this month, I’ll be very happy.

How was your November? I hope yours was as good as mine!

(Oh, and Alexis, Martine & anyone else who NaNoWriMo-ed – congrats on winning too :) )

Declutter November – end of week 4

Posted by louisa on Monday 28 November 2011 in decluttering | 3 comments

No pictures this week because first my camera battery died mid-photo session and now my computer isn’t recognising the memory card. Sigh. Just imagine pics of assorted junk ;)

This week, I got rid of:

• Big Blue Dog – one of those “oh so soft!” impulse buys at Ikea nearly a decade ago. Deserves a more loving home (and a wash first).
• A freebie baseball cap from a geek conference
• A mirror I (charity shop-)bought just before we moved here but never even took out the bag
• Another old work diary, really no idea why I keep these
• Two books – one from my women’s studies book stash and one on artists using recycling materials that was given to me but I never looked in because that’s what I use the internet for
• A stack of papers, which became kindling for last night’s stove
• A box of misc rubbish – really random stuff from a card from colleagues I barely knew when I left my job five years ago to old mobile phone packaging and lots of tiny bits and bobs including a bottle of artificial vanilla-scented oil burner oil which had leaked everywhere and gave me a headache for the rest of my tidying mission.

It was all from our spare room, which has just been a dumping ground for miscellanea since we moved in. This sorting got rid of two cardboard boxes from up there too.

Declutter November mini-challenge week 4: your hobby/craft stash

And then there was the painful craft stash reduction. I cleared out:

• Three pairs of knitting needles – a 10mm set, a 5mm and an about 6mm set which has lost their ends. Oh and one half of a broken needle. (…?) (Mum: I’ll put these in my box of stuff for you in case you want these. The pairs, not the broken bit.)
• Two balls of turquoise acrylic yarn. I’m gradually getting rid of all my 100% acrylic yarn – I bought a lot of it when I first started knitting again but don’t like using it now.
• Some candle sand – I wasn’t sure whether this was really a craft stash item but I found it in one of my craft stash boxes so I’m including it ;)
• Four vintage pillow case – bought for the fabric but I have nicer ones I’m not doing anything with so chances are these won’t get used any time soon.
• A couple of metres of blue polyester. Left over from an old project. A project from 1999.

In my sorting, I also found some things I forgotten/didn’t know I had:

• A ten pack of wool-heavy green yarn, which I think was 100g a ball, away from the rest of my wool in a drawer.
• Two BNWT bras and a hoodie
• Two cute little fabric handbags
• A script for a play I performed once – and one that just this week I looked into buying again so see if it would be suitable for using with my drama group. Answer: no. Finding that script saved me £8!

So my decluttering this week has actually saved me money and provided me with “new” things to enjoy!

Just a couple of days left now – I’m hoping to get rid of a couple of big things since most of the other stuff has been quite small…

What have you got rid of this week? How did the hobby stash declutter go?

Three Chicken Things

Posted by louisa on Sunday 27 November 2011 in chickens | 2 comments

Have you heard of Three Beautiful Things? Every day since May 2004, Clare has recorded three things that have given her pleasure during the day. Sometimes these are big things (like her wedding day or the arrival of baby Alec) but mostly they’re the small, everyday things that make life wonderful: the “tight fists” of roses set to bloom, the pleasant sound of snow and the magical transformation when separate ingredients turn into food.

I 3BTed every day too, for just over a year, but I got out of the habit – I do still notice things and write them in my head, just don’t commit them to paper/blog anyway. I should really get back into doing it again, because sometimes 140 characters on Twitter just isn’t enough to describe the beauty in the world.

Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning all this here and now is that I had Three Beautiful Things happen connected to me cleaning out the chicken coop this morning, and I thought I’d record them :)

1. We’ve had the chickens for 18 months now but today was the first time that I time it right to see an egg being laid. Lime is in the nest box when I first go down there so I leave her be – I sweep some leaves and retrieved Lily’s Oinky toy from the field where she’d dropped it in her running-around excitement. I peek back into the nest box around ten minutes later and see a big dry poo being pushed out – delightful – but then instantly the egg follows. It’s slippery and slick when it lands on the straw.

2. Blue hops onto the edge of the chest, clucking questions, as I dig clean shavings out of the bag. Her comb stands tall and red, her eyes are lemon and clear. Her neck feathers swoop sideways like a teenager’s fringe. Gingery-red, flecked with blonde and black.

3. Lime stands on my feet while I’m giving out pumpkin seeds so that she’s the closest to the treat source. It reminds me of how Lily sits on my feet when I’m cooking. The “please?” look on their faces is the same too.

And a bonus item:

4. As I stand at the kitchen sink washing my hands, the trees are alive with birds. A pair of chaffinches – a boy and a girl – hop about in the elder tree, the small blue tits are just tiny specks as they flit around the far away ivy bush and in comparison to them, it seems that the large tits in the cherry plum tree are truly defining gravity when they throw their big bodies into the air. Then I see another couple of birds in the holly bush that I hadn’t consciously seen before and I take in their noticeably longer tails and white mohawks so I can identify them later on the RSPB website. My hands are perhaps the cleanest they’ve ever been by the time I’ve had enough of the wildlife show.

What beautiful moments have there been in your life this weekend?

Ponderings #1 – on pennies

Posted by louisa on Thursday 24 November 2011 in frugal | 15 comments

This was originally going to be a much longer post on two vaguely connected things but I think it confused the issue lumping them together, so I’ve split it up – pennies today, the other thing tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, there was an interesting article on Get Rich Slowly about picking up pennies. (I’ve linked to GRS a few times recently – the US-centric investment/credit card advice and similar that was very common when I started reading it has recently dropped off and now it’s mostly just good frugal living advice.)

So this article was about why the author Donna Freedman picks up pennies from she sees them on the ground. She talks about why the “ewww, it’s dirty” argument is just silly and the best places to look for spare coins, but the most interesting thing for me was when she talks about what she does with them: she saves them up in a jar and donates them to a food bank –

according to the hunger-relief charity Feeding America, $1 provides the makings for eight meals. I keep that in mind every time I pick up a penny: Another 99 of these and eight people get to have supper.

I used to pick up pennies all the time. I think I probably stopped about six years ago now, when I was still in full time employment and those pennies didn’t mean that much to me any more – or rather, I knew that they’d mean more to other people. We lived in a poor estate in a poor area so it seemed to be rude for me to take them when they could make more of a difference to someone on a tight budget. I still think this is a valid point but I do like Donna’s idea too – she collected $44.58 last year, which she rounded up to $50, and that provided food for 400 people: who knows how much of that money would have been picked up by someone who needed it, instead of being picked up by someone who didn’t really need it, or possibly getting washed or swept away and be lost to everyone forever?

Changing the topic slightly, we’ve always had penny pots at home – silver ones which are plundered for bus fare all the time, copper ones that are filled and counted while watching a film on a wintery afternoon – and it surprises me when I hear that other people don’t have them. At the far end of the scale, a friend of a friend THROWS AWAY ALL HIS CHANGE, as he puts it in the BIN, not in a jar for counting later or a charity bucket. He’s successful in business and I imagine his reckoning is that it’s not worth his time to find a jar, drop the coins in there every day and take it to his bank/Coinstar/a charity collection once a year. If he wanted to give the equivalent money to charity, he could argue that he would be better spending his time – those seconds that add up – adding value to his business, because that would probably mean he was able to donate more money in the long run. Since finding out about that, I’ve heard of examples of at least two people who do the same – and it had never occurred to one of them that he could collect them up rather than just THROWING MONEY AWAY. I think my capital letters show how aghast I am about this idea!

Do you pick up pennies on the street for yourself or for charity, or do you leave them where they are? Do you have a penny jar at home? Are you as shocked as I am about the people throwing money in the bin?! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this :)

Declutter November mini-challenge week 4: your hobby/craft stash

Posted by louisa on Monday 21 November 2011 in decluttering | 7 comments

Ah, you knew this one was coming, didn’t you? ;)

I’ve also deliberately left it ’til last as I imagine most people will have dipped into their hobby stashes already – hopefully though having a focused look at it will help everyone (and me especially!) prune further: get rid of extra five things (or sets of things), in addition to your normal one a day.

The original idea for this was “declutter your craft stash” but I know that not everyone is crafty so I’ve expanded it to being whatever you hoard for your hobby. I’m assuming everyone taking part in the challenge hoards some stuff – if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be needing to declutter ;)

For me, I’m going to look at my yarn stash and my fabric stash, and at my books yet again because I always can prune them further. My t’other half John doesn’t craft but he hoards (or certainly did in the past) computer related stuff so I’d imagine he could find five things to get rid of there, and he’s a reader too so I’m sure he could find a few books he wouldn’t read again.

So whatever your poison – be it cooking, a craft, a sport, a game, a performance art or collecting something – have a look through your tools/equipment, your materials stash, your collection or whatever, and see what can go.

Think about what no longer any use to you – clear some space and maybe even pass it on to someone just starting out in your favourite pursuit!

Declutter November – end of week 3

Posted by louisa on Monday 21 November 2011 in decluttering | 1 comment

We’ve finished another week of Declutter November – and I’m beginning to struggle a bit!

I think I snagged a lot of the low hanging fruit earlier in the month and during the garden & wardrobe, and this week’s kitchen, mini-challenges so now I feel like I’m picking things just to meet the target rather than because I actually want to get rid of them. That said, I don’t have any wobbles about the things I’ve selected so perhaps it’s good that I’m being forced into it – I’m looking for stuff to declutter rather than it jumping out at me.

This week’s selection then:

• three books (3 items)
• a pair of candlestick holders that we got as a gift nearly ten years ago and have never used (1 item)
• a cute … thing (pencil case? make up bag) that I bough on eBay thinking it was purse size (it’s not) (1 item)
• two necklaces I took to my mum on Saturday so they’re not pictured (she gave me some of her clutter in return – clutter swap! – but I’m still counting them ;) ) (1 item)
• and another not pictured – a cute little cotton hoodie I bought for one of our nephews when he was born but forgot to pass on until it was too late. He’s two in a couple of months so it’s sat on my desk for quite a while now! (1 item)

Declutter November mini-challenge week 3: the kitchen

While I’m starting to struggle in the rest of the house, the kitchen mini-challenge was easy peasy! I got rid of:

• six big egg boxes – lots of people save egg boxes for us but we don’t have much use for these big 12/15 egg ones. They’ll go in the compost as it could use some bulk at the moment.
• an old bamboo steamer – since we have since inherited both a better bamboo steamer set and a metal one from friends.
• a cute little tea bag dish which is too small for our teabag mountain
• the chicken-shaped egg holder I mentioned in the mini-challenge launch – he’s nice but not for us right now
• the blue thing on the top of the pile, which is a thermos flask for soup/leftovers. I bought it when I temporarily didn’t have access to a microwave at work in … 2002? I then got access to a microwave and it was easier to take things cold then reheat them than carry the bulky flask. I have never used it!

I also moved a lot of things out of the kitchen: six plates, two bowls and four cups into cupboard space elsewhere along with our plastic picnic cups/cutlery; a carrier bag full of old teatowels to use as dirty rags elsewhere; two little shelves of misc; and all the medicines in the box below, which had been stuffed on a toddler-height shelf instead of being properly put back in the medicine box in the bathroom:

We now have some paracetamol, a pack of ibuprofen and a pack of plasters in a little drawer in the kitchen – that’s more than enough on hand. And now we’ve moved everything that nearly two year old nephew who never got his hoodie is far less likely to accidentally overdose on Strepsils and sticky plasters too…!

Between getting rid and clearing out, we now have a lot more cupboard space, an almost completely empty drawer, and three small shelves that are clear. Woo!

How has your week of decluttering gone? Are you still making progress?