unclutter | Week 1: start (Reply)

Uncluttering weeks run Saturday-Friday, because Friday evening/Saturday is when I have time to reflect and review on how things are going.

Spouse and I had a good conversation about the state of the house and garden, and the work fairly neatly divides into Outside and Inside the house. Outside is not really decluttering, more general maintenance that's been neglected, for which we will Get People In. I will get on with project-managing this now we've agreed a sequence for what needs doing (noting here for reference):

garden fix and maintain (have a preferred gardener who already did some good work for us last year, "just" need to contact him)
gutters + soffits (check and follow up quote by local recommended person re soffits)
repaint the house externally (find local recs)
fix the fence and garden gate (find local recs)

Inside the house, the fundamental problem is too much stuff for the storage space available, and when things don't have homes, we have the time-honoured "solutions" of "pile them on a flat surface" or "shove them in a bag and put it out the way somewhere". So we have quite a lot of shelves with Miscellaneous Stuff, and a smaller number of random large bags ditto. It's not a hoarding situation, just a perpetually messy one, and it needs both decluttering and reorganising.

We've agreed that Spouse is, in the first instance, going to tackle the Lego storage project. We have many small collections of Lego around the house, and a translucent plastic storage unit with many drawers with useful divided trays inside, but we haven't actually finished the job of transferring small piles into the consolidated storage. Alongside / as well as that, he's going to work on culling and reorganising the shelves in the study.

Meanwhile, I am going to tackle the living room, one flat surface, teetering pile, or random bag at a time. We did agree we can dispose of an armchair that mostly gets used to store piles of things, which will make the room feel more spacious, so I took five minutes to photograph it and list it on Freecycle. After that, I experimented with a timer program: 15 minutes work, 5 minutes rest, 3 times. That got me some visible progress without completely exhausting me and I'm letting myself stop now.

In my hour-of-power I tackled the mantlepiece (a dangerously attractive flat surface), including the contents of two shallow open boxes into which many small things had been put when tidying up in a hurry:

multiple sets of seasonal/birthday cards are now recycled or set for reuse as postcards / gift tags
multiple random small items have been returned to their homes, e.g. tape measure, keys, stitch-ripper
one random book no-one is reading is by the door to go to the charity shop
assorted actual rubbish/recycling has gone in the bin

What's left is mostly a lot of small Lego or Playmobil or Miscellaneous Plastic Toy Stuff. I have decided to live dangerously and spread this out across the entire mantlepiece so that each item can be seen clearly. Before the end of the day I will get Elder Offspring to come and identify what if anything is Important Parts Of Toys, and make him take it away to reunite with same, and then Spouse to come and take any remaining Lego pieces. (Let's see if this works or everything ends up shoved back into a box.)

After all this, I still had ten minutes left, so I started working through a Bag of Miscellaneous Things lurking near the fireplace.

1 large stack of paper and card to the recycling bin
1 set of toy instructions to Elder Offspring's room
2 product manuals put away in my folder for product manuals
1 receipt put away in my receipts folder

The Bag is not yet empty but my final alarm went off so I stopped. (Especially as I need to wrangle other people through the Display of Delight on the mantlepiece before it becomes the new normal.)

Goals for the week: