Week 5 review / plan for week 6

[rmc28]

Plan for week 5: Hours-of-power: Sun x2 (if possible), Tue & Thu.

Actual outcome: 4+ hours on Sunday

I tackled the four shelves where sticker books, puzzle books, colouring books, pens and paper for the children are currently living, alongside (and tangled up with each other and) a number of magazine files and "coffee table books". I thought it would take me about two hours. It took over four. (With breaks every 15 minutes, and longer breaks after each hour). It was a long slog, and one that didn't have a good stopping point until the end, so definitely one to save for the weekend. I could have just put back what I'd done so far after the first hour, but it felt quite demoralising to stop the job part way.

Process and finishing point

I pulled out one thing at a time, and sorted it into many-many piles:

• colouring books (split into pristine and partly-used)
• sticker/activity books (split as above)
• puzzle books (split as above)
• clean A4 lined paper for writing
• clean A4 plain paper for drawing/writing
• assorted notebooks
• general box of pens / pencils / sharpeners etc (at some point I think I should go through this and split it into smaller sorted boxes but that's a project for another time)
• smaller box just of marker pens
• misc unfinished projects
• things that should be elsewhere (which included school reports, books, photographs, bookmarks, finished artwork etc)
• recycling
• rubbish

At intervals (usually as I started running out of space) I disposed of the rubbish and recycling, and took the things that should be elsewhere to their new home.

• I put all the completely pristine colouring / sticker / puzzle books into the box I emptied last week (I took the stashed cushion back out of it). They filled it. It's helpfully an opaque box that doubles as a seat/footrest so we can pretend they don't exist for now.
• I went through the small pile of unearthed books with Younger Child: the bulk of them went into a donation bag and we reshelved the ones he wanted to keep in his room.
• I put the (now much less crowded) magazine files and the coffee table books on the same shelf, and brought down some similar books to rehome alongside them.
• The next shelf down has all the clean paper and notebooks, grouped together by size.
• The shelf below that has the colouring books with the boxes of pens/pencils, and separate piles for the puzzle books and sticker books.
• Unfinished projects and some stray library books are on the bottom, much emptier, shelf.
• A lot of paper went into the recycling and a fair bit of unrecyclable rubbish went into the bin.

The plan now is to gently encourage offspring to work through the partly-done activity books, either to finish them or to decide they can be thrown out. Hopefully the reduced number and new layout will make it easier to pick a thing and go with it; if/when we start running low on already-started books we can go "shopping" in the box of pristine ones.

I decided to not even try to take the donation bags to the charity shop this week, given the current situation, so they are currently tucked away in the back room until further notice.

Plan for week 6:

My household is now 100% working from home and homeschooling so my free time just drastically reduced, and I definitely will only be able to work on the decluttering at weekends, probably max 2 hours.

I've already spent an hour today going through the medicine cabinet and consolidating stashes of medications from elsewhere in the house there too. I've boxed up all the out-of-date medication and put a big note on the top, and at Some Future Point they will have to go to a pharmacy for safe disposal. Oldest find was use-by sometime in 2010 (!). All the in-date medications are now boxed up separately in clear plastic boxes, in expiry date order, and I am now confident we don't need to buy anything urgently.

I will try to do another hour tomorrow, preferably in the living room.

Comments

[tanaqui]

Sympathies that it was such a long, horrible slog, but that sounds like some amazing work on those shelves -- congratulations! And it sounds like it will help a little with you all being stuck at home, too. Also, well done on the medicines. Hope you all stay safe and well and manage to make more progress with the better house 2020 project despite all the upheaval.