Review and plan for next week

[rmc28]

What week number is this anyway? Let's see:

• Week 6 began Sat 21 Mar: I didn't manage to do any more than the sorting out of our medicine cabinet, already reported on.
• Week 7 began Sat 28 Mar: complete write-off
• Week 8 began Sat 4 Apr and finished yesterday
• Week 9 began today, Sat 11 Apr

I didn't make a plan for week 8, but I did a couple of rounds of spontaneous clothing decluttering during it. Round one was culling my tops: vests, tshirts, undershirts, jumpers, etc. I've mostly settled in the past few years into wearing almost entirely pocket dresses with leggings, and layering up or down according to the weather and/or how formal I want to look. But there's a bunch of tops I had that didn't fit that scheme, and I was struggling a bit for storage space when putting clean clothes away, so Saturday morning I pulled out all the tops, sorted them into sensible groups, and culled everything that doesn't work with my pocket-dress default, with a few exceptions that I am especially fond of. I also put some things that don't currently fit into my long-term clothes storage boxes.

I filled a bag with donations and it's much easier to see at a glance what goes where in my clothes storage. This is extra-helpful when I'm not the person putting laundry away.

Round two was triggered by Younger Child having grown again, and so I pulled out a bunch of clothes that no longer fit. (I did replace from the stocks of their sibling's outgrown clothes, and a small number of new clothes.) That pile is now waiting in the back room to be sorted out for my younger niblings.

Week 9: About an hour today on filtering some of the storage boxes of toys we keep in/next to one of the shelving units in the living room. This started because Younger Child decided to play with multiple sets of these toys, and we ended up with the contents of half the boxes spread across the floor. Once upon a time these toy boxes were very organised, with everything of the same type together (railway track, toy cars, lego, etc) but over time and a lot of rushed floor-clearances ahead of the cleaner, that's disintegrated. When I came to tidying it up this evening, I decided to take advantage of the multiple empty boxes to organise as I put things away. It went so well that I opened and sorted through the other half of the storage boxes for a fun game of Some Of These Things Are Not Like The Others. We've now got seven sorted boxes and one of Misc. Things. A small number of things went in the bin but I think just grouping everything together better is a big win.

Plan for the rest of week 9:

Whatever time I can manage, I am not setting any specific goals right now. The next few priorities are:

• Clearing the rest of the corner unit shelves. (Partly more toys, partly devices & cables that used to be attached to the TV before I moved it back in week 2.)
• Figure out what things make sense to be in that unit in the new layout, and move them there.
• Tackle the outgrown-clothes piles in the back room before it gets any more chaotic: currently there are multiple piles in multiple different sizes from both children, some of which I want to go in long-term storage and most of which I want to discard, either by parcel to my niblings or to a donations bag. I can definitely stack a pile of donations bags more efficiently than the current mess.