weekend check-in

[rmc28]

Hello all, I fell off the uncluttering wagon in, er, January. But I have a surprise! free! Sunday today so I thought I'd try to get back on it, and check in with the community while I'm at it.

My theme for today is "getting stuff to actually leave". So far I have

• sorted the giant pile of outgrown clothes (which I made nearly a month ago!) between nibling A, nibling B, and charity shop
• realised one of the garments for nibling A needed washing, so that prompted me to start a laundry load
• found boxes to make parcels for the niblings (well, actually their respective mothers), wrote a note to go inside each one, stacked the parcels waiting for the laundry to finish
• bagged up the clothes for the charity shops, and added my Gift Aid donor id to each bag
• took photos and made four Freecycle posts for assorted things waiting to be freecycled

Nothing has actually left the house yet, but a bunch of things are a lot closer to doing so. Progress! Now I'm taking a break, further adventures will be added in the comments.

How are you all doing this weekend?

Comments

[rmc28]

Ok, glorious success with getting the bags of clothes to the charity shop! This is not always a given: it is a very convenient shop for me because it's only a few minutes walk away, but it's also very convenient for anyone coming into Cambridge, as it's on a main road in from the ringroad, and has car parking right outside. So it gets lots of donations, and quite frequently has to put up a polite sign saying no more donations today please. But today I got there before the sign had gone up, so that's two big carrier bags of clothes no longer in this house.

Also 2 of the 4 freecycle posts have been claimed and should leave tomorrow.

My brother rang and is making an unexpected visit, so I may make no more progress today. (Unless he has room in his car and willingness to take some things from the garage to the tip? Hmmm.) But at least I have made some!

[wychwood]

That sounds like a good start! Having things-to-get-rid-of sitting around can be quite disheartening, I find.

[rmc28]

Yeah! I did get as far as booking the parcels of nibling clothes for postal collection tomorrow (when I am WFH all day). The freecycle people postponed until today, but one of them is taking two things, so that's 3 of 4 should be gone by this evening. I listed a fifth thing, but so far no-one's expressed interest in that either.

It's a hectic week so I can't even think about any new decluttering work until the weekend (and probably I need to put effort first into the paperwork my brother brought me).

[fred_mouse]

yay for getting things out of the house!

[kalloway]

I finally remembered to grab the bag of old clothes from the entryway and tossed it in a drop-bin. Now to finish filling the next one and do the same without a several-month lag time. ^^;;

I'm also slowly cleaning off my project/hobby desk, which has become a pile of misc. unfinished projects and needs to be dusted besides.

[tanaqui]

Yay for getting the clothes to the drop-bin! And that sounds a good way to approach your project/hobby desk: progress without it feeling overwhelming. Hope you can achieve your goals for the next bag of clothes and for the desk in the next few weeks.

[tanaqui]

Well done on your progress so far. Great that you were able to not only get things ready to go but actually get some of them out of the house!

I've not been very focused on decluttering, but since the last post we had a month ago, I've managed to:

* get rid of another bag of books.

* catch up with downloading and digitally filing various kinds of financial information (bank statements and suchlike). That was a couple of weeks ago, so it's now gradually accumulating again, but definitely back under control.

* prep the stuff for this year's annual round of paper shredding. (The actual shredding usually gets done while watching French Open tennis on TV!)

* get rid of a couple of large bags of garden rubbish (mostly from my vegetable patch) and do some cleaning out and tidying up of garden pots and trays. Inside, I'm at the usual-for-this-time-of-year state of having every suitable surface covered with pots of seedlings/cuttings/germinating plants/plants that have been indoors over the winter, so it's all feeling a bit full right now (but things will start going outside soon).

The definite plans for the next month are to get rid of another bag of books, to do more garden "decluttering" and to clear up and rearrange things inside after the plants leave the house.

[adafrog]

Yay!

[rmc28]

Thank you!

[wychwood]

I've been making small amounts of progress in various directions, but nothing major.

• sorted a handful of papers and such out on my desk and moved some of them to long-term homes and/or the recycling.
• cleared out some older emails in my personal email and abruptly realised that I was down to a single page! in my inbox! for the first time since I created the account! in 2004! which then inspired me to go through and sort out a handful more of them. I did get down to under 10, but it's back up to 15 now; I'm trying to keep it that way.
• made more progress on my bench painting, which is partly for the sake of the bench and partly so I can put away all the things I have out for it.
• took several spider plants into work with me (on the train!) to give to a colleague who had expressed an interest, so that my kitchen windowsill is no longer overflowing - I may get more plants, or at least pot up some of the latest crop of babies, but for now I'm enjoying the space.

I am meditating various slightly larger sorting-out projects, but haven't quite summoned up the energy yet. Also still trying to persuade my friend-with-a-car into a tip trip to get rid of the aggravating pile of dead electrical items in the spare room.

[rmc28]

I have a slowly-growing pile of things in the garage which need a car to go to the tip. I was cheered to find out there's a recycling point about 30 minutes walk away which will take small electrical items, but I haven't yet actually acted on taking any of them there.

[wychwood]

Technically speaking my local tip is only about 30 minutes walk away (well, maybe 40) but a) I definitely can't do it carrying the dead humidifier! and b) they don't permit walk-in customers, slightly annoyingly. Oh well. I'll get there eventually!

[illariy]

Loads of progress, very cool! Many cheers to you! And here's to the things actually leaving the house, wishing you best of luck and success to that :D

(Getting decluttered stuff to leave the flat has been a major hurdle for me in the past despite it only being my own stuff, haha.)

[rmc28]

It's definitely something I struggle with, but I'm hoping if I keep plugging away at it, I will get somewhere.

[illariy]

That makes two of us! I once had a black trash bag sitting in a corner of my room for over 6 months. But I needed that time to see that I really never went back for anything that was in there, not even once. After that, I was able to let go of that trash bag easily. I mean, the timeline isn't ideal but better late than never. ;-)