uncluttering one day and one thing at a time

I haven't been faithfully keeping track, but I'm definitely still doing pretty well on the in:out ratio. As usual, underestimating the outs, although this time I didn't keep track of ins very well, either.

( I finally got rid of most of the fabric pile! )

( Little net change, but good habitat enhancement )

I love the new table and chairs, holy crap. And I finally put up the shower rack.

( Ins and outs )

I have two giant piles of fabric to sell/give away/donate ASAP (still need to finish going through the rest of the collection) and three office boxes of books that will be going to the used bookstore/Goodwill as soon as I can make the hours work. That plus the recycling will free up a ton of visual progress space. Also have some gardening stuff to give to a friend, although I'm not really tackling the porch yet because it's not awful and we don't ever use it. Trying to sell old table and chairs so we can replace with IKEA table and nifty Costco chairs (experimental chair = success). So hopefully next time ALL THOSE THINGS will be on my out list. Also hopefully the stupid shower rack will be installed because our shower tile will be in and grouted correctly (we're on the third maintenance trip. The joys of apartment living, where the landlords hire the cheapest, most incompetent labor available).

I ♥ you, unclutter. Seriously, this and UFYH are what's keeping me motivated on getting my life in order.

Even though I know intellectually that I'm making progress, I don't feel that way. I'm seriously starting to consider the "cover clutter you're not working on with a sheet" method.

As usual, I haven't been keeping track of numbers precisely, especially outs (generally underestimated). I've probably forgotten some things.

( Ins and Outs )

( Categories )

And now, a question for the community:

DVD cases.

I'm going to stick all the DVDs (and we only have about two shelves of one bookcase--not a lot compared to most geeks of our acquaintance) into sleeves in a binder to save shelf space. The question is what to do with the cases.

1. Stick them in a box in our storage unit (our storage unit is mostly for camping gear--too expensive to replace all the time, too bulky to reasonably store in our current apartment. I know, storage units are bad, but $30/month is way cheaper than moving to a larger place).
2. Recycle (?) or throw them away.

The only pro I see to keeping them, since I sincerely doubt most of them would be "worth more" with original packaging, is that someday I would like to have a house, and one thing I enjoy about visiting friends is looking at their bookshelves and DVDs (it's one of the big drawbacks to digital, IMO). So I would like to be able to have the DVDs all out in their nice cases to look at.

But...houses are a long way away, and I'm not sure this is really all that important, anyway. OTOH, as there aren't that many, it's not like the cases would take up that much storage space.

Any pro/con arguments I'm not thinking of?

I made a first crack at the massive paper backlog and recycled two grocery bags full...and in the process found an uncashed check (!) from last November. So that was nice. Hopefully the second crack will reduce the paper mounds further.

( Transitioning to ebooks question )

Hi, I'm a packrat with too many hobbies...and I might be moving temporarily for work soon and am hence trying to clean/organize/sort through/declutter ALL the things ASAP so a) I will be able to easily and efficiently pack for a year in another town, b) leave my partner in a tidy, organized apartment not covered with my stuff. It is sort of daunting, although I am making pretty good headway (I am afraid I may not be able to work fast enough, though).

My biggest long-term problems are books (which I am getting better about--I got rid of 20 or so books the other day for store credit which will only buy 2 books, and have generally become much pickier about buying books--there is empty space on some of our bookshelves now!) and craft supplies, so once I finish the marathon my goal for this year will be to destash--primarily by sewing a lot, because the fabric takes up more net space than anything but books.

I'm not really aiming for minimalism, but I would like to craft more with what I have, buy fewer supplies, and I would like to have only stuff I love and use regularly, and not too much stuff for our living space.

I'm pretty good at getting rid of stuff, except for all kinds of weird sticking points. I absolutely hate throwing things away--recycling or donating is fine--but then I run into stuff like the entire office box of half-used notebooks I accumulated through college and grad school. Should I just toss most of them and start over, now that I no longer buy four pristine notebooks a semester and can probably do fine with three total notebooks? What do y'all think?

ETA: I actually ripped out the used pages a while back, so what I have is a giant stack of blank half-notebooks, which could probably be more productively replaced by three new notebooks...I guess I'd better suck it up and recycle the collection. Erk. Thanks for the moral support!