uncluttering one day and one thing at a time

In the days between Christmas and New Year I spent some time looking at my daily and weekly schedule to try to find when it's realistic for me to do any tidying/decluttering. I settled on 1 hour each on Saturday and Sunday, probably best done as 3x 15min with 5 min breaks. I also went looking at various cleaning/decluttering sites linked via this one tumblr post For those with home related New Year's Resolutions and picked out from there Dana K. White / A Slob Comes Clean's 5 step decluttering process as the one most likely to actually work for me.

Now it's Saturday, so I should set a timer and try out this 5-step process, but I have covid and am isolating from my household so I can't do it "the right way" (i.e. tackle the most visible mess first, take things to their proper homes elsewhere in the house). On the other hand, I have no symptoms and am basically well in myself, and I'm stuck in one room. Might as well have a go at trying out this 5 step process on the place where I am right now, even if I have to do it imperfectly.

If you have something you wanted to tackle today, whether it's a shiny new system or an old favourite, whether you are set up perfectly or forced to improvise a bit, maybe now is the time to try? Let me know how you get on in comments, and I'll post my own progress there, so I actually do it!

Week 22 ( mostly garden )

Week 23 ( mostly clothing )

Plan for week 24

I am on leave from work all next week, but from Tuesday afternoon onward I'm going to be primarily occupied with CoNZealand. However there should be time to:

• Launder all the clothes!
• Put away the clothes I'm keeping, bag up the others for donation
• Use the weedkiller, on a calm day with no rain, wearing suitable protective clothing
• Upgrade offspring's curtains
• Attempt to freecycle the old curtains
• Attempt a reconnaissance of bra drops in M&S and/or John Lewis at an off-peak shopping time

(I did consider whether to ebay the more valuable clothes, but I have a lot less spare time than I do spare money at the moment. Donation seems a better option now that charity shops are cautiously beginning to reopen. I'm aiming to take one bag a week to my local shop, so as not to overwhelm them.)

Week 18 began Sat 13 June, and I listed out a bunch of tasks in my post of 14 June. Pleasingly, I got all but one of them done during week 18. (Yes, the one I didn't do was book courier collection.)

Week 19 (beginning Sat 20 June) I did a little garden maintenance, but the main event was the arrival of a new TV bench and (the next day) a new TV. This is not so much a declutter as an upgrade, but it really is a huge improvement.

Week 20 (beginning Sat 27 June)

• I finally booked courier collection for the parcels of clothes I sorted out way back in week 9. This involved more printer-wrangling than is ideal (Zero. Zero printer-wrangling is ideal.) but the parcels are now GONE, and on their way to assorted niblings.
• We got a carrier bag through the door this week for a "charity" clothing collection. These are notorious for giving only tiny fractions of profit to the charity they blazon on the collection bags; otoh none of my preferred charity shops are opening up again yet (and nor should they) and they'll be swamped with donations when they do. So I filled up the bag with a bunch of lower-value stuff from the charity-shop stashes, and set it ready to put out on Monday.
• Like the TV this is not a declutter, but I have upgraded the curtains over our south-facing full-height patio doors with thermal blackout curtains. It's already more pleasant for TV watching in the daytime, and should be warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

Plan for Week 21

I had the unsettling realisation that I am nearly done with the living room. I need to move the old TV and some excess chairs out of it, and there is half a shelving unit left to sort through.

Freecycle is open again with stern warnings about socially-distancing on collection, and I have some things to list which will make space elsewhere in the house for me to move things out of the living room.

I also need to strim a lot of the garden again: the weeds have been growing enthusiastically in the last month and my little bits of maintenance haven't kept up. I need to research weedkiller options.

Plan for week 13 was:

• continue clearing the garden
  • replacement strimmer arrived Sunday of week 13, it rained all day
  • some small clearance work during rest of week 13
  • Sunday of week 14, actually used new strimmer in earnest, we now have about 3-inch high weeds instead of waist-high weeds
  • more small clearance work a couple of times during week 14
• agree with spouse what to do next
  • spouse is happy for me to do what I want (subtext: he will be delighted if I can reach SUCCESS of a non-perilous outdoor space, but he has no capacity to engage with the project of getting there)
• order mulch when confident of the ground being clear
  • not there yet

Indoors: still no progress in the living room, but we have ordered a new TV bench which will arrive next month and agreed on a new TV to sit on it once it's here. This gives me a deadline to sort out the corner unit shelves where the TV used to sit.

Plan for week 15:

• spend some time each day on the remaining clearance tasks in the garden (I still doubt I will reach the point of being Ready For Mulch this week, but I certainly won't if I do nothing)
• ship the boxes of clothes to family that I sorted out last month: regrettably, it doesn't seem much safer for couriers in my country than it did a month ago, nor does it seem likely to become much safer in the next couple of months, so I think there's no point delaying them any longer
• if feeling avoidant of the garden, tackle the corner unit or the Misc. Stuff above the coffee-table books

Week 9

After managing the hour of toy sorting I detailed last week on Saturday, on Sunday I started the epic outgrown-clothes sorting project, and by plugging away a bit at a time, I finished it yesterday. I am kind of ridiculously proud of this one, and I wrote it up in detail at my own journal just to have a record. I guess the key points are:

• it turned out to be bigger than I expected
• I managed to organise myself so I could take breaks fairly often without losing progress
• it spawned a couple of side-quests (the part where I was stacking toilet rolls in my bathroom in order to free up a packaging box was probably the silliest)
• the back room is visibly tidier and more organised as a result

Week 10

I'm feeling extra-avoidant at the moment, so giving myself choices rather than hard goals. Any of the following will be progress:

• work on the corner unit as detailed last week
• tackle the shelves of Misc. Stuff above the coffee table books
• put on gloves and long sleeves and start pulling up weeds in the garden, because the gardener isn't coming any time soon

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

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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.

I was travelling to visit family Friday evening-Sunday evening so failed to check in then.

The plan for week 3 was three hours-of-power, with the focus on finishing the last box of papers, and then shifting my attention to the shelving units.

Outcome: I didn't do any of those things, but I spent the time/capacity on:

• auditing our food cupboards / fridge / freezer
• cooking up food near its use-by date, or to make space for more efficiently-packed food
• setting up a bigger-than-usual groceries delivery and putting it all away sensibly once it arrived (with oldest stuff at the front, etc)
• setting up this week's order to fill in some of the additional gaps I spotted during the previous task

I set myself a couple of rules: only get food we would buy normally, and only buy extra of things that are on special offer, as they are presumably in surplus. But now my cupboards are both tidier and fuller.

Plan for week 4:

• meet with the gardener (tomorrow!)
• back to the hours-of-power in the living room: if possible Tue, Wed & Thu (Friday I have a funeral to go to, so not even going to try that day)

Goals for week 1 were:

• get in touch with the gardener
• hours-of-power: Sun x2, Tue x1, Thu x2, Fri x2

Actually achieved:

• Sun 1x hour-of-power
• Freecycle emails

Yeah, it turns out I drastically ovestimated my capacity / motivation here. It doesn't help that I'm also behind on a language course, and given the choice between catching up on that, and decluttering: well I did my language study.

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Goals for week 2:

• contact the gardener
• hours-of-power: Sat x1, Sun x1, Wed x1

I was inspired earlier in the week by others' posts to start thinking seriously again about what needs sorting out at home. The big problem is that currently I seem to be the person on the critical path for everything and I can't do everything, and I'm having some serious decision fatigue about what to prioritise, which results in nothing getting done.

So, solution part 1 is blocking out some time to talk it through with Spouse: what are his feelings about priorities for the house, what capacity does he have to replace me on the critical path for anything, what are the tasks that might unblock one or both of us a bit more, etc. That's going to happen this weekend.

Solution part 2 is committing myself to blocking out time each week doing something towards those priorities. I'm thinking of doing a goal-setting/reporting-back post each week here as part of keeping me focused.

In the meantime this week, I tried the "pick SOMEthing, anything and spend 15 minutes on it" approach. In this case, I logged into the local Freecycle group, reactivated the expired posts for things that didn't go last time I tried offering them (in December), and posted the text I had drafted on my laptop for another item. That bit of effort, and dealing with the email responses, resulted in the following things leaving the house this week:

• a mildly dusty but fully functional pushchair
• 2x child's toilet seat & step-stool
• a potty

and an agreed collection next week of a bag of outgrown child's school uniform. More space under the stairs and in the back room as a result, hurrah!

Underwear (and other clothes)

I'm pregnant and have reached the point where 'normal' clothes are generally uncomfortable.  I kept all the maternity wear I liked last time in a storage box, so it's been time for digging through it and seeing what fits / what's still my style after the intervening six years.   I've also been slowly swapping what fits with non-maternity clothes, as I don't have enough room in my clothes storage for everything.

Two weeks ago, I moved completely over to maternity knickers, which gave me an excuse to sort out my usual knickers.   The nice ones have been put away until after the baby arrives, but all the elderly, faded, battered, and scraggy ones have gone into the textile recycling.  I'm  going to do similar exercises on other clothing groups: there's no point putting worn-out or disliked clothes into storage.


Paperwork:

My desk slowly descended into chaos during last year, as whenever I was too busy I'd put paper there "to sort out later".  This got catastrophic after I got pregnant.  Naggingly aware there were probably unpaid bills there (and I never normally let anything go unpaid), I finally got my act together last weekend and started sorting through it. 

It took me about 4 evenings in total: I put cheery DVDs on for background / entertainment when I needed a break, and to keep me in the room.  One piece of paper at a time - deal with it, dump it or file it.  If I thought there would be related pieces of paper, I put it in its own pile on the floor until I found its friends.  During the exercise, I took several 3-inch stacks of paper out to the recycling bin, filled the shredder bin twice, and managed to sift out of the chaos the five or six things that really needed sorting out.  And then I dealt with them.

There are still piles of things on my desk, but no current paperwork.  And there is now SPACE on there so it should be easier to deal with the rest.

I'm now trying to re-establish the habit of opening the post as soon as it arrives, including dealing with it the same day, so we don't end up in the situation again.