2023 Organizing & Decluttering Annual Thread!!!

that's a great idea!

Cecilia, do you get a tax receipt for donating at Goodwill in the U.S.,? When we donate at the Salvation Army they give us a coupon to use in the store and I then go inside and give the coupon away.

Yesterday, I had a burst of energy and totally went through one and a half cupboards in the kitchen. There were expired things to get rid of and oddly enough a can of mushrooms with no expiry date. Most cans usually have expiry dates. I also wiped down all of the shelves then the outside of the cupboards that I cleaned

Day 1/30 15 minute decluttering challenge:

I went through a Ziploc bag of mostly beauty products tonight and threw away almost everything. One item was a Clinique serum manufactured in 2014! 😬 Most of the stuff should have never moved with me in 2020. I also went through some paperwork, pitching some things and shredding other items. I need to file what's left, but my time ended and I wanted to do nothing else.

I also did a 15 minute arm workout, so I am good on that front as well!

OMG. I was looking in the refrigerator freezer to see if I had some frozen pumpkin and I found a package of hamburger in the very back that was date stamped 2012. 😳 Yeah, that’s going straight in the trash on Monday! (Along with a bunch of other random old stuff that is of indeterminate age from the freezer and pantry.)

Hauled some stuff to Goodwill. Some was stuff we didn't need along with stuff friend gave us. Did buy some ornament bags. Have already separated it out into sell piles and resonate piles.

I have not been very successful with the decluttering this year. I’m just trying to survive DD being a senior.
But I did go through my Halloween bin. I upgraded my style of Halloween decor so I got rid of a lot of the more cutsey stuff.
Next up will be Christmas decor. I really need to edit and pair down. Plus I want to do a more vintage theme this year so I need to find all that stuff and put it together, which will make me go through all of it.

Made some progress on my photo organising and labelling - 1972-2019 is now done and 1971 is well underway. My goal for November is to finish through 1970 (my lifetime). And then I'll re-group in the New Year and figure out a game plan for the 1960s - I think I'm going to need to pull out postcards and peer at postmarks to try and figure out a timeline - mum visited Europe twice (1959, 1961) and then lived there starting in 1963 and travelled extensively so it'll be a fun decade to organise.

I did find a pile of random photos that I'm dealing with now - labelling and then will file in the correct photo boxes.

DH and his siblings have agreed to hire a local company to run an online auction to empty out their recently passed mother's home.  I am so happy they came to this decision.  Now the apartment will get cleaned out and they will meet the Dec. 31 deadline with the rental company.  

packed up the Halloween decor and put one item into the donation box. Put on a shirt today and kept tugging at the neckband -took it off, washed it, and added it to the donation box. Put away some books of DH's and found some duplicates - DS wants them so they went in the box for him. DH agreed to get rid of one more book and took it to work today for a coworker.

It's not a lot but everything counts

I've reached my stopping point for this year on the photo project. 1970 is done (1970-2019 done). Before I tackle the 1960s, I need to make a timeline of where my mum was when. I might start the timeline but dealing with the photos will be a January thing at this point. But I think labelling and organising 49 years worth of mum's photos into the 16-box iris photo boxes (please don't ask how many...) and making sure that the digital versions are all labelled as well is a good accomplishment for the year.

I also mailed off probably 50 photos to a GS Museum in the area she lived - she was an active volunteer for years. This is the second batch I've sent them (and yes, I contacted them first to see if they wanted them). I identified who/when/where as much as possible.

I finally can post an update on this thread because I made some good progress for once, Yeah! Dropped off three big boxes of books today. Two went to DD’s former elementary, going to one of her previous teachers and anyone else who can use them. Another half box of the littler kid books went into the Little Free Library outside of the Early Childhood Education center, the other half for older kids went into the Little Free Library outside of the elementary school.

I went through some big bins of linens in our bedroom that we brought home from the lake cabin when we renovated it in 2019. Some of the stuff is sheets in sizes we don’t have beds that will fit them, so out they will go. I decided to keep the extra queen duvet insert that fits DD’s bed or the guest bed and the duvet cover and matching pillowcases for it. I earmarked a set of king sized flannel sheets that can go back to the lake cabin since we have two king beds and no flannel sheets there. We don’t spend a ton of time there in the winter but we do occasionally go there. One of the bins was cracked on a corner so it can go now that it’s empty.

From there I moved on to the main floor front room (formal living room that has never been used in that capacity). There were some kitchen chair cushions that I had replaced a while ago, but now the ties on 3/4 of the replacement cushions were broken, so I threw them in the trash and put the old ones back on because they’re still functional. Found some candles in pottery things, brand new that we’ll never use. I’ll either put them up on Buy Nothing or donate. Found some cabin decor stuff and some baskets that we likely won’t use, so a few more things for Buy Nothing or donate. Got the whole love seat cleared off! I still have a huge stuffed horse that someone gave DD when she was born that I have to figure out what to do with that’s taking up half the futon. I don’t know if anyone would even want that thing because it’s so freaking big. I also found places to put away the new (to us) Halloween decorations our neighbor gave to us too late to put up this year that had been sitting in the middle of the room for the last two weeks.

Maybe l’ll post the stuff we don’t want anymore on Buy Nothing for a week and take whatever doesn’t go and put it with the donate stuff and drop it all off at Salvation Army after that.

The fail part of the week was that I originally planned to spend a good part of this week cleaning up my work tables in my studio and that didn’t happen. But I feel good about what I did get accomplished because it’s the more visible parts of the house that I was tired of looking like an episode of Hoarders from the front windows, LOL.

Thanks dewryce - almost all of the photos are digitised - I think there are a few of mine I'm missing still. I still need to finish labelling my (digital) photos and I still need to organise and label both physical and digital pre-1970 for my mum's (and grandparents and great aunt) and of course tackle the ones I inherited from DH's side but I figure whatever I manage is better that it was.

[NINE photo boxes - each with 16 mini boxes inside - YIKES) and I have another just over 1/2 full. I suspect I'll end up with a dozen or so in the end]

dewryce - the nine only cover 1973-2019 of my mum's photos.

I was born in 1970 and I'm almost done filling the tenth container. My mum was an avid photographer and so was her mother - I'm blessed with quite a few photos from the 1920s on (Granny was born in 1903) and I do actually have some photos as far back as the 1880s from my great grandparents (not many and those ones are all professional with one exception)