2024 Organizing & Decluttering Thread

The new shredder arrived Friday. Down 1 shoe box of receipts. Kind of sad to see some of the receipts from the old yarn shop where I learned to knit. It closed years ago.

Week 10 is going to take me a lot longer than a week, lol. I have started some of those suggestions with my storage unit (mainly I have 4 sets of shelving along the two sides of my 10x10 storage unit), but I have way more work to do!

If the weather cooperates this week, I plan to go work in the unit for a day or two.

My storage areas would take months 😂. This week’s focus at our house is rearranging the master bedroom and making it more retreat like. Also need to finish gathering and pricing everything for the kids consignment sale which includes DS’s toy closet. I’m on spring break this week and luckily DS has a different break schedule so he’s in school until Thursday. Lots of alone time to try and get it done.

the recycling is out of the garage

and we took down fencing - dh will take it to a metals recycling yard

several books went into the donation box

progress

I've been knitting lots and my craft room always gets messy when I go through to pick out what I will work on next. So today I’ve decided to go through my yarn stash again and weed out some skeins and get stash into better order. I took ALL my yarn out of my craft room and into the spare bedroom--I warned DH to not look in that room as I don’t want him to have a heart attack--yeah, it's a LOT! I made it through all but the fingering weight--it’s last as it’s what I have most of, and least likely to get rid of much, if any of that weight. I’ve re-organized the other weights so they are easier to find. I’ll go through the fingering weight tomorrow and figure out how I want that better put away. So far, I’ve go a hamper over 1/2 filled with yarns to destash. I’ve had good luck on FB marketplace selling yarn in lots--I’ll do that with these, price it well, and just get rid of it.

Daily declutter task from My Simpler Life Declutter Calendar:

Clean out your coffee table or another end table.

Between this weekend and today, I've got 17 items to take to the church clothing swap.

In cleaning out the clothes chair, I've found 5 pairs of pants that fit: 2 pairs of jeans, 2 pair of lounge pants, and 1 pair of navy dress pants. So now I really only need pajama pants with pockets and black dress pants (wash and wear, not dry clean only).

I also dry cleaned (aka used Dryel) the new wool winter coat I got for $25 at the Mall of America last month and two pairs of dress pants and hung those up.

I've also determined I do not need to buy new socks for a very long time! Unless they are holey, I plan to keep them all and then get rid of them as they annoy me or look worse for the wear. My only exception to buying new ones will be the thick Cuddl Duds ones that Sam's sells in 3 packs in the fall - those are my favorites!

**GypsyGirl** How can I like that post twice? I’m pretty sure Peter Walsh used that same quote in one of his books and it’s been one of my mantras for a long time.

crazy4scraps I think working on visible spaces for now is a great idea, especially as that is so good for keeping motivation going.

Speaking of, do you know what has really done that for me lately? Because the visual impact and the impact on how easy it is to choose clothing and do laundry affects us every single day. Our clothing & laundry. We’ve done a good job through the years of decluttering our clothes and as we do we find it easier and easier to do laundry because there is not so much to do. When we had more we could go AGES without washing a single load of laundry. And when I was in a really depressed cycle and DH had to literally do everything around the house, we did. We have literally had 20 loads of laundry to do at once before. But now, especially after our latest declutter cycle, even with every item we own dirty, we probably don’t have anywhere close to 20 loads of laundry we theoretically could do including all linens. We do 4, maybe 5 loads a week and never have build-up. We have to wait for enough things to get dirty to run a load. And we don’t ever have to sort laundry. Here is how:

1) 1 load sheets & towels, they’re all white in every bathroom and we only have 5 or 6 towels so they’re interchangeable and we only have 2 sets of sheets for our bed. They get changed every Sunday and immediately go into the wash. We keep a laundry basket in our bathroom for the towels we use and on Sundays just have to grab this and the towel from the powder room and throw them in with the sheets.
2) 1 load of clothing. I am down to 7 around the house outfits. (I am a stain magnet and so I keep these separate). And minimal going out clothes because I am a homebody. I don’t need a lot of selection. And DH changes into his evening clothes after work and wears them for a couple of days. So this is almost always only one load. I do this on Mondays. We keep a big empty mesh drawer open in our Elfa closet separate from our other clothing for the dirty clothes so it’s easy to see when this is enough for a load.
3) 2 loads of DH’s work clothes: scrubs, underwear and shirt, compression socks. He only has enough for exactly one week so this load absolutely has to get done just like my around the house clothes. We don’t have any laundry to do Monday evening through Thursday evening so when DH gets home from work he puts his scrubs directly into the washing machine and his other work clothes in the basket right next to it. Friday afternoons I just have to put in detergent and start the load. We try and finish both loads that night but we have until Sunday when we need it again for the linens.
4) 2 occasional loads. The above 3 are our weekly loads but we do have 2 occasional laundry loads that pop up. Our duvet and cover, maybe every couple of months because we use a full sheet set and fold the top sheet over the duvet so it doesn’t ever touch our skin to get dirty, just gets dusty. And we run several good air filters in our house so it takes longer to get dusty than it used to. And our kitchen linens, one load about every 3 weeks. This is a case where owning more items actually benefits us. DH uses a fresh towel thrown over his shoulder every night when he cooks to keep his hands clean, our old pretty kitchen towels get relegated to this use when they get stained or a seam comes undone, we have tons. We use one glass cleaner cloth for the dining room table and then the kitchen counters every night, we have at least 2 dozen. And we change out our pretty kitchen towels a couple times a week, they hang by the sink and are strictly use to dry water off our hands when we wash them, have 7 I think, one was just relegated to daily use last night. Reusable mop heads and dusters, a little over half a dozen of each of these as well. We keep a small laundry basket at the bottom of the pantry so everything can get thrown in here, I need a tiny basket for these upstairs so I can stop throwing them on the laundry room floor in the corner! Anyway, the basket is full every few weeks so we grab it and run it on a sanitary cycle then. We have enough to go almost 4 weeks and that’s still just one load full, but I prefer to have just in case leftovers for these items.

So between limiting our clothing and linens where it makes sense and the process we set up laundry isn’t even something I think about anymore. I hang and fold clothes as they come out of the dryer, super easy because I only have one load except on Fridays sometimes. And I just carry them directly to the linen closet and our bedroom closet so I don’t even have a laundry basket to put folded clothes in. 

Believe it or not our only real storage area, the garage since our attic has very little accessible space, is completely decluttered of things that need to leave our home. I’m sure we’ll find plenty to get rid of as we go and if we make another sweep in a few months because I am getting rid of more and more each time I declutter. But it’s been through this year. And it’s organized as well as it can be right now. One side wall has all of the yard tools hanging on it. The back wall is almost floor to ceiling Elfa shelving, one part is camping and other sports and outdoor gear, the other is regular garage storage stuff. The last wall has DH’s workout stuff along it, a huge smith machine, weight bench, swimming trainer and heavy duty shelving for his smaller gear. Come to think of it, that needs to be better organized. We purchased it during the pandemic and haven’t decluttered too much because a lot of it is gear for his triathlons, which he hasn’t done since then. Since he’s not active we hesitate to get rid of items since we don’t have it fresh in our mind what works best. But organizing, we can do. And then we have a huge footprint the size of our SUV with our holiday totes stacked as tall as me. There is just no place else in our home large enough to store them. We have decided to make our current project room the permanent project room (yay!) but there isn’t room in there for all of this yet.

Anyway, what needs to be decluttered in our garage is a 5-foot deep strip single-stacked along one garage door. All house projects that need to get done. And we are working on them. S L O W L Y. It’s taking us forever but these are things you want to get them done right the first time. So for now, there it sits weighing heavily on our shoulders. You know what just now occurred to me? We should find a handy man that can take care of a lot of these for us. Would cost a ton less than the contract work DH would lose out on in the time it takes us to do them because we have next to no experience. Going to talk to him about that tonight. Oh that would be so great. I’m glad I talked this out with y’all He just got home and agreed, yay! Our “excess” money is going to a road trip that will end up at Disney this summer so we are going to take the next few months to do the things we feel like and gather a list of things we’d want this handyman to do for us and then hire them when we get back. That’ll give us plenty of time to find one as well. I am so excited!!!

I missed the original post - I don't scrap in order either but I tend to sort into albums chronologically. I agree with dewryce - put them in 3-ring albums/binders for now and you can always move pages around in the future.

I'm switching over my hangers to all pink in my closet. I'll use all the black ones at my mom's assisted living apartment. I purged a bag of clothes after realizing how long it's been since I wore them. Touching every item is really helpful!

I need to do this - we have WAY too many cat toys

I’ve seen this. Is it something that everyone needs to do? Or only if you use fabric softener?

Ntsf, maybe you can donate the suits somewhere. I have seen ads here in the past that charities outfit females and males for graduation.
Dh and I went through a cupboard and a drawer in the kitchen. Re-cycled a container that is real old and probably not food safe.. Also re-cycled yogurt containers. A month ago we purchased wood boxes with holes on top to put Ziploc bags in from Costco. They look so much better than tattered boxes.