Some days, I feel like my house is just one giant space filled with clutter. That's one of the downside to being at home all day long. You can never escape it. And with two kids and a work-from-home job, some weeks and months, I'm stretched so thin that the clutter just builds and builds until not only is every surface covered with stuff that doesn't belong there, but everywhere we would even casually toss stuff 'to be dealt with later' is full of stuff too.
So this weekend, I went on a clutter kick. Since I have a bit of downtime with my workload right now, I am determind that by the time Christmas comes (and we have a whole new level of clutter), that this house WILL BE decluttered. Every. Single. Room.
And yes, that even means you spare room.
On Saturday night, I started posting things on Kijiji like a mad woman. Sadly, so far I've only had one bite, but that's not the point. Whatever's not gone in a week is going to Goodwill with the other two boxes of stuff I filled. And those boxes go alongside the two boxes of toys that will be donated to the Early Years Centre tomorrow. (Why the Early Years Centre? Because I have been dropping in there for four years so this afternoon I called and asked if they take toy donations. They do -- and whatever they can't use they in turn donate to other charities, so I know that it will all go to good use.)
It might sound like a lot of decluttering has been done already, but that was the easy part. You see, a lot of that stuff has been hanging around in boxes and bins, stacked against a wall in the basement for months. All the stuff that has been removed from circulation but never taken that one step further.
Later this week starts the hard part. The storage space underneath the stairs that you can barely walk into anymore. It's mostly filled with Rubbermaid bins of kids clothes and shoes and God knows what else. Then will come the kids' rooms. Some toys and dolls are going to have to go to make room for the truckload of stuff they're bound to get for Christmas, and I have to empty out their closets of all the clothes that don't fit.
After then comes the *gulp* spare room. It's gotten better over the years, but it's still the place where things go to die. In other words, if we don't know what to do with something, it goes in there. And years later we finally realize it needs to be thrown out.
You may ask, if that system is working, why mess with it? Well, in the new year, we're going to be turning that spare room into an office for me. (Don't worry all you out-of-towners who have slept in that room in the past, there'll be a futon in there.) And I refuse to have it cluttered up with a million things that we don't need or want in the first place. The shelves full of my canning can stay and old photo albums can stay. But mountains of CDs and hundreds of old Ranger Rick magazines (don't ask) may just have to go.
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