I love decluttering. I blame living with my grandma, she grew up in foster care for much of her youth and moving from home to home didn't have much stuff to call her own, so as adult kept everything. Love her to death, but the woman loves her stuff.
Our recent clean out was our closet. See...I like shoes...and purses...and clothes. And so does my partner. Our lovely walk in closet was busting at the seems mostly with stuff we don't wear...or even like! So we started sorting stuff out, it was actually easier to just move what we liked to the closet in the guest bedroom then to actually take out what we didn't want. Then I had a brain storm and called up three very lovely, very broke, young women I happen to know. All three of whom are about our size and in desperate need of clothes that for things like job interviews, office jobs, and even just wanting to update their styles from high school (one recent grad, the other two are two years into college), to young adult. We let them go wild in our closet. If its in there, we don't want it and you can have it was our motto. It took one afternoon and we got our closet back! Whatever they didn't want got brought to the women's shelter and we were done! We also received three lovely hand written thank you notes for the "new to them" clothes and a fun afternoon (we got yummy food and made mocktails for the girls, it was fun).
We've also been helping my mom declutter. She's going from a three bedroom house to a one bedroom apartment. She can't even figure out how she's accumulated so much stuff! Things from her parents (her living parents FYI, just stuff they didn't want anymore), she kept holding onto, so I took pictures, sent them to my grandparents who hadn't the foggiest clue what most of these things were or where they came from (some they didn't even remember owning themselves!) so out the door they went.
Then we got to the "stuff I no longer want but can't just give away to goodwill because it's useful to someone I'm just not sure who", the woman tried multiple times to get us to take this set of dishes. Nice dishes. But..we have two sets of dishes already. We simply don't need them. Finally I gave up and started texting my friends, who knew someone who was in need of some nice basic dishes. Low and behold I got a hit! Single mom, just moved into her own place with her daughter, in desperate need of household items. My mom cheerfully loaded up this girl's car with household items (dishes, pots and pans, a food processor, a vacuum cleaner, two mops, and even two area rugs), not to mention the stuff she found for the little girl. My mom has this need with the stuff she gives up, it needs to go to someone who she knows will use it, apparently the fact that people in thrift stores need this stuff doesn't work for her.
And shredding. Oh shredding. I've given up on doing my own shredding. That just isn't going to happen. I broke two shredders. Then I found out my credit union has shred bins. The big kind with the pad lock, company picks them up once a week and the stuff goes and gets shredded, pulverized, and burned. I go once a month with our shred stuff, dump it off, and I'm done.
The partner moved in two years ago and we're still trying to fit our stuff in one place together. The truth, we need less stuff! Like...only one set of dishes, only one vacuum (we have 3 and we only have carpet in the bedrooms), we just haven't tackled it yet...two years later...
