When we moved to this house several years ago, we unloaded all the boxes into the barn, and then distributed them from there. At first there was a flurry of unpacking (clothes! bedding! the kitchen stuff!), and then that tapered off to the occasional “Oh!! We need the _____!,” with an accompanying search for the right box. Then the remaining boxes just sat there. My first plan was to see what was still sitting there a year later, and ditch it: if we didn’t need it in a year, we didn’t need it. But then there was the pandemic, and I know during those early months a lot of people were motivated to sort/organize/purge, but I instead went into Emergency Mode and could barely keeping myself from saving bits of string and scraps of tin foil; I was NOT going to get rid of things we MIGHT NEED.
However, in the last few weeks, the kids going back to school has ramped up the restless feeling I sometimes get when I am at home by myself. I have found it soothing to assign myself One Box: I go to the barn, I pick any box I want, and I Deal With That Box. I started with a box of assorted notebooks and notepads and other desky things. I’d already brought the important ones into the house; these were the cute spares I don’t try to keep myself from buying. I found a place for most of them in the house, which meant some slightly irritating rearranging that turned out to be well worth it, and I put the ones I no longer liked on the donation pile.
The next day, I handled a box of bedding. I salvaged one set of sheets and one pillow, threw out a tattered old non-handmade quilt (“In a True Emergency, it would be JUST AS WARM as if it weren’t tattered!!”), and threw out a thin old mattress pad we owned because YEARS AND YEARS AGO we had an incontinent elderly cat and regularly needed a back-up mattress pad—but the cat is long gone and in all the years since then I’ve never needed a back-up mattress pad, and at this point if we STARTED needing a back-up mattress pad we could buy a new one and use our current one as the old back-up, so out it went (into the trash, which is harder to do).
Then I stalled out. But still, I took care of TWO BOXES! That is TWO FEWER BOXES in the barn! Plus, I laundered the sheets and they’re on the bed now and I am appreciating them more for having not seen them in a few years. (They’re some Target Shabby Chic ones I got on clearance, a vintage white color with a line of roses down one edge. They’re not a good match with our shades-of-brown-and-grey quilt, but they don’t clash, either, and also now THIS quilt is getting a little rough-looking so perhaps they will go great with the NEXT quilt.)
As someone who should probably teach decluttering, I say HUZZAH! Baby steps are still steps! One box at a time! So proud of you!
I am happiest when organizing and purging, so I am proud of you.
Good for you! I gotta say this is my least favorite thing to do. The main reason the time consuming nature of purging, especially if one is inclined to recycle, or donate it. Living with a semi-horder and two kids it seems like there are piles and piles to get rid of or secretly remove from the house, when the horder is not looking.
It is so hard to purge things! You might need them at some point! I recently got rid of old sheets (usually only the top sheet of a set), twin sets from when my sons had twin beds, and old blankets. I gave them to our local animal shelter. They really appreciated them.
Possible strange question: but we are looking at a move that would put a lot of our boxes directly into a garage/barn type structure and we would bring into the house one at a time. I cannnot stop worrying about mice nesting in the boxes, or water getting into the boxes through a random rainstorm plus large leak, or pens or glue freezing and exploding.
Did you deal with this? How did you cope?
Also, virtual high five for the sorting!
This is a legit concern! I moved in June to the forest in Colorado and some boxes lingered in the garage. I unfortunately just found a gruesome discovery when unpacking a box a chipmunk had gotten into. I am sorry I have no answers for you. The discovery did push me to just get the rest of the boxes done so it is a disgusting motivator!
We have had two freezing/exploding situations: a snow globe (but this was in a box that was going to be in unheated storage anyway, I just forgot I had something in there that couldn’t handle unheated storage) and several bottles of shampoo (but that was Rob’s fault: if I’d known he was putting that box there, I would have intervened). Neither was disastrous, though the snow globe was sad. The shampoo made less of a mess than one might have expected: the bottles were upright, and so some shampoo came out the tops and soaked into the cardboard, but that’s when I noticed something from the outside of the box.
So far we have not had any mouse or water issues, though I worry about that too, and one of my goals for this process, if I ever get that far, is to transfer more things from cardboard boxes to plastic bins. I even HAVE a bunch of plastic bins, I just haven’t moved the stuff to them. Perhaps this conversation will be motivating.
As someone who does not have a garage or other indoor-ish space available for garage-type storage, we use super heavy-duty plastic bins under our deck to store things like beach chairs, outdoor extension cords, etc. Highly recommend the Rubbermaid Action Packer line, though these may be more heavy duty than you’d need if they’re in a garage — ours have kept out water and creatures for the two-ish years that we’ve had them. (Cannot speak to freezing/exploding issues, since we have avoided keeping liquids in them.)
I just finished moving, and we still have boxes to unpack and here is my advice: Food and office supplies and what not, just generic stuff that isn’t SPECIAL in some way? Donate it. Buying new is cheaper than paying a mover to move it. I WISH I HAD DONE THAT.
Why did we move three boxes of canned goods? WHY?
Why did we move all the office supplies from when we had our own business? WHY???
Don’t be us. Donate that stuff. Go onto your neighborhood’s Buy Nothing facebook group and give it all away.
I agree. It was very discouraging when I unpacked a box of holiday wrapping supplies (none of it new) in a box that was moved across 3 states. It felt like such a waste of time and space. I could have recycled it or given it to a friend and then replaced it all for probably $20!
On the other hand, I left a vacuum behind because I couldn’t fit it in my car and the moving truck was already gone. I still regret that.
OMG I need to do this too! We’ve been in our house for years at this point and there are still boxes I haven’t unpacked just sitting in the basement! I just HATE doing it! I managed a couple of boxes this summer but there is still just so much. Part of the problem is that during the move here I took two full days off of work and laboriously sorted everything into piles of keep, donate, trash, and at the end of it all I came into my sorting room and it was all gone… because my husband had just thrown it all randomly into moving boxes (and didn’t even label them). As I stood there spluttering he just said grimly “Well it all has to go.” He had even packed all the toilet paper, and we weren’t done doing stuff in that house quite yet before we turned the keys over.
Now I risk reliving the utter rage every time I pry open a box: will it contain stuff I wanted to trash or donate 7 years ago? Honestly I can feel my blood pressure going up just thinking about this.
Oh, goodness, MY blood pressure is going up after reading that!
I once cleaned and tidied the utility room in our basement, motivating my husband to clean the finished part of the basement — by moving everything into the utility room.
Planning to be mad about that forever, thanks.
*virtual high five of solidarity*
I bought a few pretty boxes and put some files in the – my husband piled heavy boxes on them and crushed them.
I bought a set of big rubbermaid storage containers in a colour I liked, knowing that everything I put in them was going to be my stuff and properly labeled and sorted – my husband used a few of them to throw greasy garage stuff into.
I bought a second set of storage containers in a different colour to start over again… go ahead and guess what happened.
I sorted a bunch of boxes from the basement and put the ones full of stuff I wanted to keep in boxes and put them in the main part of the basement – the next thing I know my husband has taken this as in indication of “this is where we put all random boxes now” so the pile doubled in size and I had no idea what was in half of it.
I took the stuff to donate upstairs and put it in the dining room waiting to be cleared out of the house – my husband didn’t like the clutter in the dining room and put it all back downstairs in the basement.
But he still complains that we have too much crap and I should be getting rid of a bunch of it. And I don’t dare let him do it because he’d chuck out stuff that I DO want to keep.
Steam. Coming. Out. My. Ears.
I want to send you rolls of CAUTION tape.
I am not an enthusiastic cleaner or declutter-er, I just hate the alternative more. The last thing I need is someone undoing my work. The second-to-last is someone making it harder to get it done in the first place.
I have been doing it anyway, and when I was in the throes of everything looking worse before it would look better, the remaining kid at home asked me where something was. I told him. He returned to tell me that I get on him about the mess in his room, but I had turned another kid’s room into a mess, so I had no business, etc.
Me: Was I able to tell you where to find the thing you were looking for?
Him: Yes.
Me: Are you able to find things in your room?
Him: Sometimes.
I’m trying to end this before it passes to another generation.
What the actual hell? It sounds like he is doing it on purpose!
I am spluttering in rage for you.
So angry for you.
YESSSSS! Good work, Swistle! It is SO hard to a) unpack things and deal with them; they are so easy to deal with when they are tucked away invisibly inside a box and b) get RID of things, especially those that may have some tiny smidgen of usefulness left in them. Excellent progress, you!
Every single box taken care of counts! Absolutely, any forward progress matters.
I’d love to look at a post of comforters Swistle likes.
My husband somehow conned me into going through boxes of his literally 1000s of clothing items. We don’t have enough dresser or closet space for them, and we have large ones of each. I went to go to bed and groaned because we got interrupted and everything was just EVERYWHERE in the bedroom. Meanwhile I have approximately 10 t-shirts and 2 pairs of shorts (I work from home) and I’m perfectly fine. I can do laundry literally any time, why do you need 750 tshirts?
But also, I WFH… so things can get sneaked into the donation bin.
Question for people who are good at decluttering:
How do you persuade yourself to get rid of stuff that “might be useful someday”?
For example, I have been saving every single random little fabric scrap from sewing in the kids’ art closet, and one of the teachers just sent out an email asking parents to send in extra fabric and yarn for an art project. Makes it even harder to throw out future scraps. There are so many things in the “might be useful” category when you have young kids! A jewelry box I don’t use anymore? What if my daughter would like it someday?
I could really use some insight here.
Odds are usually good, that whatever you want to get rid of will serve someone else. You shouldn’t hold on to something because you “might” have a need to give it to someone else in the future…otherwise you are just letting things take up real estate in your home.
My secret weapon is an “I can replace this” attitude and a pretty good feel for how much of something I will actually use. I’m a quilter and a garment sewer. It is *hard* to get rid of fabric and notions, but I really do know at what size a scrap stops being useful to me or when a notion just isn’t the type I like/style I use/etc. (Scraps get donated to someone who uses them to stuff dog beds and notions go to the resale store to delight some other sewist who does like that notion.) We re-use jars a lot, but I also know that the shelves we store them on are really all I need. Plus, if I really do run low on jars I can buy mason jars. I’d rather re-use, but its not like I can’t get jars. You get the idea. So, that only leaves the stuff I can’t easily replace that I have to be firm with myself about. And sometimes, it just has to get to the point of ridiculous before I let go. I just recently threw out materials I drafted twenty years ago as an intern. They were completely out of date and of no use to anyone, but they sat on my bookshelf in their binder until last year. But, usually my desire for a peaceful environment overcomes that desire to hang on to stuff.
I get rid of things via Buy Nothing, Freecycle, and Craigslist, and that lets me see two things:
(1) That people give away stuff, so if I need an end table/knife block/step stool at some point, someone will probably be giving one away or selling it for a low, low price
(2) That nobody wants to thing I am getting rid of, and probably I never will, either
I figure if I ever do need to buy a replacement, it’s just money I spent in order to have a less-cluttered house for years, and that seems like money well spent
The Buy Nothing neighborhood FB groups have been awesome on this front. GIVE IT TO SOMEONE WHO CAN USE IT NOW. It’s been so helpful to me.
Too your kids get older and there aren’t any more art projects (although markers & colored pencils are still used in HS). But the “might be useful someday” and “has some sentimental value” are my 2 absolute WORST declutter categories. I have had some luck imagining myself moving to some fantastic location like Paris. Would I bring this if we moved to Paris? Not 100%, but sometimes it works.
I found a first grade teacher on Buy Nothing who took allllllll of the craft supplies. All of them. ALLLL of them. Hand ’em off to someone who can use them now.
Every single time we have moved, we have always had boxes that sat untouched for years. I think it happens because after the move, we are so exhausted that we just don’t have the mental energy to deal with it. And yes, baby steps gets it done, eventually.
Drops in the bucket are Drops! in! the! Bucket! as wise Swistle once told us. It all counts. My husband (bless his heart) ‘organizes’ when I am out of town and it is beyond maddening. I bought too many crackers because he ‘organized’ them from where they always were. I bought a big box of Q-tips because he ‘organized’ the big box I already had to a different place. And yet, for all his organizing, I am called on often to help him find something that is literally right in front of his eyes. Good thing he has many redeeming qualities. And good thing I don’t have any quirks of my own.
I did a little organizing and purging during lockdown, but I was mostly too restless to settle to much of it. Now both my kids are away and I should be going at it hardcore, but I am working more and trying to keep myself distracted so I don’t miss my kids and my house should be MUCH CLEANER than it is at this point. (This post reminds me of when I wrote a post about being in purge mode in the basement and needing to keep going because I knew I would stop feeling like doing it and my husband told me to take a break because I would not stall out and you commented ‘you are right and your husband is wrong'” And you were so, so right.)
I feel so pleased for you! Yah you!! (Also props for having the boxes in THEMES to begin with – we have a few “assorted things we threw into a laundry basket and then never dealt with” containers over here!)
I need to do this! Every time I look in the garage and see boxes and various piles of things that need to be dealt with I feel overwhelmed and shut the door. I think I need to mark the calendar with a 30 minute time slot that says “just one box” and see if that will help me get the ball rolling.
Re: the mattress pad. I feel seen. I have been keeping a whole lot of crappy old towels in storage “just in case” we get a wet basement, the last wet basement being June 2005. At this point, if we needed more towels I could use the towels we have and then go buy new towels.
Two boxes! That is an accomplishment. My parents moved house in 2014 and gave me some of my old boxes that were in storage and I think it took me five years to deal with them. When I did, they were filled with old letters from my grandma and pen pals, and journals! I’m just glad that five years of sitting in my garage didn’t give them water damage or anything.
That’s awesome. So hard to get the momentum, but you got two boxes!
We have unpacked boxes in our basement from our last move, in 2002. But a couple years back I looked in one of them because we we’d broken some mugs and needed more and I thought there were mugs in there and there were and we’re using them now and my unrepentant inner packrat felt justified.
I do wish the visible parts of the house were less cluttered but the basement doesn’t bother me.