Organizational and de-cluttering ideas for 2008

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Happy New Year! January issues of magazines often offer suggestions at organizing homes, so I’m starting a CA thread where we can share and motivate each other to organize and de-clutter for 2008.

One suggestion from BH&G Jan 08 issue addressed clutter in the bathroom, which motivated me to disposose of outdated and unused toiletry items. It’s much easier to find things in there now.

Please share what works to help keep your homes organized! :idea:
 
more stuff means more work, more cleaning, more storage space, more worry, sometimes more insurance, and more aggravation. it had better be some spectacular new thing to warrant at that, so be very selective on what you buy and what you let into the house, and when a new thing comes in an old item of like kind must leave. get rid of stuff. cancel subscriptions to periodicals you don’t read. If you don’t read one issue before the next one comes in, you dont need that magazine.

If you haven’t worn it, used it, cooked with it, played with it, cleaned with it, or touched it for over 2 years, you don’t need it. get rid of it.

memories reside in the people, the events, the emotions–not in things. keep the memory, lose the things.
 
I organized my candle stash and found one I didn’t know I had. And speaking of candles. don’t y’all forget to get a bayberry candle and burn it tomorrow. It’ll bring good luck!
Kathy
 
I am a bit of a clean freak- Our house is very tiny so I am constantly getting rid of stuff. I hate clutter. If it doesn’t have a place or doesn’t get used -it gets donated to one of the local goodwills, salvation army- etc.

That being said- I often forget to declutter other areas that are “put away” like closets, the medicine cabinet, etc. I recently went through my make-up tin and threw away stuff that was 3-4 years old!! YIKES.
When it comes to clothes I try to say to myself- if I haven’t worn it in the past year I get rid of it.
Every evening when dd is in bed I try to sort through the mail, newspaper and the daily paper “junk” because its amazing how fast that stuff collects.
I’ll be watching this thread and see what good ideas other have!! Good topic! 👍
 
puzzleannie said:
memories reside in the people, the events, the emotions–not in things. keep the memory, lose the things.
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So true!!! My dad is rather sentamental and yells at me all the time for getting rid of stuff… I got rid of my wedding dress a few weeks after the wedding. My best memories of the day are of DH and I get to look at him every day!!!😊
 
quick poll: how many people still have their HS or college textbooks on the shelves, but never open them?
guilty, although when my career involved writing I used my 8th grade English grammar book constantly.

DH still has every math book he ever owned (except matrices and vector spaces, he threw that out a window after the final exam). He did use a couple of them when he was teaching, and still consults them occasionally now that he is tutoring.

are you really going to refer to your Comm 101 or Women’s Studies books again?

what about all the paperbacks, esp. genre, which you read once and will never read again?

Magazines - ugh

who still gets a newspaper instead of reading it online?

another quick poll: how many people know how many years you must retain tax records?
 
gardenswithkids said:
Happy New Year! January issues of magazines often offer suggestions at organizing homes, so I’m starting a CA thread where we can share and motivate each other to organize and de-clutter for 2008.

One suggestion from BH&G Jan 08 issue addressed clutter in the bathroom, which motivated me to disposose of outdated and unused toiletry items. It’s much easier to find things in there now.

Please share what works to help keep your homes organized! :idea:
Click to expand...
I’ve got a goal of throwing out 5 things every day … less junk in my house means less stuff to clean!!
 
I once heard that if you haven’t used something in the last 6 months (stuff like lotions, creams, make-up, etc.) throw it out. That could also apply to clothes, accessories, magazines, books, etc., and could make good fodder for a garage sale or donation bin.
 
Is it a sin to hold on to something that we don’t use, knowing that someone else can put it to use?

I think it would be because wouldn’t that, somehow, resemble greed?

If you don’t use it, give it away and if its no longer good then trash it.

If you really have something that you like and just cant seem to get rid of it, try taking lots of pictures of it and keep a nice album of that or those items and pass the items on to someone who will put them to use.

Don’t keep items for “just in case they might be used in the future”. If you know you wont use it within the next week chances are that you won’t use it anytime soon. Instead of having it sitting there without use, someone else who needs it can put it to use.
 
We did the “Keep” “Sell/Give Away” “Toss” thing a few weeks back.
I need to invest in some bins to keep it together.

Real Simple magazine has some great ideas.
 
Moving 1000 miles helped us:D Seriously, though, moving will cause one to toss anything unncessary.

We gave a lot of things to good will, clothes mainly…

I would recommend larger items be sold in your local paper, or if you are up for a garage sale…that is always a good idea. (but garage sales are WORK):o

Something I learned from ‘the fly lady’ is she recommends spending 60 minutes cleaning one’s home, and throwing things out, etc…for the average procrastinator. While cleaning is not so bad for me, I dislike (loathe) organizing and throwing things out…making piles of clothes to give away…bla bla If you spend 60 minutes (using an egg timer for example) you will get a lot done…and perhaps even after the 60 minutes, you will want to keep going. She says that by setting a time limit on cleaning, most people CAN commit to that time period. It’s when we look at a room or our garages, and say…holy smokes, how am I going to clean this whole thing out!!!:eek: It has helped me greatly to becoming more organized and time efficient.👍
 
My recent strategy has been to take advantage of the geography-- Goodwill is across the street from Walmart (which is the only game in town for grocery shopping).

So, now I put a few things in a box or bag and take them to Goodwill on my way to grocery shopping.

I’ve been off of work for a week, and trust me I have been going through clutter and throwing it out like there is no tomorrow. I hate clutter, but DH keeps everything… well, everything except all the stuff I’ve thrown out or given away!
 
First, let me [SIGN][/SIGN]wish you all a happy, healthy, and blessed 2008.

As for de-cluttering, I have been a rat-pack all my life. I come from a home where things are hoarded. This past year I made a concerted effort to de-clutter my home with the help of a couple of Yahoo groups. I have chronic back pain so it’s hard for me to clean butFlyLady said, “We can do anything in 15 minutes.” So I started the 15 minutes at a time, i got my kitchen, dining room, living room and half of my son’s room decluttered.

My main problems with letting things go is that I have this or had this belief that as soon as I get rid of something I’ll need it. Well, I haven’t needed a thing I’ve let go of. The second problem is that I hate throwing away things that still work … no matter how old. So, I gave some things to my granddaughter, Goodwill, and put things I free cycle. By doing this I know I’ve blessed others.

It wasn’t easy but I did it. The next thing I want to tackel 15 minutes at a time is my massive amount of photo graphs. My daughter scanned all her photos onto CDs and tossed the originals. This will be very hard to for me but I have 3 large tubs full of photos. So, by the end of 2008 I would like to have accomplished this tast.

I hope this has helped some one, Blessings to you all.
Yvonne[SIGN][/SIGN]
 
I have a great suggestion for toys. When my son was younger (he is now 20 yo), we would go through his toys the day after Thanksgiving each year. Our goal was to get rid of half of everything. We would start with all of the broken toys, then move on to the ones we could give away to another little boy that didn’t have anything to play with. This sounds like it would be a horrible ordeal to do with a young child, I think we had one bad year, after that when we went to donate all of the toys he didn’t play with and he took one to Toys for Tots because it had never found it’s way out of the package. The soldier that was there collecting talked to my son for a few minutes, well that changed everything! The following years he was ready and willing to sort through and get rid of toys.

My second suggestion became my philosophy following my mom’s death. She passed away unexpectedly. My sister, brother and I had to go through her house. After that both my sister and I went home and cleaned as if someone would have to go through ours. OK, so this sounds bad, but… now my sister and I joke that when we do our good cleanings twice a year we clean as if we are going to die before the next cleaning. You will be amazed at how much you determine is not worth someone else having to go through!
 
puzzleannie said:
quick poll: how many people still have their HS or college textbooks on the shelves, but never open them?..Magazines - ugh…
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LOL, I just moved hubby’s old, dusty college texts. I love books and portions of our house resemble a library.

My recent cleaning spree started by cleaning out the linen closet to make room for some of our treasured children’s books that my toddler had targeted for destruction. She kept taking the books off a bookshelf, so I moved the books into the linen closet and put that bookshelf in the basement. Before I checked this thread, I literally was just loading it with old college texts, but perhaps we should re-examine those old books and get rid of some.🙂

Old magazines–yikes! I often save them in neat stacks on bookshelves and I do re-read some from the same season of previous years, but my toddler likes to get to those too. There’s nothing like a destructive toddler to help declutter the house. 😃 It’s probably time to save whatever magazine I have worth saving and donate them somewhere. Every month, new magazines arrive in my mailbox to take their place.
 
Tonks40 said:
I once heard that if you haven’t used something in the last 6 months (stuff like lotions, creams, make-up, etc.) …
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Personal testimony from my bathroom de-junking to support that. I discovered an expensive hair product that was who-knows-how-old. While I threw out lots and lots of stuff, I saved that to use; however, when I went to use it one morning, it made my hair smell like rancid oil–probably because the oil in the product had gone rancid. Yuck.
 
MustangBoop said:
…The next thing I want to tackel 15 minutes at a time is my massive amount of photo graphs. My daughter scanned all her photos onto CDs and tossed the originals. This will be very hard to for me but I have 3 large tubs full of photos. So, by the end of 2008 I would like to have accomplished this tast…
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Good idea to make a huge project like that a year long goal.

I don’t know what to do with all the old photos beyond storing them in giant bins for now. I figure I’ll sort them and make beautiful books once my kids have grown. My mom left us to help her sort old photos, so maybe organizing photos is best done with grown children. (Anyway, that toddler of mine who tears books off our shelves would probably try to ruin any photo album right now, so it serves her right to have to help me organize the photos when she’s older. 😃 )
 
1ke said:
…So, now I put a few things in a box or bag and take them to Goodwill on my way to grocery shopping…
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That’s a really good idea to donate quickly. Once you are ready give something away, it doesn’t need to clutter up the house any longer. I’m guilty of keeping bins of stuff to donate in the garage too long–drives my hubby crazy. I get it out of the house by putting it in the garage.
 
Thank you everyone for lots of good and inspiring ideas! Keep them coming! Forgive me if I don’t respond to every posts, but I don’t want to spend all my free time writing about organization and decluttering instead of actually organizing and de-cluttering…or maybe I do.😉
 
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