De-Cluttering

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March 6, 2020 by phicks2012

I am not a hoarder. I don’t save trash, and we don’t generate a lot. I buy soft drinks in aluminum cans and recycle them. I recycle printer ink cartridges by sending them back to Hewlett-Packard. I take plastic bags back to the grocery store and stuff them into their recycling bins, and because I live in the country I toss food scraps outside to feed the local wildlife.

But I do tend to buy and to save more things than I probably ought to. I have a tendency to misplace small hardware items (like cup hooks, hinges, cotter pins, picture-hangers, and document clips), sewing notions (like Crochet hooks, needle threaders, seam rippers, and spare bobbins), and other items (like AA and AAA batteries, earbuds, and charging cables for mobile phones and other electronic gadgets) — anything small enough to settle to the bottom of a drawer, or to escape notice when being looked for. When I need things like that and cannot find them, I tend to replace them by purchasing more, and then when the original items turn up again — which they inevitably do when I’m actually looking for something else entirely — I wind up with more that I really need.

To also tend toward the impulse-buying of decorative wooden boxes, and toward saving and re-purposing glass candle jars and glasses. The glasses tend to get donated to Goodwill but the boxes and lidded jars tend to be used for storing small items like sewing notions or office minutiae, or to contain nuts, candy, or teabags. They work very well for that, but even so, and decorative though they may be — well. I probably have too many of them.

In addition, I tend to save certain magazines — especially those containing recipes or home repair articles (and ALL paper copies of The Equinox, Popular Chivalry, and Tournaments Illuminated)– and I rarely throw out books (not paperback and DEFINITELY not hardback). I seem to collect more bolts of fabric than I get around to using, and I have more colored paper than I will probably ever use for newsletter covers — especially since so much of that publishing is now being done electronically.

As a result, I have to make a point of regular de-cluttering — going through drawers, boxes, baskets, shelves and bins and figuring out what to do with the things that turn up.

Some things like extra (and probably unusable) tubes of superglue, batteries that are probably no longer viable, old & new junk-mail that somehow didn’t get tossed right away, old magazines (other than those listed above) and catalogs, old and useless receipts, and technically empty bottles of “whatever” go immediately into the trash. No problem.

Some things get sorted and put where they should have been put to begin with — hardware items into my tool box or workshop, electronics items into the catch-all drawer I use for such things, sewing notions in with my sewing stuff, and partially used OTC meds consolidated into single bottles.

But it has to be done regularly, and when I was doing it the other day I realized that I had six calculators. Six! Two of them didn’t work and went immediately into the trash, but what do I really need with four calculators when I now have a phone app for that? Are they even worth donating (assuming Goodwill would take them)?

I also discovered that I had over a dozen bottles of RIT fabric dye. I definitely need to get busy on my dying projects — re-dying faded items and dying others that I couldn’t find in colors I actually liked — because I really don’t need to be stockpiling fabic dye.

I found a number of feline products that I no longer need now that my elderly cat has passed away. I’ve given those to my housemate, who does have two friends of the feline persuasion, but my cat beds are going to be laundered and put into storage until I fall in love with another kitten — or puppy. My housemate’s cats would just LOVE THAT! 😉

I discovered I had WAY too many ballpoint pens — I really need to be better about testing the ones that have been forgotten and set aside, and tossing those that don’t perform — and I realized that I also had too many partially used memo pads as well. It took a while to rip out the used (and now irrelevant) pages and chuck them into the trash can, but it made me feel somehow heroic, nonetheless.

Actually, now that I consider the matter, I still have more staplers, and tape dispensers, and generic office supplies of all sorts than I possibly need, and I could probably avoid visiting Office Depot for at least a year without serious repercussions — at least until I need more plain white copier paper. However, I decided I wouldn’t be tossing out any staples, tape, or paperclips in the near future, especially when such things are small and easily stored, and when they don’t have expiration dates and will be just as usable in five years as they are today. I just put them all into the same container.

But I disposed of a lot of magazines and catalogs, and tossed a lot of fugitive junk-mail. I consolidated six bottles of hand/body lotion, five bottles of shampoo, four bottles of furniture polish, three bags of wild bird seed, two bottles of spray cleaner — and a partridge in a pear tree.

I cleared out several medium-sized Sterilite containers, made space on several shelves and cabinet tops, relocated several cans of insect repellent and five packets of flower seeds to the mudroom for use come spring, and found my Magic 8-Ball — which, when asked if I had done a good de-cluttering job, said “Yes Definitely”.

So that ought to count for something, right? 😉