It must be Spring. A contageous decluttering mood seems to be spreading among fellow bloggers. I got hit by it too, this past weekend – after reading GB’s post, who said he caught it from Kate, who had shared from someone else, who…
Anyway, from a list of 10 decluttering principles, besides the one-item-a-day idea, it was the following that really hit home with me:
“Declutter the Easy Stuff First.
There is no need to make things difficult by trying to declutter the hardest things first.”
Still kind of exhausted after the Sisyphus job of dealing with all the inherited stuff from my parents' house over the past few years – and yet feeling a certain need to get on with some of my “own” now – this simple principle struck me as just brilliant.
It’s just so true that whenever I start thinking of getting rid of (more) stuff, my mind tends to jump straight to the hard things – both emotionally and physically – and then it’s so tempting to just put it off again. You know – the heavy stuff that calls for help by someone with strong arms and a car; or the stuff that someone else might actually find useful even if I don’t; or the papers and photos that need to be properly sorted through and read before decisions can be made; or various items that maybe aren’t really important, but still bear memories…
The Easy Stuff approach however took me straight out into the kitchen to get rid of a number of items that without any regret whatsoever could go straight into the ordinary garbage & recycling bins. Like, you know, too many “extra” glass jars and old scratched plastic food containers and bowls and jars and cutting boards; and the useless cracked not-even-antique tea pot…
While I was at it, I also decided to reward myself by replacing a few worn everyday items with new fresh ones – as seen in the photo above. But I did throw away a lot more than the few I replaced! (About a month’s worth at least, counted by the one-item-a-day principle.)
