I am glued to my phone tonight, very anxiously awaiting the birth of my new nephew, Preston. I have been bothering every member of my family for updates. :) :) I wish so badly that we were there to welcome him into the world tonight, but at least we will be there next weekend. I have yet to experience the visiting of a niece or nephew in the hospital! We lived in California when Paisley was born, we had a 2 day old newborn when Parker was born, and now we are living out of state again for Preston's birth. What the heck!?! We have terrible timing for these moves, I tell ya. We'll need to search for something really interesting on TV or Netflix to distract me.
I have been off of work all week and have been going CRAZY de-cluttering and organizing. We watched a documentary on Netflix on Sunday night call Minimalism and it sparked something inside of me. Like really, really sparked something. George and I both tend to be clutter haters and are very good about getting rid of things, having a spot for our things, keeping our place tidy, etc. And even still we were able to get rid of about 12-15 bags of donations, another 2-3 bags of trash, and a few boxes of items that I have posted for sale...already made $80....yeah! We still have several boxes that are unopened from our move (garage/outdoor stuff, decorations) that we will need to go through whenever we move back into our house. We got rid of a lot of items that we either don't wear/use, have duplicates of, or are just unnecessary. For example, we had four ladles...I have never needed more than one ladle at a time. We had these pillows on our living room chairs that we always remove when we sit down. Neither of us particularly liked these pillows and when we removed them, we preferred the look of the chairs without the pillows, so we sold them! We also got rid of a TON of clothes. I have sold a decent amount of them for $3-$7 per item. Lots of examples like that added up to a massive de-cluttering. It feels so good and now putting away toys, dishes, laundry, etc is much easier because I'm not fighting full bins, cabinets, closets, and drawers. We could do a second round and get rid of even more, I think, but it takes so much energy so it'll have to wait.
One more quick note on minimalism and de-cluttering. In January, we are going to do the "Minimalist Game" with some of my family. On January 1, you get rid of one item, on January 2, two items, January 3, three items, and so on. If you'd like to join along, email me! We can all send each other pictures, tips, and encouragement throughout the month. We will be in AZ for over a week next month, so we will have to catch-up when we get home. Since we have already de-cluttered so much, some of our items might need to be papers, pens, pencils. Haha!
Fine print: you are signing up to get rid of 465 items (thanks Jeremiah for bringing that to our attention!)
Here is the pile of some of our donations!
Compared to our house, George and I have a very small closet in our apartment. When we first moved in, I was panicking about the lack of closet space. We literally had to squeeze items in to get them to fit! It was a mess and it drove both of us nuts. Here is how our closets looks now. SO much better. Now we can actually see what we own. Honestly, I still have too many clothes. 80% of what you see in there is mine. I left items that I was on the fence on, but have committed to getting rid of whatever I don't wear in the next month (except warmer weather items).
Ok, over and out...baby watch continues!
Those of us who really need to de-clutter, don't. I give you credit and I also wonder how you could have moved such a short time ago and already have so much to get rid of. I donate to Salvation Army, which is easy, but am not too familiar with how to sell things. Good for you! Dan also wins an award for minimalism. As always, I love your blog! ~Aunt Gail
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