Yesterday and today I am . . .
Working with my older sister who’s visiting from New York to conquer the Mount Kilimanjaro of boxes she’d been storing in our father’s basement.
We spent nine hours sorting through her stuff yesterday and we even snuck in a few hours this morning. We still have a lot to do, but thankfully the task has shifted from mountainous to hill-like. (Four mini-vans loads of Goodwill donations helped to winnow down the task.)
Just call me the sherpa of decluttering.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
Click HERE to follow The Non-Consumer Advocate on Twitter.
Click HERE to follow The Non-Consumer Advocate on Instagram.
Click HERE to join The Non-Consumer Advocate Facebook group.
Click HERE to follow The Non-Consumer Advocate on Pinterest.
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Please come to my house and tell me where to start. I swear it comes in as fast as it goes out. Everyone wants to store stuff here. I have decluttered so many times, and I still feel like I’m in hoarder’s heaven!! It is never ending.
And at my age, I can’t do anything except sleep for 9 hours straight!!
She’s lucky it’s you helping and not me. I could never part with such a wonderful treasure-trove of Cricket Magazines without spending the better part of a week re-reading them all. But I AM getting better at viewing such decluttering as enriching the lives of others who need or will value those talonous treasures that don’t easily let go of me. Thank goodness for curbsides and thrift store donation boxes.
Oh wow, I love old books, magazines etc. I’m with Auntie Karen on this I would have spent all day looking at them. I bet you having lots of laughs whilst sorting together. x
This weekend I am…
*Spending time with the new neighbors+ my kids playing with their kids
* Taking outside walks, enjoying the sun
* Finishing a good book (Gravity, by Tess Gerritsen)
* Doing laundry and hanging on the line
* Playing Jaipur with hubby
Have a great frugal day!
This weekend I:
cleaned out and reorganized the closet in my room
Got all the pens in the house and sorted so I could donate 3/4 of them. Also found notebook paper to donate
Hubby took daughter and I on a nice ride in the country today. I really needed to get out and look at something different.
let – ha ha – hubby cook dinner tonight – no take out
You are a very good sister!
This weekend we sorted through 4 boxes of books and a bag of CDs our son went through when he was home this summer. We’re keeping about 15 books – the rest for resale/donation – my husband has let go of only 1/2 of the CDs. We still have DVDs to sort.
Got a Schwinn double jogging stroller that was marked “free” when on a walk with a friend. We are going to have our first grandchild within 2 weeks and I’d like a stroller for when they visit – this probably isn’t the right one – but if I re-sell it, I can use that $$ for an appropriate one.
This weekend I….
Went to a delicious family style Italian restaurant where we took home two meals (each) worth of leftovers, the servings were that big.
Went to a wine tasting and came home with a Sonoma “field blend”…a blend of different grapes from different parcels of land all over Sonoma.
Watched “Fistful of Dollars,” one of Sergio Leone’s first Westerns. Awesome fight scene.
What a perfect weekend!
This weekend I….
Spent part of my saturday working the local farmer’s market. Didn’t do as good as I wanted, since we had an inversion of smoke from all the wildfires. Paid for the booth and $31 over. Better than staying home and met lots of nice people.
Spent this morning, weeding, watering and harvesting the garden. Got enough fresh veggies to make a cuke, onion, and tomato salad. Also a big bowl of green beans, and the dreaded Zucchini.
Over the weekend I got rid of a bunch of stuff, after listing it on Freecycle. I also found stuff to take to the local food bank this morning.
We worked outside yesterday. We are repainting the house ourselves. My husband cleaned out the junk clogging the gutter covers. Our neighbor’s tree is the gift that keeps on giving: shade as well as blossoms droppings in the spring, some kind of droppings this time of year, and branches all year long.
We went to UNO’s for lunch. We each ordered 2/$12 meals (which means we came home with enough leftovers for one or more meals each). We drank water, I had a 20% off coupon, and a gift card I bought for 20% off list at SAM’S Club.
I re-hemmed a pair of suit pants for my husband. Today I need to figure out how to fix a pocket with holes in it (in a different pair of suit pants).
I hope everyone has a fun week.
Four minivan loads! Wow! Great job the two of you! I think one of my life’s goals is never to accumulate so much stuff that it takes me and a friend twelve hours to sort through it.
cleaning out clutter Is no fun. I threw out a lot of stuff I did not need and got rid of a good amount at a yard sale a couple weeks ago. It is insidious, the stuff you put down in the basement or attic just seems to grow. It was either clean it out or get a storage room. Pay to store junk? That would be insane! Even if I give the stuff away, it would cost me less than storing it. So I consider clearing out the old stuff to be a necessary chore that I just had to do.
Oh, my this brings memories. About 10 years ago, my sister and I helped our two aunts (never-married sisters) clean out their garage, which was lined with filled shelves down both sides. We did this over two summers, for a week each time, and it was a huge job. They were incredible hoarders, although they were also incredibly neat about it and kept it all out of the apartment and on shelves. Some examples, though:
-A special sized notebook paper their father (my grandfather) used all the time, that no one else ever used, an 8-inch high stack of it. I was in my mid-forties at the time we found the paper, and he had died when I was 18.
-Every kitchen appliance, such as a toaster or blender, which they couldn’t fit in their tiny kitchen was put in the garage, in its original box, with the original Styrofoam packing. They unpacked the appliances each time they used them, then returned them to their boxes, neatly packed again, Styrofoam in place.
-Fabric yardage, trims, and patterns, filling two large cartons — think dishwasher sized boxes. They hadn’t owned a sewing machine in years.
-Tablecloths from the 1950’s, which they had not used since about 1960. My sister and I were awarded these as part of our “payment”.
That first summer we carried things to their church yard sale, to the dumpster, or to friends for them, and condensed the rest, emptying 76 cardboard boxes. The next summer, we really went to it, and carted three pickup loads to a friend’s yard sale, gave away another pickup load to friends, and emptied 125 more cartons. When they moved from that apartment into assisted living, which is why we were cleaning out for them, it still took two U-Hauls to carry their furnishings and the stuff left in that garage.
I’m consciously de-cluttering all the time, myself. I learned some lessons.
I loved Cricket Magazine when I was a kid! Ah, Memories!
Yesterday we lost power. I was envisioning (dreading) getting ready for work this morning, in the dark, coffee-less, and taking the dogs out while on high alert for the skunk I noticed lurking around. But our power came back on last night and I am so, so thankful for it today. Yard lights on, no skunk.
My cousin and I have both gone through mountains of “stuff” in the past few years as we try to sort through and get rid of the immense collection of things our parents stored in their garages and such over the years. It’s a daunting task, but it feels so freeing with every load going to Goodwill or stuff that ends up dumped in the trash.
God save me from crap!
It sounds like you made great progress on the mountain of boxes. 🙂
Over the weekend, I decluttered our coat closet and found all the gloves I could not find last winter. No replacements were bought for them: I just wore the same pair all winter, despite how ratty they looked.
Today I took a big bag of stuff to the Salvation Army store, made a lemon pound cake with some lemons that needed to be used up, tracked down a sale on cat food, and hung laundry on the drying rack.
Thanks for the throwback – Cricket Magazine! Wow…
I hope you sold those on Ebay or other 🙂 !
That’s roughly $55 just there in that pic alone.