Use It or Lose It

Once upon a time, I cleared out and repainted the upstairs storage closet (also known around here as 'The Storage Closet of Doom' for good reason).

It was all organized and pretty. I could walk in and out without fear I'd be buried in crap treasures:



Sadly, it doesn't look like that anymore. No, now it's even worse than it was before I re-painted it in 2010. The level of stuff is waist-deep on me (I'm only 5'0", so yes, it's not SUPER deep, but it's deep enough, thanks).

See?

Now, this has been bothering me for a couple of months, but I rationalized it by saying, "Eh, either the space that I want to put (insert item name here) in isn't ready for it, or I can't paint it yet. No big deal. It can wait."

Well, that was super great...until I actually needed something out of the closet. The BACK of the closet. And to get to it, I had to make a path. As I was taking yet another armload of treasures out, I realized 1) How much stuff was actually IN that closet, and 2) What a great job I'd done getting it all to fit. (Or something like that. Work with me here.)

In January, one of my favorite blogs, Young House Love had a post talking about the same issue: A Strange Self-Imposed Challenge. They said the same thing I said: Stop hoarding things, start using them (I'm paraphrasing here). They're doing a "Dude, Get On That Already" series with their treasures. It inspired me to get cracking on my hoard
treasures too.

It's time to go through the piles and make a decision on each thing. If I wait for the perfect place/time to use these things, well, that's never going to get here. A home is always a work in progress...well, at least for me. Steve is a trooper for putting up with my always changing things, and I know he's secretly relieved when Home Improvement Season is done for the year.

So, with that, it's Use It or Lose It time.

Let the Games begin.

A Thing a Day, or 365 Less Things

I just read about this today over at the Unclutterer blog that I read a couple times a week. There's also a forum for people to post what they've gotten rid of. I also found a really cool blog written by someone who's doing the challenge, over at the 365 Less Things blog. Every day a picture is taken of the item being tossed/donated/sold/given away.

This challenge is something I can get behind. Most people who really know me, know that I have a low (VERY low) tolerance for stuff (stuff being defined as "clutter, visual or otherwise") and periodically go on tossing binges. One of the good things about doing the hallway storage closet is that I went through Every. Single. Box. that was already in there, and did a super quick sort.

I also took boxes out of the master bedroom closet, and went through them before putting things in the storage closet. Now, this first pass was mainly to see what was there, since some of (alright, MOST of) said boxes hadn't been opened since either I brought them home from my mom's house, or since we moved twice the year we built the new house. I can tell which boxes that I personally packed because there's not much wasted space (a skill learned by necessity because I moved so much between the ages of 18-23). Some of them, however, were most defintely NOT packed by me because there's like 3 items in the box. In some ways it was kind of like Christmas, "Oh! That's what happened to _____." In others it was a "And I kept this why again? And moved it twice (or more)?"

I'm going to give it more thought, but I'm seriously considering combining my 101 in 1001 item #101 "Do a 365 day photo challenge" with this and taking pictures of things I'm getting rid of. It'd defintely be a win-win.