Apr 16, 2010
The Great Decluttering Project
Oh clutter. It’s the unforgivable sin of the minimalist world. Clutter – which can be disguised as collectibles, mementoes, gifts, and ‘it might be useful someday’ items – is bad.
Clutter makes us buy bigger houses, rent storage sheds, spend a fortune on home organising kits, turn our garages into sheds, and fills our basements and attics with dusty old albums, jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing, and moth-eaten museum-style clothing.
Clutter is insidious, sneaking its way into our homes with the post, the grocery shopping, the holiday season.
In a spirit of confession, here is some of my clutter:
- An ancient gameboy that doesn’t work that I don’t want to throw away but can’t donate to anyone.
- A box full of random wires – telephone lines, usb connectors, chargers for devices that we no longer own, and exchangeable plugs and adaptors.
- A briefcase of Dungeons & Dragons books, maps, dice and magazines.
- A snowglobe that someone gave me as a gift.
- Three incense burners (I haven’t burned incense in well over a year)
- A shelf of old CD’s that contain back-ups of old files, mysterious programs compatible only with ancient versions of windows, and a number of music CDs even though my music has been digital for a decade.
- Cardboard boxes that once contained expensive electronic equipment, complete with the protective moulded packaging.
- Expensive pens, pencils, bristol board, acrylic paints, pastels and other ‘a-grade’ art materials from my years as an aspiring artist. Now, depressingly, I bet a lot of them have dried up or faded. A great example of saving something expensive until it’s useless and never getting to enjoy it.
So for the next four weeks I’m going to get rid of one item a day. That’s it. I can list it on ebay (it only counts once it’s actually shipped out the door), I can take it to the recycling centre or a charity shop, or I can throw it in a compost bin. I’m not allowed to send anything to landfill.
I started today with my GCSE revision books. I’m taking them to the charity shop. As a bonus, I included my one remaining Harry Potter book, and a pretty dire comic book.
If anyone else wants to join me on this challenge, post the item you got rid of in the comments.
[...] gotten rid of a lot of items since I started the Great De-Cluttering Project. The gameboy is gone, a large number of books, the second iPod. Most of the surfaces in my house [...]