I’ve been on another round of decluttering. I don’t have lots of stuffed areas in my small home but I do have things that I no longer need or find useful. I didn’t make the connection for myself about visual clutter till way into my decluttering journey. Now I realize, that because I’ve always been a visual person, I need to see space around me in my home. That’s also the reason all the rooms of my house, the bathroom excluded, are painted Simple White by Benjamin Moore. I need that continuity.

If you’re just organizing your stuff, you’re really just rearranging stuff that probably needs to go. Moving stuff around doesn’t get rid of it. reI like organizing things using the container method. This method by Dana K White is about keeping only what fits in any container. The rest is decluttered. It’s a good method and very efficient at getting to visually see what you have in any given space. 

This month we took a bunch of things to the Placer Food Bank. Some of this was the ‘pandemic’ food I just knew I would never use but someone else might. Especially all the Mountain House dehydrated food meals that I thought someone homeless could use as they are complete meals. I still have a few random things to give them but I’ll wait till at least it’s a bag full.

We also took a load of ‘nice’ things to the Assistance League thrift. This included 2 pairs of dress-type shoes( Merrells, and Naots), and some other misc. I’ve already got a few more things ready to go including the Food Saver vacuum sealer that I haven’t used since summer and then it was only for frozen corn. I also have the beautiful quilt frame ready to go. I have it on Pay it Forward but so far no takers.

It’s important to reevaluate where you are in life and what things are helping in your space and what things are just in the way or cluttering up your home. I have decluttered pretty extensively since 2011( I checked an old file I had from when I started Flylady). So much has left my home and storage areas but it doesn’t really stop as there’s always something to get rid of. I’m a firm believer that the things I don’t need may benefit someone else. Plus, now being in my 70’s, there’s a whole other level to what I need/want. I need things in my home to be simple and easy to maintain. Plus, there’s the safety factor of how things are. We know we’ll need to change out the tub for just a shower unit and I’m planning on working that into a project for this summer. Since we only have one bathroom, summer will be best because we can use Rubi’s bathroom while we do this. The floor will need to be redone and sink, toilet while we’re at it. Of course, this is going to have to be budgeted for. But what we do know is the tub needs to go for safety.

We still have some boxes of photos to go through. B has been putting some on the cloud to preserve them. I also have gone through these boxes previously and gotten rid of tons of photos that were duplicates, of random nature pictures, and just blurry or strange.

Once the weather changes, I’ll go back out to the barn and clean the restaurant shelves, and decide what to do with the empty bins. There are maybe 8 bins or so. I might take some of the older bins we have and switch to these as they are smaller in size and fit those shelves perfectly. But, we are in a rainy period here in Northern California so it might be a while. The next week is forecast to be raining off and on.