Year One Clean-Out

Moving is a great time to clean things out and downsize, but it's also a very stressful time and therefore not always conducive to fine-detail organizing, like sorting through paperwork, tchotchkes, and other miscellaneous items left in drawers and file cabinets.  Most of the time we just pile it all into moving boxes and figure we'll sort everything out once we've moved and dumped it into our new drawers and closets.  A sofa?  Pretty easy to decide if you're taking it or not.  The eight butane lighters in your kitchen drawer?  Not so easy, for some reason.

Organized!

So the season of year-end tossing time has come, here at the homestead.  I've been sorting through file cabinets and kitchen drawers, and shredding or getting rid of what's no longer needed, what is duplicated, or what is too old to matter anymore (like duplicate 1099 tax forms for escrow interest on a house bought 20 years ago, and 3 year-old receipts from Lowe's for drip system emitters.  Why do I keep this stuff?  Why?  Why?).

Since we're going to be remodeling the kitchen soon, I thought this would be a good time to organize and de-clutter the kitchen drawers, something we didn't even do before moving out of the old place.  While I was at it, I also got into the file cabinets in the library as well.  It felt good to organize and get rid of stuff, and since we've been here almost a year, it's time to make good on the promises we made when we left the old place -- telling ourselves if we still hadn't used something after living a year in this place, we'd chuck it.  Chucking is occurring as we speak.

I did the same thing in my clothes closet, using what I think is a good technique.  I told myself if I hadn't worn it in awhile, and did not think I would be wearing it again, I'd put it into a box and, if it remained there by the time a year had gone by, I'd have the courage to pass it onto Goodwill, where hopefully someone who likes it can give it a new lease on life.  That italicized phrase allows you a loophole for keeping some specialty items of clothing, like evening wear or heavy coats, understanding that you may only need those once every few years.  But the usual shirts, slacks and blouses that always seem to get passed over when you peruse your closet all go into the box to wait out their year.  

Some items I did, in fact, go looking for, and I was happy I hadn't thrown them out.The rest of the box, filled with things, I haven't missed, will go away now.

What's left after a year -- bound for Goodwill

De-cluttering is one of those tasks you may not like doing, but will make you extremely happy with the results.  We all accumulate far too much stuff in this life, and lightening the load always feels freeing.