Day One of the 500 Pound Declutter

When I got home tonight, if I wasn't already committed to beginning my de-cluttering journey, all I had to do was round the bend into the kitchen.

Our Kitchen Desk

Now I know we all have that one dumping ground.  The place where things just get set when you walk in the house.  Ours is this desk.  Unfortunately, this is also smack dab in the middle of the kitchen.  You can't hide it.  You can't avoid looking at it.  It's always there.  And it has been driving me nuts for quite some time.

And so Eli went to bed, the big boys and Brian headed off to Scouts and I dug in.  Ugh.

Tons and tons of misc. papers, most of which could be recycled or shredded and then recycled.

Reindeer ears.  Of course.  Fun when we made them, but really, are we ever going to put them on again?  No.  Tossed.

Benadryl from when Eli was sick, ohhh,I had to go look.  Well when he had this rash, which I would have sworn was about 8 weeks ago.  Yeah, as you can see, that was in May.

Broken purse.  Way broken.  Broke a week ago.  I cleaned it out, threw a lot away.  Put 12 lipsticks in the bathroom upstairs and put the purse in the cloth recycling that can go out next week.

 

Plenty of tools and gadgets that have just never made their way back to Brian's workshop.  Now they have.

Some toys, the good ones got put away, the rest of them got tossed.  But the next one is a personal favorite.  A broken matryoshka doll.  Eli likes to play with these (we even think he might have eaten the teeniest one recently).  He had them out the other day and I unknowingly walked through the room and stepped on it.  Crushing it.

Now I don't think of myself as very emotional or attached to "stuff" but then I found this sitting there and thought, well maybe sometimes I am.  This was mine as a little girl.  I have had it for something like 30 years.  But as I looked at it, I thought, come on, you are not really going to glue these six pieces back together, are you?  And no, I was not.  The remaining dolls I kept, but the broken top and matching bottom were tossed.

We had been keeping paperwork, receipts, etc. for taxes up there.  But I didn't want to look at them anymore. So I dug into just one of the drawers to see if I could find a spot for the papers.

Well isn't that a well thought out drawer.  Let's not even talk about the fact that the candy is from Halloween a year ago.  And the silver mints?  Oh yeah, those would be from our cruise in the spring.  Not anymore.  Tossed.  The scissors and markers went into the stash of next year's school supplies.  And the paperwork moved to the drawer.

I also have listed one book and one CD on Amazon.  If they don't sell in the week, they are going to the half price book store.

And the results?

Day one, I packed up my bag of stuff.  First I got on the scale.  And then I got on with my bag of clutter.  And I couldn't quite believe it.  So I did it again.  Nope it was right the first time.

5 pounds.  5 pounds of clutter just on the top of my desk.  That is insane.

But man it felt good.  Looking at it feels even better.

495 pounds to go...