One Less: Ornamental Spoon

Someone I once knew did woodwork as a hobby, and as a thank you for something I did for him, he gave me a hand-carved wooden spoon.

It looked beautiful, so I put it on display.

After ten years or so, while I was decluttering ornaments and trinkets, I realised it looked kind of ridiculous and cluttery being on display like that and put it in my utensils draw, and now it's my favourite spoon for cooking.

One Less: stack of empty pots

Today we cleaned out the shed.

I've put off cleaning out the shed, partly because it's full of geckos and who knows what else, partly because the stuff in there represents so much time and money invested in me thinking I could be another Peter Cundall or Jackie French.  

Piles of empty pots ready to propagate in.  Bags of fertilisers and bottles of organic pesticides to treat this deficiency or eradicate that pest.  Seeds past their plant-by-date.  Shovels, trowels, rakes, gloves, hose connector doodads.

It all goes with the pile of barely read gardening tomes inside.

So much money spent, so little return.  Rotting.

I thought that I wanted to be a gardener, but it turns out I just like gardens.  All I need is an easy care yard, with the occasional spectacular flower (there are some of these sprung up at the moment that I'd forgotten about), a little vegetable patch, and a fruit tree or two.  I don't actually want to be spending hours potting around the garden: there are too many fantastic books to read, and I have too many children to play with!

One Less: Box of Papers

Once upon a time I used to be a music teacher.  I trained to teach secondary school Music and English, but ended up teaching Music from preschool through to year ten, and middle school English and SOSE (history/geography/civics).   When I left teaching seven years ago it was fairly abruptly, and at the time I didn't know if it would be for one year, two years, ten years, or forever. So I just packed everything I had into five boxes and put them into storage.  As it turned out, I had a baby before I had opportunity to take up another teaching job.

Two years ago I did the sums and worked out that if I did teach again I would have been out of it for ten years, probably twelve.   There are already new syllabuses in place for the subjects I taught, and will be yet another new one by the time I return to work.  My resources will mostly be so out of date that I won't be using them anyway.

So I sat down with my five boxes and culled.  I threw out class sets of worksheets that I never used.  I threw out bits and pieces of English resources that I had collected but never taught a full unit on.  I threw out doubles of assignment task sheets and extra copies of exams.   I managed to pare it down by half.

Today, the Small Boy wanted to play out in the garage where the boxes are stored, so I set to work culling again.  It felt rather momentous because I looked at my materials in the box mentally marked 'music' and realised that I would probably never teach Senior (year 11 and 12) Music.  I never taught it when I was working, and don't really want to teach Music if I do teach again.  The bits and pieces of materials for teaching Senior Music that I was saving in my box are worthless now and will be even more worthless if I were to return to teaching.  So I threw them out.  I also pared back all of my P-10 resources so that I have just the bare bones.  I stuffed one display folder with unit plan overviews that I can build from again if I ever need to.  My 2 1/2 boxes is now down to 1 2/3.  When I next get a chance, the box mentally marked 'English/SOSE' may not be safe!

I'm not willing to part with all my teaching materials just yet.  I will possibly teach part time one day in the future, and don't want to have to start everything from scratch.  Until I can say definitively I will not be teaching ever again, I don't think it is wise to part with it all, but I do want to pare down to just enough to get me started if I need it.

But, as an added bonus, my husband (who is a primary school teacher) looked at his six boxes of resources and starting culling, too.  He's barely looked in those boxes in five years and knows a lot of what he owns is also out of date.

One Less: Box of Staples

You know, I don't really need 10000 staples, six pairs of scissors, six sharpeners, 10 Post-it note pads, 5 liquid paper pens, 20 bulldog clips, 8 erasers, or 4 rulers, especially not when most of those have been sitting in a box, unused, on my shelf for 4, 6, 8, 10 years.

Stationery downsized from two boxes to one.  Excess stationery going to my sister who is 1/6 of the way through a business degree, so will probably benefit from it more than me.  Broken and no-longer working stuff: binned.  Remaining items in the box are on borrowed time.  I think we can drop to a box 1/3 of the size.

What was I thinking buying that many staples in the first place?

One less: outdated clothes

I pulled out all my folded clothes, threw them on the bed and sorted them into piles according to style.   Should I confess right now that I found unworn clothing, still with tags?  And I have multiples of the same colour.

I decided now was the time to part with my graduation outfit from when I finished high school.  Yes, yes, it was only 13 1/2 years ago, but I figured that I'm never actually going to fit it again, seeing as I don't even intend on being my grade 12 size again, and after two babies I'm just generally bigger.  Besides, I cannot actually picture an occasion to which I would wear a black and gold lace halter top.

It was also the time to part with a few tired clothes that I've kept to just wear around the house - how many do I really need! - and the parachute silk pants with the broken zip that I've kept in case we do another trip to the snow.  Also gone are the jeans that never really fit properly.  Winter only lasts a few weeks here: here's to not spending those weeks in uncomfortable pants!

I am hanging on to things in multiple sizes. Shock, horror, gasp! A big minimalist no-no, I know, but my breastfeeding size is a little bigger than my ordinary size, and I'm actively trying to lose the extra kilos I found in between babies.  It's not actually multiple sizes, it's two different sizes to accommodate my body's not-finished-having-babies-yet flux in size and shape.   I promise that when I'm done all the too big stuff will go!

More or less cluttered?

I've been sorting through my digital photo collection - over 7000 photos!    I noticed in a few photos that the house looked less cluttered three years ago than it does now, despite having devoted a lot of time over the last three years to decluttering.  Some days I feel defeated by the mess and clutter, and the appearance of no progress doesn't help.

I have a few theories:

a) we have more furniture.  A piano and a 8 seat dining table will make a room look a lot fuller than just a 6 seat dining table.
b) we have more toys.  I thought we had too many toys when Big Boy was a toddler, but we have twice as many now.
c) we have less stuff stored in cupboards and bedrooms, because I've sorted a lot of that stuff.
d) it is only in the last year or so that I have been consciously buying less, and only in the last six months that I have started to get the hang of buying less. Really, as much as has been coming back into the house as has been leaving the house.

But it has given me a little more motivation to:
a) continue buying less
b) try and be a little tidier.  I'm not a tidy person to start with, let alone with three other people in the house who don't tidy up after themselves either (yes, one of those is a grown up).  I need to declutter and tidy together in order to not keep feeling defeated by the clutter and mess.
c) continue to get rid of stuff that I don't need.
d) be patient.  The clutter didn't get here overnight, no will it disappear overnight, especially not with two children who need a lot of my attention.

A procrastination post

I decided I had better deal with a box full of junk.  A box that I had thrown in various things one day when I was doing one of those 'people are coming! quick, tidy the house!' clean ups.  You know, the ones that I wouldn't need to have if I didn't have so much clutter.

I've sent the 'artwork' to the recycling bins. There are only so many Kindy projects that I need to keep, and that's a pretty small number.

I've got a pile of things that need to just be put away.  A couple of board game instructions, a few articles that I need to read and decide whether to keep it or not.

There is a sewing project that just needs ten or fifteen minutes of attention to be finished.

Then there is the rest:  a pack of cards (I guess I should determine whether it is a whole pack or not), a heap of candles from when I went through a candles-and-oils-to-make-the-house-smell-nice phase (that only lasted a few weeks), some coins I saved from our New Zealand trip last year to go into my husband's coin collection (don't even ask how they still haven't got into the collection nine months later), some photos to be scrapbooked (some of them are from Big Boy's second birthday, and now he's four -and-a-half - I haven't scrapbooked much in a while), a pair of swimming goggles, a timber whistle, some computer games that don't work on my computer, the charger from our old camera (which died in NZ), a peg, a pen, nail clippers, dolls clothes (despite having two sons), wood glue, a tennis ball, my spare glasses (I'm paranoid about breaking my glasses and not being able to see until I can get them fixed!), and some manicure stuff (I don't really pay much attention to my nails, so they were probably a gift).

Some of these things have been shifted from one place to another, and then another.  I tend to get caught up in the fact that something is still useful, or that a paid good money for it and hang on to things that I will never use anyway.   If I want to avoid last minute clean ups, and not have a cluttered home, then I need to make those tough decisions about the things in my box.    And I need to stop procrastinating.

I WANT to be a minimalist, even if the journey is painful at times.

the memory box

This morning I sorted through a box of sentimental junk.   I do this periodically.  I throw out stuff that doesn't hold the same meaning as it used to.   I'm still upset that I accidentally threw out a box of letters a few years ago, but I've never missed anything that I've lost.

It's all gone now into a clear 10L plastic box, which is only half full (though, I've got a feeling there's more in the garage).  The cockroaches can't get it, and it's a limit to how much I can keep.  I have an identical box for special pieces of the boys' artwork and first handwriting etc.  I threw out a few things that I have no idea why I kept them.

They stack nicely in the top of my wardrobe, with a third box of old toys that belonged to my late father.  They are over fifty years old, and some are still in their original condition (hmm... maybe the hoarding is genetic?), and I'm not sure what to do with them.  Mum held on to them because she thinks they could be worth a bit of money, and some are probably worth displaying.  I guess I should do some investigating, because I don't know if I need them hanging out in the top of my wardrobe!

I haven't really kept much sentimental stuff for a long time, maybe because I'm semi-conscious that I've thrown out quite a bit over time.  Most of what I had kept was from my last few years of high school, and my years spent teaching, both bittersweet periods, more so than any other time.  In fact, all that I've put in their over the last few years has been the clips from my babies' umbilical cords!   Maybe I'll need to downgrade to an even smaller box in the next few years?      

One Less Pile of Papers

I had a subscription to Gardening Australia magazine for three years, and occasionally buy Better Homes and Gardens magazine.  After I'd read each issue I'd tear out all the 'useful' pages and put them in a folder.  This afternoon I went through the whole lot and threw out three quarters of the pages.

The problem with magazine articles is that they only provide limited information: they mostly contain nice pictures.  The problem with gardening information is that I live in the tropics, but the bulk of the Australian population doesn't.  Sydney and Melbourne are far from tropical - more mediterranean and temperate climates - so much of the information about what to plant when is irrelevant to me.  Crikey, if I waited until Melbourne Cup Day (first Tuesday of November) to plant my tomatoes I would never have tomatoes: they are a winter crop up this way.

I've just kept a small pile of 'ideas' for if we want to do some renovating, or decorating.  Just a few things.  I threw out a lot that I didn't like anymore, so I'm okay with keeping a few things if I'm willing to sort through them every so often.


***

I bought a new handbag yesterday from the World Vision shop.  It's handmade by a lady in Ghana, and is small, light, and has a couple of pockets for my bits and pieces - like a spare nappy, and a comb.   When I need to take extra stuff, I'll take an extra bag.  I'll attempt to sell my oversized bag.

dumping rubbish

My husband is currently filling the boot of our car with some big items of rubbish from around our yard and taking them to the tip.  We've been procrastinating about doing it for, um, a long time.

But, we've been put on cyclone watch.  A cyclone is expected to cross the coast just south of here tomorrow night, which means we could be getting some big winds and anything in the yard could become a missile.  Tropical cyclones are pretty unpredictable, so it could even veer north and hit us more directly.

There ain't nothing like an impending natural disaster to kickstart some decluttering!

Though, speaking of cyclones, I have a radio in the cupboard - battery operated - solely for the purpose of keeping updated during a cyclone if the power goes out.  Local radio is the best way to keep informed if the danger has past.  We've never used the radio, and hope never to need to, but some things you just can't get rid of.