Decluttering and Organization

The Dada is back! He returned last evening to big hugs from Miss J, and being woken up by me after falling asleep in the bathtub. All is right again.

While he was away, Miss J and I worked on some decluttering and organization issues in the house. I’ve seen Hoarders and realize that I do not have a full-on hoarding disorder, but what I do have is an unfortunate combination of sentimentalism and imagination. I look at things and the thoughts run the gamut from “This thing is mine!’ to “I remember when I got/used/found this thing!” to “Miss J was so cute when she wore this thing!” to “But we might someday NEED this thing!” (I inherited that last one from my Nanna. She saved tin foil and egg cartons, etc. and at least had the excuse of having lived through the Great Depression to sort of explain why she did it.)

I find myself involved in two major struggles when working on organization in the house (actually three, but my housemates are a story for another day!)

My first struggle is to disconnect the memories associated with the thing from the thing itself, aka the sentimentalism.) Miss J did indeed look adorable in that dress or playing with that toy, but I have pictures and my memories and I don’t NEED the thing to remind me of that. To this end, I am currently packing a large bag for FlipSize, a new website similar to the US-based ThredUp, where you earn points for sending in your gently-used children’s clothes, and your points can be cashed out for various rewards or used to make purchases from the site. Miss J’s smaller clothes were mostly donated before our big move, but in the year we’ve been here we’ve accumulated a new stash of outgrown things, and also stumbled across some older items that were mixed in here and there in our other belongings. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of return I get on the items I’m submitting, but realistically, anything I get is an improvement over these clothes hanging around and taking up space until I get myself motivated enough to have a yard sale or something.

My second big struggle is to reconcile my dreams with my reality. I am an avid crafter, and am passing my love of making on to Miss J, but I have to be more realistic regarding what I’m actually going to do. Over the last few days, we pulled out, sorted and organized all my craft bins. There were a lot! In fact, at one point I was putting some finished bins back in the basement and literally swore out loud as I turned around and was confronted with yet another container with crafting items in it! But we finished the task, with the exception of one scrapbooking bin that I didn’t finish organizing (but will soon, I found out this morning that I won a month of free classes at the local scrapbooking store, so I have to get my supplies together!) In the process of all this, we filled a good sized box with items that I’m never going to use. But I also came across no less than 5 unfinished projects, a couple of which are quite old. My dream is that I’ll have all the time, space and money in the world for crafting – my reality is that none of those things are in plenty right now. So I’m making a commitment to myself (and to my girlie, who should be learning more positive lesson from me) to work at my unfinished projects first instead of starting new and even more ambitious things.

And the really funny, yet really frustrating, part about all this is illustrated below in the photo I took yesterday as sorting wound down. Because I was so disorganized, because my things were spread out in bins and containers with no rhyme or reason, because I hadn’t properly unpacked the one creative outlet that I’ve really needed over the last little while, I could never find some glue when Miss J and I needed it. So I bought glue. And then we needed it again, and who even knows where that last bottle is right now. So I bought glue.

This is why I need to stay organized.

Yes, that right there is 9 bottles of glue and 3 glue sticks (make that 4, forgot the one hiding in the white glue bottle.) I expect that there are a couple more glue sticks in Miss J’s art cart. And probably both kinds in the office, if I look. This picture is my new inspiration to stay organized.

On a side note, Miss J couldn’t be happier. I gave her a scrapbook kit I’d gotten for her a while back, and she started her own scrapbook. It’s incredibly freeing to watch a 6 year old scrapbook, she’s random and passionate and doesn’t strive for perfection the way I do. I was trimming a photo for her and talked about cutting off parts we didn’t need – she really took that to heart and on later pages there are photos where she trimmed around people’s heads so there’s no background left, because “We don’t need all that extra stuff!” It was a good reminder for me to let go and have more fun with all this cool stuff I’ve accumulated.

Now, does anyone have anything that needs glueing?