The Happy Housewife – Where Martha Meets Real Life. Clean House, Cut Clutter, Get Organized at Home! Ask Unclutterer: Regrets and legacy items. Reader Andrew submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer: I agree and aspire to be neat, minimalist, the epitome of uncluttered … but I have a couple of high priced items that I haven’t used in some time but feel I would regret if I didn’t have them … primarily because I feel my kids could one day use them.
So I wonder:Have you ever regretted getting rid of something? What do you do about “legacy” items? The items are few, but still weigh upon my mind. Sort, scan, and file your stacks of papers. As the year winds down, my husband and I are embarking on The Great Paperwork Filing Project of 2009.
It’s such an undertaking it feels appropriate we give it an official name with capital letters. (Similar to The Big Move of 2004 and Project Remove Splinter from My Finger, which unfortunately is still ongoing.) Organizing your home and family with notebooks. On Friday, I wrote about creating an information notebook for every person in your family.
Notebooks are great because they keep all of your important papers in one place and they are easily portable. In our home, we have a recipe notebook, appliance notebook (instruction manuals, purchase receipts, maintenance and repair receipts, and warranty information), and important information notebooks for all four of us (our cat even has one). We store these notebooks in a place where we can find them quickly, easily spot if someone hasn’t returned the notebook to its shelf after use, but in an area that has minimal guest traffic.
Our personal notebooks are valuable to us and we would be devastated if we lost them, so most of the information in them has also been scanned and then the files backed up online. As we’ve mentioned before, all you need to do to build a notebook is get a three-ring binder, a pack of sheet protectors, and you’re ready to go. Organize. Discover your style to keep clutter out of your closet. On page 23 of Unclutter Your Life in One Week, I promote the idea of discovering your style to help you keep clutter out of your closets.
If your closet is limited to clothes that fit, clothes you want to wear, and clothes that project your desired image, you’re less likely to find yourself overbuying or with a mess you can’t control: You may not know exactly what you want your clothes to say about you, but you probably have a good idea what you don’t want them to say. When I was in my twenties and leading a forum on school uniform policies, a group of high school students told me I dressed like a “frumpy pants.” It was a few seconds after that moment that I decided I didn’t want my clothes to say that I was a “frumpy pants.”Years later, after reading Carrie McCarthy and Danielle LaPorte’s book Style Statement, I figured out a more proactive concept for my wardrobe choices.
I’ve found that having a defined style has made it a lot easier to keep clutter out of my wardrobe. Parting with sentimental clutter. In the first few chapters of the book Stuff, which I reviewed on Monday, the authors talk in detail about sentimental clutter.
We all struggle with this kind of clutter, not just hoarders, and the authors explain why on page 45: “We can’t help but imagine that some essence of the person or the event symbolized by the objects will magically rub off and become part of us.” Preserving digitized photographs. My father, a photographer, put a camera in my hands at a very early age. I have taken hundreds, often thousands, of pictures a year for most of my life. Stop hoarding magazines. My 98-year-old paternal grandmother loves National Geographic magazine.
When we helped move her into a one-bedroom apartment in a retirement community a few years ago, I was shocked to discover that she had been saving every issue of the magazine for more than 30 years. The collection (stored in dozens of cardboard boxes in her attic) contained somewhere between 400 and 500 monthly issues and special printings. I try not to think about how quickly those boxes of magazines could have burned in a house fire and am glad that such an accident never happened. Unfortunately, all of the time, effort, and space my grandmother sacrificed to keep her collection was superfluous because the last 112 years of National Geographic magazines are now available on 32 CDs.
I would prefer that they appear on DVDs, but 32 CDs still take up less shelf space than thousands of the yellow border magazines. This isn’t the only magazine to undertake such an endeavor. Why we hold on to sentimental clutter. Sentimental clutter plagues our attics, basements, closets, garages, and desks.
These sentimental trinkets can keep us from moving forward with our lives physically and emotionally. If there is so much of the past taking up space in the present, there isn’t room to grow. The article “What is nostalgia good for?”