Creatrope

As you settle back in the chair after a multi-hour decluttering session you realize that the ‘outbox’ - things to be garbaged/donated/recycled is pretty darn small.

You’ve just spent your afternoon in the classic situation of orbiting around decluttering and instead just Moved Stuff Around. I’ve done that more than a few times…

Don’t get me wrong - getting things in the right place is a big step toward home organization, and it can achieve good results if used judiciously. But if you’re like most people, the real gains and satisfaction are only gotten by the physical removal of items from the house.

The great thing about focusing on removal versus moving stuff around is that it is far more virtuous: It puts you one step closer to Living Simple, makes that that next decluttering phase easier, and you don’t waste your time and effort cleaning/shelving/organizing items that you probably shouldn’t have in the first place.

Food for thought: the next time you get a head of steam to declutter and find yourself moving an item from one room to another, stop for a moment and consider whether you really love it, you really need it, it improves your life or has a good possibility of doing so in the near future - and if not - perhaps tossing it into the donation bin is the right solution.

Decluttering isn’t just about stuff in the closets, the floor or the garage. Sometimes the clutter is right in front of you.

When I used to do a semi-professional magic act, an old friend who was a professional told me that the best way to improve your magic act was to remove your worst effect (non-magicians call them ‘tricks’).

Decluttering walls to improve the look of a gallery of photos or wall-hangings is worth considering. Perhaps removing your worst or least favorite item is the best way to improve it?

If so you might find yourself a bit puzzled on how to remove the drywall anchors.

I’ve written about one way that worked for me in Decluttering Walls: Removing Drywall Anchors

The “Two Minute Rule” goes something like this:

If it can be done in less than two minutes, do it now.

It’s found in many books on organization, including my favorite Getting Things Done. For some people, if that’s the only item they take away from these books, it’s well worth it.

The theory is that the time and mental energy you spend ‘managing’ the action item is wasteful. It costs so little to accomplish the task, just do it now.

I haven’t seen this directly applied to decluttering, but I think it’s directly applicable. If you’re holding something in your hand that truly belongs filed in another room, hung up, garbaged, recycled, put back in the toolbox, or put in the donation box, don’t just toss it in the room you are in. Take a few extra moments and walk it to where it belongs.

The best bonus is if you’re holding something you have a tendency to lose or misplace - keys, glasses, cell phone (on vibrate of course). By taking a few moments to move it to the ‘right’ place you not only minimize clutter in the wrong place, but you make it easier to find the item where you expect it to be.

If someone can provide an ‘original’ citation for this old concept, I’d be happy to update this entry.

This ceiling-mounted kids gym and climbing wall has seen a lot of use, and was easy to build once I figured out a strategy. It was around $125 worth of parts. It was inspired by a friend who has an even more elaborate one.

It uses standard backyard playground equipment and the parts are interchangeable to give the kids some variation. There’s little rare-earth magnets placed on the beam to allow for hanging ‘targets’.

It fits into the theme of home organization and decluttering because there’s nothing to put away and nothing to clean up.

You might also like the DIY Indoor Playhouse.

The ScanSnap does a credible job of reducing the chore of converting a large collection of physical photos to digital.

Read how I did this, and some tips and tricks and videos of it in action in Scanning and Archiving Photos.

I reviewed this unit earlier in Fujitsu Scansnap.

Here’s a fun hack I put together while purging the VHS tape collection.

Semi-Automated VHS Tape Eraser

I started small, but managed to create another whole carload to Goodwill.

First the Ceiva 1. A nice little device, and it was brand-new, but I was never going to activate it and the neat hack for it didn’t offer a lot of bang for the buck compared to other projects on the ‘to do’ list. Ebay revealed that the Ceiva 1 were not fetching enough to consider selling it (my bar is pretty high there). So off it went.

Today’s purge of board games was a little more difficult. I got rid of a couple more ‘mass market’ games that although well-rated, I never seemed to play: Boggle, Perquackey, Pictionary Junior, Balderdash Junior and a partial Abalone set. I’m very hard on ‘outsized boxes’. If it’s going to be a bizarre shaped box and be hard to store, it better be a darn good game. The game shelves are looking quite a bit better recently.

In the garage I found a large box of art supplies with various odd wooden bits. I remembering buying them along with a large lot of more desirable art supplies at a garage sale.

I got rid of all the bulky old-style life jackets, finding it hard to find a scenario in which I needed my own life jackets. Even with global warming, we’re far enough away from the lake that it didn’t make much sense.

Following the rule of ‘getting rid of duplicates’, I got rid of an old plastic wagon and a few ungainly large squirt guns from my sons huge collection.

Mix with a duplicate DDR pad, a possibly lead-lined lunch box, and a brand-new but unused ironing board, and we reach about 100+ pounds today…

How does a technical/financial person approach decluttering?

Return On Investment, of course. What things can you remove that give you the best return on your effort expended?

With that, I’ve collected my thoughts on Maximizing Storage and Decluttering By Focusing on Volume and Weight.

This is going to be a tough one.

I’ve already brought 60+ boardgames to my son’s school, and donated perhaps half that amount to Goodwill. I’ve still got nearly 200+ games in two rooms, of which I played perhaps thirty in the last two years. The number is rising as my son is now able to play all but the most sophisticated, but we still don’t have many opportunities to play 3+ player games.

I like werewolf a lot better than 99.9% of these games anyway and all it takes is a few slips of paper (but 11+ friends!)

Since I’ve already purged many the awkward, cheap, mass-produced games, what I’m left with is the good (and collectible) ones, but ones I will likely never play again (SPI, Avalon Hill, Games Workshop, RPGs). Computer games are just much easier to setup, tear down, and I have instant opponents on things like BrettSpielWelt.

So the games have to go. I’m targeting to keep 10% of what I have and actually play. The space I free up will dwarf what I’ve gained from book & paper purging.

I’ve contacted a local gaming group to see if they have a some efficient way to conduct transactions in bulk. Ebaying these things would maximize the income, but a be time-consuming and unpleasant.

I’ve received several questions from family and friends about how one values an item to make a reasonable decision on whether its worth trying to sell an item or just give it away.

I’ve written several entries on this that might be useful.

* 10-10 Rule
* Collectibles That Never Are
* Valuing Items For Sale, Donation or Junk