a big thank you / calling all spring cleaning tips
julia child quote / source unknown / via pinterest
thank you for all the shout outs on that last little experiment. i hear you. thanks! made me feel happy! i love it when i know you're out there reading. it feels like a little party! we've been off on a mini getaway in the mountains. eating, catching up on cable tv and swimming in hot tubs while the last of the spring snow fell. seth took his first dip in his nautical suit and benji showed off some back stroke skills. life is good. i feel so blessed. today it is raining and we are cleaning and laundering and catching up on cartoons. benji loves our official pajama days wherein we don't have to leave the house! getting home from vacation is the perfect time to spring clean the whole place. (i am using vinegar & warm water as my go-to cleaning solution these days.) i have a goal this year to get rid of all the crap lurking in the corners. i am a part-time professional hoarder and hope i can keep up the motivation to clean sweep. do you have any tips for me?! i have about seven huge empty boxes waiting for a day i may need them. wha?! is this necessary in life? and magazines?! why can't i part with them? and what about kiddie artwork!? i want to figure out a solution before he starts kindergarten! wishing you a happy spring saturday.
10 comments:
I was thinking about clean sweep tips and then remembered you were in my workshop! Those were my best tried and trues. I just did a mini workshop on maintaining your organized rooms, how to clear clutter effectively and how to involved the kids. If you would like, I can email you the pdf of the presentation? The cabin sounds so fun! Glad you are getting some time to relax.
I have a problem with saving boxes "just in case" too. Maybe just save one box in each of a few sizes that will nest and get rid of the rest. For children's art, at least take a picture of it. Using one of the photo websites, make a book of your child's art with pictures of him. Put a few in frames and rotate the art on display. Put the originals in a stack if you can't throw them away, and once a year go thru the stack to keep it a reasonable size. Eventually you can toss it.
I can't believe that others save magazines (and boxes) like I do! lol!
As for the artwork...scan it and then print it. Get a 3 ring binder and use the page savers to slide the printed artwork into. You could even get your son to make a "Title Page" for it!
Love your blog!
We're having a garage sale and it feels so good setting things aside to donate or sell. I've gone closet by closet and cleaned out our basement. My advice is do it on the fly - 15 mins here or there gets rid of so much clutter, I can never set aside long periods of time for big projects, life is too busy (and fun!)
We have an art wall in our family room - saving only the REALLY special ones. The rest? We use the app ArtKive (LOVE!).
I have seen ideas on blogs and wherever else about using those file folder boxes for kids art, one folder per year. I've also just taken photos of my kids art and projects that are too big to keep. This blog has lots of cleaning/organizing tips! http://www.memoriesoncloverlane.com/
I think I have the opposite problem you have, Marta. I get rid of it all. There are very few "things" I create an emotional attachment to. We could really balance each other out if we were neighbors. :)
Since I love magazines so much and can't get rid of the ones I did buy, I have decided to stop buying them. I get some from the library instead. It helps me with my budget and with my hoarding!
I'm with you! I save things "in case I need them"... and I have too many magazines as well.
I love the UK's magazine Living, etc and have quite the stack of those magazines. But when I went through them recently, I found I wanted to tear out only a handful of pages from each magazine. Perhaps eventually I'll toss those pages as well.
I do have 20+ issues of Domino Magazine and hesitate to recycle them in case someone somewhere would like to read them! So I hold onto them "just in case".
I was going through a tabletop of clutter during the night when I couldn't sleep, and found a little packet of coupons. I didn't need any of them but tore some out "just in case" someone at work needed them. Turns out, I asked the guy at work if he wanted them and he said "NOPE" and kept on walking down the hall.
It has me wondering how many things I'm keeping "just in case"...when I really dream of a minimalist apartment with empty space on shelves and in drawers.
Maybe one day.....
a follow up to my comment above: I stacked up every magazine I'd been meaning to go through (stacks of Livingetc and Domino) and would grab one or two and pull pages then recycle the magazine.
I did this daily for six days, then one morning I got tired of looking at the magazines, grabbed the remaining issues and tossed them into the recycling dumpster in my building's basement. The resulting THUD was quite satisfying. And I haven't missed the magazines.
What also helped was that I had this notion of finding a good home for each magazine if I wasn't going to keep them any longer. The moment I realized that and also realized that I do not own the only copies of those magazines in the entire world, it was freeing somehow and I felt better about letting go of magazines.
It also occurred to me that I can leave the remaining magazines as the very last thing I declutter.... so I have time to decide. I can tidy up the rest of my apartment, knowing I can keep my magazines or not. No pressure.
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