Donation Day!

Yesterday, I filled the boot of the car up and took off on a big day of donating my unwanted goodied to a charity store with a friend of mine. It was great! I make sure I get my cloth bags back from the store and then I take a good look around and see what I might need around the house.

And you know something? 

I'm buying less and less at op-shops now I know what I want in my house and cleaning out more and more.

It's a great feeling that after a few years, you get to know what you need and what you want. But you also know when you need help in which areas too. 

I've been purposely cleaning out my house and giving away things for some time now, and now my Mum has asked me to help her out - I'm so proud to help her. But I have pointed her in the direction of Peter Walsh and his 31-Day Challenges first, so she gets an idea of how to get in and do just 10 minutes first off and then take control back of her home and her things. I am going to help her out with packing everything away and will take some things to the op-shops... but I'm still cleaning out my place and it'll be another year before I'm completely tidied up on my own I still have some archive boxes to fill and other things to work out too.

Now it's the 1st, February, it's time to get stuck into the other different things around the house. You know, the things we tend to forget. 

And this is what the Weekend Challenge is this weekend. Find a place in your home you've been avoiding like the plague and sort through it. I really mean, pull everything out, attack it, and if you're really disappointed with everything in it, and don't want anything of it, donate or sell it. But if you can see potential in some of it, sort through what you want, what you don't want and organise it properly. This is the weekend to get into your first avoided project in the house. I really believe that you can do it! 

As for me? It's a box of books in my home office I'm going to go through - along with some paperwork, which is also boxed up on top of it. Yep, it's all going to be looked into, sorted and worked out. That's been my avoided project in my house. 

The Magazine Pile

Okay, we all have one - or more than one - around the house. And it's the pile, or piles, of magazines we have stashed around the house which we either say we read or have read and think we're going to keep for another reading.

Well, I gotta say, that most of the time, I'm right about re-reading my 'Good Reading Magazine'. I'll re-read it a couple more times and then? Well, I don't do anything with it. It gets put into a pile in my living room where it gathers dust - like anything else which doesn't get used.

So, what I'm doing today and tomorrow is looking through all the magazines I have stashed around my house (and no, I don't have 'reading material' in the toilets - that's just manky and nasty!) and I'm going to go through them all. 
A lot of my magazines are about art, reading and publishing books. So, there's not a single gossip magazine to be found. This is a good thing for me, because I'll be donating my magazines to a doctors surgeries and old folks homes where the people there can read up on books and writing - something which may be of interest to some of them. I can't give away a lot of my writing magazines because I'll need them in my writing; no matter how old they are, they're still useful to me. 

So, that's my weekend challenge for myself. I'm not setting anything for you for the long weekend... it's a weekend of chilling out for Australians and respecting the ancient lands we are now living on. I'll put in another Weekend Challenge next weekend when we go back to normal again. How's your house going? Getting there? I hope so.

It's Personal

I know it's a strange thing to talk about, but when you're decluttering, you come across a lot of personal items. These are probably things you don't want to part with, and yet you're not sure if anyone in the family want either.

I'm talking about your hand-written journals, magazines you bought about famous people from the 1980's and 90's, odds and ends you thought were great and then put them away somewhere safe and forgot about them until now... so, what I'm doing is collecting together a few archive boxes in a certain colour to make them my Personal Boxes. I've labeled them 'My Life' and I'm putting things into them that my family can go through (and I can add to or subtract from) during my life.

This makes things easier for when the time comes for you to move house. You'll know which boxes are which and where they'll go in your next place. I've colour coded mine and written on them. 
Now, I've only done this because I don't have big filing cabinets, and it's the best way I can work out what is my life stuff, my banking, my car, and other things which are part of the bigger picture of everything in my office. 

So far, I'm onto my 3rd purple archive box for My Life... yeah, I'm not making them boring and beige. They're going to be colourful and useful in my house. The funny thing is that I don't know how many of the purple boxes I'll end up having by the end of my life... and that's the thing, you won't have the same number as me either. So don't fret if you've got 10 of them or only 2 ... what matters is what goes into them. It's about you, and what you want to leave to your family - what really personal things which you want them to see, which really matters. 

Weekend Challenge Time!

Okay... I didn't get time to put in a challenge yesterday because I was out all day.

But, I think it's better late than never - right? Anyway, I've looked through my towels recently, and that includes my bath towels and kitchen towels. Now, I had to make sure I didn't need the kitchen towels - and to do this, I looked at them and wondered when I used them last. 

The bath towels is a little more different... I go on how threadbare they are. And to add to this, my Aunty keeps giving me bath towels for my birthday; which is a lovely way to making sure I always do them out and change the ones in my house. 

So, this weekend's challenge is to go through all of your towels - this includes beach towels too! And figure out which ones stay, which ones go and which ones are thrown in the bin. 

Now the ones which go to charity? Well, take them to your nearest animal shelter and they'll use them for bedding. I know I did this challenge last year, but it does work out to do this just after Christmas; as sometimes we receive these kinds of things for presents. 

By The Back Door

Isn't it funny how much we use doors, and yet we ignore how much mess is next to and around them?

Well, today, I nearly tripped over something next to my back door and I knew why - there was a huge mess there I had been ignoring for over a year. So, I got in and cleaned it up.

There was 2 rubbish bins - one of which I really didn't need - and the other was full to brim with art and craft things which were supposed to be tossed out last year. So, I went through the craft gear and sorted it out, figured out what I wanted to keep, what I wanted to throw out and put everything being tossed out into a big rubbish bag.
Meanwhile, I moved a red container filled with wooden sprung clothes pegs. Yeah, in my 'Crafty Peg' days, I went kinda nuts in collecting them. Now? Well, I'll never run out of them, will I? But my plastic ones are going brittle and I'm looking whether to get in and work on a collection of wooden ones for myself - thus why I haven't given away any of these ones.

Well, swept up the area, threw out an old cockroach trap and put an empty bin back, and the container full of pegs and it looks good. What I threw out was a really old bin, anything I didn't need and it all went out into the big bin in the car port. Yep, that's another bag of rubbish out of the house! I'm so pleased!

Wardrobe Clean-Out

You know, yesterday was a big one for me.

After cleaning out under the two sinks, I opened my wardrobe and pulled out everything in it and put it all onto my bed.

And believe me, you really don't know how many clothes you truly have until you do that! I had watched an episode of Marie Kondi and found myself saying, 'Holy Crap, that's a lot of clothing right there!' Believe me it was!

And the first thing I did was start going through it all... piece by piece, I tried on all the winter jackets, found which ones I hadn't worn in over a year, which ones I hadn't see in a year (and the reason why was because they'd been hung in with the dresses and I hadn't been able to find them!). 

Then, I looked at the shirts and tops and figured out what I hadn't worn, which ones I didn't like, which ones I loved and either hung them all up or tossed them in the 'donation pile' - or the wash pile. 

Oh boy, then came my dresses! I still have my 21st dress - and I'm not letting that go! It's hand-made, gorgeously hand-sewn and dyed from New Zealand and weighs a ton! It also costed me a fortune to buy! So, no, it's not going anywhere. Then, I tried on a couple of other dresses which looked like they'd fit, but once I got them on, I couldn't get the bastards off!!! After much struggling, I finally did get those dresses off and into the 'Donation' Pile. Yep, somebody out there is going to look great in those.

After another hour or so, I had a wash pile, a donation pile and the rest of it all hung on coat hangers and folded and put away. My wardrobe looks really good! I found I have about 20 coat hangers which don't have a home.

Then, I went downstairs and went through the kitchen drawers where my towels lived for the kitchen and sorted through them and figured out which towels were going to staying here and which ones will be donated and which ones will be used in my painting gear. Only two were sent away... the rest? Stayed here - yep, they're still in good condition.

So, there was my afternoon of cleaning done and dusted. A lot was done and I'm proud to say that I have one bag of clothes to give away... and that bag will be added to soon. How are you doing with your house? Are you being as good with the cleaning out as I am? 

A New Addition

Okay... there's a new addition to the sidebar.

I've added a text box where I'll be keeping track of how many bags of rubbish - not including my kitchen rubbish for the week - I toss out while I'm cleaning out my house this year.

In addition, there's a Donation tally too, to show how many bags of donations are sent off too. 

This is going to make this so much more fun!