This was written before Marie Condo and her fabulous ideas of clutter, but still topical to me. Here is Marie’s book on Amazon.
So we spent a long weekend moving and adding furniture to our basement. We also attempted to clean out some accumulated clutter over the past years.
A few things that I learned:
- If you find a box that has not been opened ( you can tell because it has the packing tape from your move on the top ), do NOT open it. Do not open if you are attempting to de-clutter. As soon as you open a box, it will cause you to rationalize why you kept it, and it will create more clutter. The amount of chaos will be at a 6:1 ratio (i.e. six new boxes will be made from this one box)). You can peek inside to ensure it isn’t a box of gold, but if you look closely, you are finished!
- There are treasures in your basement for charitable organizations:
- I found three old sets of glasses that I took to my church. They recycled them, and someone else had glasses.
- My old TV went to the Salvation Army, not the landfill site.
- A lot of arts and crafts supplies will go to the Salvation Army. Hopefully, they can make some money on that.
- A great deal of baby clothing and paraphernalia were donated to the next generation in my wife’s family.
- Shelves can be helpful for storage, as long as it is for storage and not clutter. We shall see what comes of these shelves, but they need to be attached to the wall.
- Clutter will cost money in the future.
The spiders that lived in my basement are very upset. They now live in the garage thanks to a vacuum blitz, but some insects must be moved in the name of de-cluttering.
I spoke with another person who de-cluttered, but they did so after their basement flooded. They had to throw out many treasures because they were ruined. My advice would be to de-clutter now. Don’t let mother nature or the forces of nature force you to do it.
