Declutter, Clean, and Organize My Life Catch-All

I've just had another super busy weekend, and though I got a bit behind in my goals, I'll be caught up again today once I clean the bathroom floor and the microwave.

It's been really nice having a clean and relatively decluttered kitchen because I've been able to use the kitchen table to do some of my creative things, such as practicing making candles as well as coloring a couple pages in a Magical Gardens coloring book with pens and colored pencils while having hot tea and listening to some podcasts. Some reward for my efforts thusfar!

I still need to get to the bedroom closet as it's a disaster but I suppose I've been procrastinating on that one.

Skipping a whole bunch of posts. I just cleaned out my box of PC Game Disks and I'm freaking out a little. It took three passes and you're goddamn right I tested a few of the registration keys and now have some digital editions instead.
The box is essentially empty now and I just realized that I have another box with the manuals, posters, inserts.... Siiiigh. That one will be rough.

Edit: Okay, I'm legit caught up now. I LOVE that garage look and I have no idea how people plan that sort of thing. In my family you piled things around the general location where there was some storage or shoved them in a box.

Rezzy wrote:

Skipping a whole bunch of posts. I just cleaned out my box of PC Game Disks and I'm freaking out a little. It took three passes and you're goddamn right I tested a few of the registration keys and now have some digital editions instead.
The box is essentially empty now and I just realized that I have another box with the manuals, posters, inserts.... Siiiigh. That one will be rough.

Edit: Okay, I'm legit caught up now. I LOVE that garage look and I have no idea how people plan that sort of thing. In my family you piled things around the general location where there was some storage or shoved them in a box.

AWESOME!!! That's pretty cool you were able to get some digital editions.

That sort of organizational planning doesn't happen all at once. It is very much step by step and involves creating good habits over time.

With the changing of the weather, my motivation has been in a bit of a slump, but I have still managed to clean and vacuum the coat closet, put away games that were lying on top of the main TV table, and start cleaning the ingrained dust on it. I've removed a pile of games from the "office" TV stand and will be putting those away, and also ordered another power strip for it to replace the UPS that howls every time I turn it on. I thought about replacing that battery, but it's easier to just unplug when I'm not using it than deal with the heavy brick.

Every tiny step counts!

Today is one of my catch-up days that I have every so often when I'm behind on my daily goals, so today I cleaned off the wooden, rolling microwave cart I use for my 21" TV in my "office" room, dusted, cleaned, along with the TV, 3DS, Switch console, and Xbox 360. I swapped out the dead UPS for the new power strip I ordered (and will look into replacing the UPS battery in the meantime) and vacuumed all around it, so all of that is done!

Also paid a couple of bills and sent in another estimated tax payment to the IRS.

Now I will spend an hour working on my weekly message for this week's scripture.

But productive day so far!

I've been cleaning out some more closets, mainly throwing out some clothes I haven't worn in years. Still hanging on to those pants I almost never wore, because some day I'll lose those 10 kilo's, I swear! Some nice sweaters are going to my nephew. I only wore them once, but they shrunk a bit in the laundry. My nephew is a few centimeters shorter than I, so that works out

dejanzie wrote:

I've been cleaning out some more closets, mainly throwing out some clothes I haven't worn in years. Still hanging on to those pants I almost never wore, because some day I'll lose those 10 kilo's, I swear! Some nice sweaters are going to my nephew. I only wore them once, but they shrunk a bit in the laundry. My nephew is a few centimeters shorter than I, so that works out :-)

I actually do hang on to pants and other clothing that won't fit. I know that the standard advice is to get rid of them and only keep clothes that fit you now because even if you do ultimately fit back into them again, they will be out of style or messed up in storage or whatever.

Well I've taken that classic advice a couple of times during some of my major declutterings and then I've lost weight (or sometimes gained it) and then found myself regretting having gotten rid of that clothing, and I've never run into the "out of style" issue because I typically don't wear things that were the fad of the year. Even so, women's clothing sucks a lot of the time when it comes to colors and so there is no guarantee that I'm going to find anything in the color I like, so if I have clothes in colors I like, I will keep them around if there is a chance they will fit. For example, I don't care if bright red is "out of style" in any given year. I like the color. I like wearing the color, and I don't care what anyone else thinks about it.

So now if there is a chance that I will fit back into it again at some point and it's something that I still like and would wear if it did fit me, then I'll keep it unless I need room for something else.

Now obviously if someone's closet is exploding and they really do need to get rid of some stuff, then the clothes that don't fit probably should be the first to go!

The last couple of days I've been trying to get some major spots out of the carpet in one of the rooms that still has it. I hate carpet with a passion, but getting it replaced is much further down the list. In the meantime, some grease or something leaked from the desk chair that used to be in there, so I've been working on getting all those spots out. It's such a pain! But so far it looks better than it did before I started!

Despite the fact that I've been home on vacation all week, I didn't do a lot of decluttering or cleaning. I posted two things on eBay yesterday (and one of them sold today, yay!) and vacuumed and cleaned the floor today, and that's pretty much it.

Most of the rest of the week was spent playing videogames. Honestly, I have no regret.

bobbywatson wrote:

Despite the fact that I've been home on vacation all week, I didn't do a lot of decluttering or cleaning. I posted two things on eBay yesterday (and one of them sold today, yay!) and vacuumed and cleaned the floor today, and that's pretty much it.

Most of the rest of the week was spent playing videogames. Honestly, I have no regret.

Yay! That's still a couple things done that weren't done before so they still count! Sounds like you had a really good vacation!

bekkilyn wrote:
bobbywatson wrote:

Despite the fact that I've been home on vacation all week, I didn't do a lot of decluttering or cleaning. I posted two things on eBay yesterday (and one of them sold today, yay!) and vacuumed and cleaned the floor today, and that's pretty much it.

Most of the rest of the week was spent playing videogames. Honestly, I have no regret.

Yay! That's still a couple things done that weren't done before so they still count! Sounds like you had a really good vacation!

Under the circumstances, it was pretty good. I wish I had another week though. Oh well, Christmas is around the corner, and I think the project I'm on shuts down for two weeks then.

Edit: Oh, and I did get my flu shot yesterday as well. One more thing off the to-do list!

Edit 2: The last PS2 accessories I had listed on Kijiji sold this morning, and I have a pending offer on some of my old DVDs too.

bobbywatson wrote:

Under the circumstances, it was pretty good. I wish I had another week though. Oh well, Christmas is around the corner, and I think the project I'm on shuts down for two weeks then.

Edit: Oh, and I did get my flu shot yesterday as well. One more thing off the to-do list!

Edit 2: The last PS2 accessories I had listed on Kijiji sold this morning, and I have a pending offer on some of my old DVDs too.

It's great how all those things are selling!

I've been playing around in MS Word to see if I can make some fairly decent planner pages for my new Discbound notebooks since I have some specialized requirements that aren't typically on the planner pages I can buy. Only downside is that I need to use the desktop version because the Android version on my tablet doesn't have all the features.

I haven't been keeping up with my daily declutter routine lately, as it's gotten to the point where I need my wife's input on whether something needs to stay or go, and there's simply no low hanging fruit left. But we did finally declutter the little attic room adjacent to our home office.

I threw out all my university courses, except for my master thesis and the political marketing campaign our group spent that particular year on. Also out the proverbial window went the collection of PC game magazines I still hung onto. I quickly leafed through a copy that had reviews for Unreal Tournament, Dungeon Keeper 2 and best of all: VooDoo 3 vs Riva TNT2! Quake at 48fps on 1024*768 baby! Two pages of cheat codes, tips and tricks for Total Annihiliation: Kingdoms, walkthrough for Tomb Raider 3, and a preview for FIFA 2001 that lamented how each release is nothing more than a roster update and some tweaks

The writing was really clunky though, I can't believe I kept reading it for so long. I remember cancelling my subscription because I felt the magazine got stale and complacent, with the same lame inside jokes, and because they hadn't had even one female writer in their entire history.

Aaaanyway, we also went through our kids' memory box and filtered out the stuff we wanted to keep. Meaning we now have copious space again in our home office, serendipitously timed for the arrival of Mario Kart: Live

I absolutely LOVED reading all those PC game magazines back in the day! I don't even know if physical game magazines even exist anymore, but I know that even if they did, they wouldn't be the same, and the internet has basically taken over for every possible type of thing related to games.

I've been working cleaning my huge "puzzle" mat I use as a rug and place to exercise in my main room. I've been trying to clean a full row every day, and today should be the last row. I'm also taking the opportunity to clean the floor under and around the mat fairly thoroughly. I had to disrupt the web of the spider that lives in a corner next to my fireplace. It escaped further up the wall for a while after I cleaned up under the web, but seems back to normal now.

So can anyone help me in figuring out how much time I should devote to cleaning? We bought a bigger (2k square feet) house a year back and I never feel like I can keep on top of things. I clean about a half hour a day during the week and 2-3 hours a day on weekends. I feel I keep up on basics like dishes and laundry but there’s still a lot of clutter and some of the rooms need a serious refresh.

So, I've had a very profitable decluttering going on over the last two weeks. I decided to pull out the totes full of game cases that I've had stashed under the stairs for years and get rid of them. I've had the discs in a CD binder for a while, and I honestly didn't need the cases, so let's toss 'em.

While I'm going through those and separating the plastic from the manuals and inserts for recycling, I run across a copy of The Last Story limited edition I got as a preorder way back when, but never played. I thought "huh, I wonder if this semi-obscure JRPG might be worth selling." I figured that if it was $30 or $40, I'd think about it, but I've never sold on ebay before, and wasn't sure it'd be worth it for that. But you never know.

Pull up pricecharting.com, and turns out this thing is worth around $70. That's...actual money. Then I looked at the pile of PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era games that I've been toting around. So I started going through all the games I had, looked up the going rate, and put everything that was selling for north of ~$30 on a list.

When I finished, I totaled up the values, and the 70 or so things on the pile added up to around $5000. I was not expecting that. Back then, I had a habit of snagging games that sounded interesting and that I suspected would get small print runs. I never wound up getting around to playing most of them, but I held onto to them, and it seems I chose wisely. The biggest surprise was that my copy of Rule of Rose is now a PS2 collector's holy grail, and sells for something like $600-700 on the regular.

So over the last two weeks, I figured out how to ebay (protip: auctions are for suckers, figure out the going rate, set it at buy it now with free shipping, and let it ride), and set up a mini shipping warehouse. So far, I've sold about 30 items for a net profit, after shipping costs and ebay/paypal fees, of around $1400. I've got almost everything listed, and just kind of watching to see what gets bought. If you're curious, this is what's still available.

I guess the moral of the story is that selling on ebay isn't actually that hard, and you might be surprised what your stuff is worth. I'm taking a chunk of this windfall and splurging on a ridiculous PC build, and will probably hang onto the rest as a "chaz buys frivolous toys" fund that I dip into as needed. I don't even feel bad about it because virtually everything I'm selling was stuff I bought years before I met my wife, and it's pure found money. Yay decluttering!

Awesome!!! It's great to find "money" under all the stuff you're decluttering!!

jdzappa wrote:

So can anyone help me in figuring out how much time I should devote to cleaning? We bought a bigger (2k square feet) house a year back and I never feel like I can keep on top of things. I clean about a half hour a day during the week and 2-3 hours a day on weekends. I feel I keep up on basics like dishes and laundry but there’s still a lot of clutter and some of the rooms need a serious refresh.

It's not so much how much time you're spending, but how you are prioritizing. What might help is pick one of the things that you're not getting done, such as the decluttering and then *prioritize* spending some time on that one thing each day. So you might declutter for 15 minutes (set a timer) and then do some of the basics. If you always start with the basics, then you run out of time (or steam) before you get to the declutter and it never gets done.

So pick a big thing that you never seem to get to and do about 10 or 15 minutes of that *first* and then do some of the other things.

You shouldn't need to be spending so much time cleaning on weekends if you are cleaning during the week AND have a routine down.

And don't forget maintenance. For example, if you clear the clutter from a table, make sure that no clutter gets put back onto the table and that it stays clear. You don't want to have to keep clearing the same table over and over. That's making a routine out of something you don't need to be doing in the first place since nothing should be going on that table that shouldn't be there.

As things start to get picked up and you find a place for everything to live, the time you spend on it will keep going down and you won't need to spend extra time cleaning around things and moving things back and forth.

So I FINALLY made a dent in my closet in the past couple of days. I kept adding something to do with the closet to my daily goals and would poke and prod around in there, but primarily procrastinating because it is such a huge task, but I took out a whole section of clothes and hung up a couple of 5-tier closet shelves that I will use for t-shirts and other foldable shirts and actually put some folded shirts IN them! I've also as of last night ordered a couple of 3-tier hanging shelves to put on the other side where longer shelves won't fit. Today I need to go through one of the piles I created yesterday and either fold them or decide to donate them. (Or use them as rags depending on condition.)

I've really gotten into planner preparation mode for 2021!

I ordered a Makselife Goal planner for my main planner, and then I have a BIG Happy Planner (discbound) that I will use for planning out worship services and church related things, and a spiral Recollections (with an owl on it) that has horizontal entries that I will use for daily devotions, and then another spiral Recollections with celestial/astrological cover that I will use for intuitive work and related "woo woo" things.

Oh and I have a Happy Planner Mini Notes notebook for game notes and organization, so there is that too even though it's not a planner!

I'm also trying to take to heart some words from John Maxwell (who writes a lot about success and motivation) to do something I hate every day!

Minor milestone... Our junk mail and to be shredded stuff tends to pile up in the kitchen. In the past few months a third of our table was buried in boxes, mailers, extra napkins, tissue boxes, assorted kids books and toys, and spare take out silverware bundles.
The table is now clean. The adjacent counter is approaching clean, but we are dragging heels on purging extra crap from our cabinets. In one of the cabinets I have, I kid you not, one of those gas-station plastic musical candy dispensers of a raindeer that, when activated, poops a candy while playing a jingle. The grandparents thought that was a hoot to give to the kids. Now I have to figure out how to surreptitiously throw it away.

I also have an old computer desk where every flat surface is used for storage. Screws, memory cards, adapters, odd tools from Ikea kits, buttons, stamps, pencils, USB cables, etc etc... We want to get rid of that desk so I bought two organizer cabinets that hopefully I can use for all the little one-off items that I can't get rid of but also can't really go into one big box.

Going to start on that today!

Sounds a bit more than minor to me clearing away all of that stuff!! YAY!!

I LOVE the pooping reindeer LOL

jdzappa wrote:

So can anyone help me in figuring out how much time I should devote to cleaning? We bought a bigger (2k square feet) house a year back and I never feel like I can keep on top of things. I clean about a half hour a day during the week and 2-3 hours a day on weekends. I feel I keep up on basics like dishes and laundry but there’s still a lot of clutter and some of the rooms need a serious refresh.

The secret to cleaning that I've found is the less stuff you have, the less you need to clean. This is hard in a house with kids but even then there is probably a surprising amount you can get rid of that your kids will never miss. I recommend starting with getting rid of as much as you can before you start worrying about optimizing your cleaning.

The mistake a lot of people make is thinking they can clean and organize their way out of clutter when really you just have the same amount of clutter it is just now hidden away or in neat rows.

That said, 30 minutes a day plus 2 hours on the weekend (not 4-6) should be enough to keep a regular house clean. Unless your family is messy and people don't pick up after themselves as they do things.

After putting it off for a while, I went ahead today and listed a few of the manga volumes I want to get rid of on Kijiji, and 5 of them sold off right away. (I got two offers for the same 5 volumes, in fact.) No idea if the rest will sell. We'll see! I never expected those 5 to go so fast.

One of my Wii games also sold on eBay this morning.

The list of things I need to get rid of feels endless, but someday, someday! I will get to the end of it. With a bit of luck, this will happen before I retire.

Well if it does turn out to be endless, then you have a guaranteed endless flow of cash.

But yay for making more progress!

I've been slowly pecking away at my closet. It also seems endless, but I can see where there has been improvement too!

I've fallen off the bandwagon a bit, although I did add a cabinet to our home office to cleanly store some random stuff. But all the low-hanging fruit is gone, which also means that most drawers are pretty tidy right now.

I think I should add our night stand drawers to the list or something. Or start over, the cookie/sweets drawer was already getting cluttered again.

edit: I don't know if it counts as well, but I just did my yearly 'decluttering' of online subscriptions and donations. It's astonishing how much we spend yearly when you start to actually count it all. Some of it is essential of course (like antivirus or O365), but I've been able to shave off about 10%.

dejanzie wrote:

I've fallen off the bandwagon a bit, although I did add a cabinet to our home office to cleanly store some random stuff. But all the low-hanging fruit is gone, which also means that most drawers are pretty tidy right now.

I think I should add our night stand drawers to the list or something. Or start over, the cookie/sweets drawer was already getting cluttered again.

edit: I don't know if it counts as well, but I just did my yearly 'decluttering' of online subscriptions and donations. It's astonishing how much we spend yearly when you start to actually count it all. Some of it is essential of course (like antivirus or O365), but I've been able to shave off about 10%.

Of course it counts! This thread isn't just about decluttering and cleaning physical things, but also organizing and decluttering our *lives* to make them better, more satisfying, less stressful, etc. however we might want or need to define it that. So virtual decluttering and getting finances more on track with where we want them definitely counts, among other things!

And yay! It's great to know that you only have online subscriptions for things you are wanting and using. I've been debating getting rid of a couple of mine, but then I end up using them and delay pulling the plug.

I've been debating getting rid of a couple of mine, but then I end up using them and delay pulling the plug.

I feel this so hard. We went through this early with the kids. It didn't help that everything we were on the fence about was utterly overshadowed by daycare costs. It's hard to argue against a five dollar a month quality of life upgrade, even if only used sporadically, in the face of over half a grand a week in daycare costs. Pinching pennies while burning stacks.

Digital clutter related:

I was looking at the list of projects in my Todoist app, and saw that I still had the 'Moving - Address changes' open, and there was an open task in it. I looked at it, and it was about changing my address on my life insurance policy. I moved a year and a half ago. Since I'm working from home and my task list is pretty empty at the moment, I figured I should just take care of it now. Five minutes later, it was done, and I was able to archive the project! Yay!

Next up: Sort through all the files on my MacBook Pro. I'm still trying to figure out whether I'm keeping it or selling it. The only real reason I use it now is because Astropad is not available on Windows... yet, but it should be out eventually, someday, maybe.

Yay for getting that address changed!

I'm a horrible procrastinator when it comes to things like that and other random "administrative" things. Take for example today. I have a bill that is due today. I have the money to pay it. Have I paid it yet? No. Will I pay it at some point today? Most likely, yes. But then I ask myself why I keep doing it. I do go through times when I will pay the bill the moment it arrives and then other times when seemingly on a whim, I wait until the very last moment. It makes no sense and yet there it is. Somehow I have to get past this thing because it stresses me out when I procrastinate, and I KNOW it does and yet I still do!

bekkilyn wrote:

I'm a horrible procrastinator when it comes to things like that and other random "administrative" things. Take for example today. I have a bill that is due today. I have the money to pay it. Have I paid it yet? No. Will I pay it at some point today? Most likely, yes. But then I ask myself why I keep doing it. I do go through times when I will pay the bill the moment it arrives and then other times when seemingly on a whim, I wait until the very last moment. It makes no sense and yet there it is. Somehow I have to get past this thing because it stresses me out when I procrastinate, and I KNOW it does and yet I still do!

When it comes to bills, my usual method is to pay them as soon as I receive them. For credit cards, I don't even wait and pay the total every single week (I have a recurring item in my to-do list reminding me to do it).

I use this recurring item as a trigger to also look my bank accounts transactions to make sure everything is OK and that I have enough funds to cover upcoming automated transactions like car payments (only 8 months to go!) and rent, and determine if I have some extra funds I can move to my savings accounts or to my retirement investments. I've also set up auto-pay for my cell phone and internet bills, since both of these are essential for my business. (As you can probably tell, I've become obsessed with personal finances on my quest to reach financial independence.)

On the topic of Todoist cleanup:

Todoist added a 'Sections' feature in their apps, so that allowed me to get rid of some sub-projects and just consolidate a few things at the main project level. That's fine for smaller projects (like the one I describe below), but for longer ones I think I will keep the project/subproject structure.

As I was going through those projects, it became obvious that 'Digital decluttering' is the low hanging fruit here, and that it would only take me a few weeks to complete it. So, here we go! First steps:

  • Finish sorting through the burned DVDs I have hanging around (today) Done!
  • Consolidate my media library on one external hard drive (next two weeks)
  • Set up my file server to replicate the changes from the main external hard drive to the back up one every night (during the holidays most likely)

I ended up making the payment as well as anything else that had come in and so I'm all caught up again. I really wish I could just set up automated payments for everything, but with utilities that aren't the same every month, and internet that has the potential of suddenly going up without pre-warning, I don't like the idea of my bill suddenly going up to some weird amount and then it's already paid before I've ever had the opportunity to contest it.