If you had a lot of stuff, how long did it take you to do a major de-clutter?

[Walt34]

An eye-opener was clearing out FIL's house when he had to move. His house was by no means cluttered and had an almost spartan look to it. Nonetheless we were surprised at how much stuff he had that we had to get rid of.

That made us much more aware of our own stuff and how much there is of it. So now we think more before buying anything. And we're trying to fill a trash can a week with stuff that's not really of much value but "might be useful someday". We were raised by Depression-era parents and they didn't throw out much, and a lot of that line of thinking transferred to us. It also has a lot to do with why we have zero debt.

If it's not trash I'm giving it away or listing it for sale. We are making slow but steady progress on reducing the amount of stuff we have.

 

[samclem]

This thread hits pretty close to home--we've got much too much junk. Also, the house we bought is a bit of a fixer-upper, which means lots of projects--and tools, supplies, etc stashed about. It is a bit overwhelming, and is a source of stress.

I haven't come to grips with it yet, many attempts to organize the overall effort have fallen short. Athena53, I'll take a look at "Rightsizing your Life." There are times I think we just need a good, thorough house fire.

 

[meierlde]

An eye-opener was clearing out FIL's house when he had to move. His house was by no means cluttered and had an almost spartan look to it. Nonetheless we were surprised at how much stuff he had that we had to get rid of.

.

Of course your FIL represents another approach, leave it to the heirs to de clutter. My folks did it with my grandparents on one side, I moved into my parents house so did some de clutter to my stuff. I have suggested to my sister and nieces and nephews that they go thru and pick the stuff they want and then hire someone to have an estate sale/ including in the sale the service of hauling stuff off to the dump/recycling place.

 

[daylatedollarshort]

Another good show to watch for motivation is Clean House on Netflix. It is less depressing than hoarders. The host and crew clean out a cluttered house, have a yard sale and use money from the show and the sale to organize, paint and redecorate. It is a little corny, but the before and after shots of the rooms are worth flipping through. Also seeing what gets sold or donated to charity is good food for thought for us on what to toss or keep at our own house.

 

[rodi]

One of the first things on my "to do" list when I retire next week is to go through the house, room by room, closet by closet, and figure out what can be sold, donated, trashed. I'm planning a HUGE garage sale at the end of the summer, and craigslist and ebay in the meantime.

Already started, sort of... our tenant (extended family) just moved out of our granny flat and we decided we're renting it unfurnished going forward. We had a garage sale last weekend, and have some of the better stuff on ebay currently.

 

[ERD50]

I have tons of clutter in the basement, garage, a 'spare' room, closets, and a little in the attic.

But I'm a tinkerer, and I do lots of repairs and home projects, so I save a lot of odds and ends that I often end up using. And we have a lot of space. So I'm not really worried about it.

But I have been thinking of taking an inventory and making a list of stuff that fits these categories, so that if I were suddenly incapacitated, my kids would know what to do with this stuff:

A) Records that need to be kept.

B) Stuff that is actually worth money - keep it or sell it.

C) Stuff that may not be worth selling, but should go to someone who can use it (good will, friends, family). This would be tools, some of my music stuff, etc.

D) Stuff that has some sentimental value - keep it or not, I don't care - just so they don't throw it out not realizing what it is.

E) A guide to what's on all those hard drives!

For the rest, get several dumpsters and hire some strong backs to dump it all. I'm a pack-rat, not a hoarder (according to my definition, hoarders just can't part with anything, regardless the consequences; a pack-rat keeps lots of stuff, but may actually use it one day, and has no trouble junking stuff that serves no purpose).

Until I'm ready to give up doing home repairs, or have an actual plan/date to downsize, having a ton of stuff has no real cost associated with it, I'll get rid of it when the time comes. It's a lot of work right now to decide if I might use this board or that piece of metal or that jar of screws, or heck, I might need that old power drill sometime, even though I've go a better one, a back up is always good. But once I stop the home repairs, those decisions are easy.

So no major de-cluttering for me, until the time comes. I don't find it 'freeing' as so many here have said, I find it tedious to sort it out. That will be so much easier when I don't need it anymore. It goes! Simple!

-ERD50

 

[photoguy]

E) A guide to what's on all those hard drives!

I'll admit to being anal enough to have a spreadsheet tracking the contents of my 20 or so hard drives.

 

[MichaelB]

Accumulation of stuff is like any other bad habit. Easy to fall into, tough to break, very easy to put off. For us moving frequently has made it easier to deal with - that, and having lost everything in one move, learning the hard way that it's only stuff.

"What if it need it" or "I'm keeping this for a reason" is an easy trap to fall into. I make a photo record of the stuff we recycle out of the house, and when we start asking ourselves the "what if" question I just pull up records and photos of past stuff to see how much we regret disposing of or gifting.

Going from never getting rid of anything to the other extreme is hard. Much easier to do a little, then repeat regularly, even monthly, on a schedule.

 

[ERD50]

I'll admit to being anal enough to have a spreadsheet tracking the contents of my 20 or so hard drives.

Likewise (or I wouldn't be able to find it!). But my kids wouldn't know where the spreadsheet is!

Yes, I should print it out and keep it with the drives, but my shorthand notes wouldn't be enough for them. I'd need a readers digest version list of what they would need to know. Old cycles of backups, or stuff I kept 'just in case' are of no use to them.

-ERD50

 

[kcowan]

When I de-cluttered my basement workshop on the acreage, I found a bunch of scrap metal that had become valuable enough that a dealer came to the acreage to sort through it.

I also encountered a set outsourcer from the movie industry at our contents sale who would buy vintage-looking stuff that no longer worked.

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

My brother-in-law recently passed away, and he had a tendency to accumulate stuff (fortunately, he was quite organized about it). We called in an antique/collectible dealer and he went through the entire house in search of stuff he could sell. It took all day, but he filled a stretch van and paid us $600. Among the stuff he took: lawn chairs, old photos, beer signs, sporting equipment, clothing, old toys. Oh, and an old floor-model radio that didn't work. In the process, he turned up some legal documents we were looking for.

 

[daylatedollarshort]

I was volunteering at a rock and gem show one year, and a family came in that had inherited a collection of valuable rubies and other gem stones, asking for help on what to do with them. I guess there are worse problem in the world than inheriting a large collection of rubies and emeralds, but the adult kids had no interest in gem stones, had no idea how to sell them, and life would have been easier for them had they inherited stocks or CDs.

 

[Katsmeow]

I've been working on this for years. It has been a real process. When we sold the house we owned a couple of houses ago (this was in 2006) we threw away some stuff and then packed other stuff. When we got to the new house there were many boxes we stored in the spare garage and thought we would unpack "later." About 5 years later, we realized we could throw most of it away and then did that. Then when we went to sell that house, we had all the stuff we had accumulated over those 5 years.

This time I was more ruthless. DH and I went through the house room by room and got rid of stuff. We were preparing to sell the house so were motivated to get this done in a matter of a couple of months. DH was more cautious about throwing stuff away than I was. So, some things we compromised on and packed away with the idea of reassessing later.

We moved into a rental and put that stuff into a storage place along with stuff we had no room for in the rental. It was a year before we bought our current house so, once again, we realized that the stuff we didn't miss during the year was stuff that could go away. On the other hand, there were a few things we actually went over to the storage unit and got during the year so we knew that was worthwhile.

We had a lot of books and were moving to a smaller house than our original house and decided to buy as many books on Kindle as possible. So we got rid of tons of physical books (we went from a house with about 20 bookcases to having 3 bookcases).

When we moved into the current house as we unpacked stuff I threw away still more stuff. Again, a lot of this stuff that had been in storage for year.

We've been in the current house 2 years and I'm currently going through even more decluttering.

Part of it is that some things we've saved we realize we no longer really need. For example, we have tons of DVD movies that we bought years ago. For many of them our tastes have changed or, if they haven't, the movie is often available to be streamed so we have little need to have DVD movies.

I think the hardest things to get rid of are those things that you don't really have a current need for, but you can envision a need for and don't like the idea of having to rebuy if you want it. There are some kitchen items that I got rid of and then needed the implement and had to rebuy it.

Or, our old cordless phone system. We haven't had a landline or VOIP for years. But we still had this expensive cordless phone system. I kept thinking I should throw it away on the next pass, but never quite did so. Well, we just got phone service from Comcast. We didn't really want it, but having it made the most economic sense for getting the other things we did want (essentially the phone service ends up being free). So, it was nice to pull out the old phones and be able to use them.

I just think decluttering is sort of never ending because you always end up with "new" clutter even after you declutter.

 

[audreyh1]

About a year. But we got rid of a boat, a house, and all the furniture! We moved into an RV and ht the road.

A belated congrats on your marriage unclemick!

 

[spncity]

We moved into an RV and ht the road.

We'd like to do something like that between houses. Did you store anything for a period of time?

How big was the storage space and how much did it cost?

 

[Sue J]

One day - KATRINA.

Now time has passed and I got married last year at age 70. The Katrina experience I think helped my attitude. I moved to the new wife's airplane bungalow with some clothes(a very reduced amount), two dogs, one cat and a relatively small Kennedy toolbox.

I had never heard of an airplane bungalow so I looked it up. Airplane Bungalow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia I love that type of house and the size, just never heard of it by that name.

I have never been a shopper or accumulator. I'm content with the stuff I already have and have learned to uncouple from stuff that's beyond it's useful function. But I do tend to hang onto stuff I used to use or enjoyed in the past but don't need anymore. I'm making progress in this area.

But DH is an acquirer. He and our older son love to go to all the thrift stores and just buy old stuff. It's either to rescue stuff or sometimes to buy and sell on ebay. I wish he would really get to selling some crap on ebay because what really happens to it is it gets put upstairs in an unused bedroom and left there, usually on the floor. This is the stuff that's far too "important or valuable" to get put in the large storage attic above the attached garage where it is exposed to heat and cold.

If he ever got the urge to purge I'd be thrilled to participate, I'd even splurge for a dumpster. But right now he's still enjoying the hunting and acquiring of old crap and he enjoys the time with our son.

I'm certainly not an immaculate housekeeper but I'd like to be able to open a door to an unused bedroom and see baseboards and nice wood flooring instead of open boxes of old electronics and miscellaneous junk.

 

[aja8888]

I have never been a shopper or accumulator. I'm content with the stuff I already have and have learned to uncouple from stuff that's beyond it's useful function. But I do tend to hang onto stuff I used to use or enjoyed in the past but don't need anymore. I'm making progress in this area.

But DH is an acquirer. He and our older son love to go to all the thrift stores and just buy old stuff. It's either to rescue stuff or sometimes to buy and sell on ebay. I wish he would really get to selling some crap on ebay because what really happens to it is it gets put upstairs in an unused bedroom and left there, usually on the floor. This is the stuff that's far too "important or valuable" to get put in the large storage attic above the attached garage where it is exposed to heat and cold.

If he ever got the urge to purge I'd be thrilled to participate, I'd even splurge for a dumpster. But right now he's still enjoying the hunting and acquiring of old crap and he enjoys the time with our son.

I'm certainly not an immaculate housekeeper but I'd like to be able to open a door to an unused bedroom and see baseboards and nice wood flooring instead of open boxes of old electronics and miscellaneous junk.

Are you my DW's long lost twin sister?

 

[redduck]

I just cleaned out (but, not completely) the top shelf of one of my clothes closets. I decided to toss out some sweat pants and work-out shorts and shirts, along with some bermudas (are they still called that?). Of course, I went through the pockets of all the clothing--most of which I hadn't worn in at least a year. Now, this always happens--there's Kleenex (often more than one) in some of the pockets--usually unused (or, seemingly unused). So, the quandary is, do I keep the Kleenex or toss the Kleenex? (And, this is the stuff I wonder about at 10:55 on a Saturday night. I simply need to do better than this).

 

[Surewhitey]

Moved to another country...

15 years of accumulation and decided to move to Mexico. Sold or donated everything. Quite liberating. Kept enough to pack up the car and travel South.
We hope to rebuild one day with a clear idea of what we really need if/when we move back.

 

[redduck]

But, what did you do with the Kleenex?

 

[Chuckanut]

I have been tossing out stuff for a decade. I still find things I dont' use and can probably be put to better use by somebody else. Alas, I often continue to buy things that become clutter. However, I am becoming better at walking away from such things for a few hours and a few days, and then asking myself if I really need the item. Usually the urge goes away. If it repeatedly comes back, then I may eventually buy it. The impulse purchases are the worst.

 

[Birdie Num Nums]

But, what did you do with the Kleenex?

Nosy!

I have been tossing out stuff for a decade. I still find things I dont' use and can probably be put to better use by somebody else. Alas, I often continue to buy things that become clutter. However, I am becoming better at walking away from such things for a few hours and a few days, and then asking myself if I really need the item. Usually the urge goes away. If it repeatedly comes back, then I may eventually buy it. The impulse purchases are the worst.

I know what you mean. I've just gone thru a major decluttering, including kitchen gadgets, but last Sunday walking thru an outdoor mall, I couldn't resist buying this gadget on sale for $6.

 

[redduck]

I would starve if I didn't have a draw full of these-type gadgets. But, this one looks better than the ones I have. Please let us (e.g. redduck) know if this one works well.

 

[W2R]

I am lucky that I have zero arthritis in my hands, so I have never had any trouble opening jars at all. I don't own even one of those gizmos.

Generally I do not buy anything until I have figured out a place to put it. While that helps in minimizing clutter, it doesn't eliminate it.

To cut back on clutter and unwanted items, I bookmark whatever I might see on Amazon and want instead of buying immediately. Often a few weeks later I find that I don't want the item so much any more (and delete the bookmark).

 

[jetpack]

Having just inherited a lot of stuff, I'm in the mode to downsize. Most of the new stuff I got is more of the sentimental value stuff.

One of my strategies is that I put a free box out next to my trash in the ally. I try to keep it full, and the stuff keeps disappearing (not by the trashmen), so I know it's going to someone that wants it. It's a lot easier than other options. I don't need a yard sale with $0.25 items.