After the difficulty with keeping up with the mins game (and keeping records and tracking everything that I decluttered for that challenge) I sort of stopped keeping track of things that were leaving our house… But… That doesn’t mean things haven’t been leaving…
With all the kitchen and dining room stuff moving in to the basement, we had to finally pull a bunch of things out of the cupboards, and I have taken the opportunity to get rid of things that have just been taking up space. Here’s an incomplete, but best estimate based on my memory, list of what has left our house in the last few weeks:
- dog crate (Bentley doesn’t fit it anymore)
- magic bullet x 2 ( I want to get a full blown blender for my new kitchen… preferably a vita-mix or equivalent… and yes, we had 2 magic bullets… from when we combined households)
- mini food processor (since I got my full sized one, I don’t use the mini one at all)
- kitchen table + 4 chairs (the new space won’t work with this old one, and a friend was moving in to a new place and needed a table)
- my old stereo (the one I got in high school for my bedroom – it had been sitting in our basement unused since we moved in to the house)
- a big book shelf (from the basement – held a bunch of things that honestly we should either get rid of or find a better location for… this also went to the friend who was moving in to a new place)
- a giant bag of old jerseys from my field hockey club (too old to be used anymore)
- a push lawn mower (my husband got a fancy gas powered one for his birthday)
- a TV stand that used to hold our TV in our old place (hasn’t been used in this place)
And that’s just an estimate of what I remember… I know my husband disposed of some other items that I just don’t know about… Quite a few of these items were sold on VarageSale, so we gained a little spending money from them.
Do you find it easier to just do random decluttering rather than specific challenges?
All-Round Better Me 
Congrats! It sounds like you’ve done some great work.
I definitely prefer to make it a habit to continue to declutter, and I typically have an area I’m working on. I don’t do challenges unless I create them myself. I find that if I slack on a challenge, I stop doing it all together. I’m also not real competitive–even with myself–so I think keeping a principle in mind like “decluttering will bring more space into your life” or “when things are clean and clear, I feel better,” is more useful for me.
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I would like to keep that sort of principle in mind, but I find to start something like that I sometimes need set rules to follow… Which was great at the beginning of my mins game, but increasing the numbers and trying to keep track of things just took up too much effort…
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YAY for decluttering! I don’t think I’ve ever taken part in a decluttering challenge mainly because I always declutter in one fell swoop. Since my big, summer-long declutter two years ago, I usually just do one quick survey on the house once a month to decide what needs to get donated. If you don’t do it already, keeping a donation box active in the house also helps encourage the removal on no longer used goods 🙂
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Yeah, if I had the time to do a full household declutter in one go, that would be ideal. Unfortunately, it is really hard to schedule in that much commitment to something when there is so much other responsibilities around…
We had kept a donation box around for a while… But right now with the renovations it is hard to keep anything organized… When things are back to “normal”, I will definitely try to go back to that.
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so to answer your question, I like doing challenges that seem doable (if that makes any sense!) Sometime the challenge just doesn’t fit in with our schedules. The challenge you took on in January can be difficult. We did one last year but instead of starting with one item and working up to 31, we did it in reverse order and IF we worked and removed more, we just separated it into the appropriate days. The point is to get the extra stuff out of the house.
Our current challenge is only for 2 weeks and it is to average a certain number of items per day. Way easier to do, especially since we are both off work for the entire time.
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You have been very successful at this latest challenge of yours! 🙂
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It helps that we’ve had a forced staycation. It also helps that it is only for 17 days, not an entire month.
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I’m about 5 weeks into a one year mission to throw out one thing every day, although we are already over 200 things. It’s a very doable goal and one that doesn’t require a ton of free time all at once to accomplish. I started the project, but my wife has probably thrown out more than I have now.
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One thing a day seems like a very doable challenge… Perhaps that is something I could try myself for my next round of decluttering… I just went and read some of your updates. You are doing a great job of decluttering!
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