De-Clutter

So last year, I made a goal to de-clutter my life. In this de-cluttering, I was going to tackle my home, my room, my desk and my car. I am proud to say that this is a goal that I have accomplished. Even though this goal was met by force on most occasions, the point is that it’s done! Let me further explain what by force means and how each de-cluttering came about.
The first thing to get de-cluttered was my car. January of last year, I finally had to let go of my Honda Civic that I had proudly kept for 10 years. We’d had a good run and got to explore many places together, but after 175,000 miles, I knew it was time to depart from Greylan (my pet name). So I went to Carmax and traded him in, still receiving $2000. You can view my “Out wth the Old” dedication album via Fb. This of course forced me to clean him out at the spare of the moment when I drove off the lot with my new vehicle, Oliver Black (named in part after his first detailer), a Dodge Nitro. It’s really rather a funny story how Oliver and I got together. I was scoping out cars in January and found two possibilities: Oliver and another type of Dodge vehicle. I had them both shipped to the dealer and was waiting for them to arrive when…Snowmaggedon hit and stopped all traffic. My poor prospects were literally stuck on the road and I was only able to view them after everything had sufficiently thawed out to make roads passable. So Oliver and I never got a chance to play in the snow. Nevertheless, we have had fun. Within the next few months, he and I had driven up to Jersey, over to Deep Creek Mountains in Maryland and down to Salisbury and Virginia Beach. And while he’s slowly accumulating stuff, I do make an effort to clean him out once a month so as to avoid the clutter trap with the new vehicle.
My desk was also the result of being forced to de-clutter. As you know, I had a son this year and that required me to take some time off from my job. And as a condition of my leaving, my boss told me that I HAD to clean my area. So once again, I found myself gouging out spaces that had old papers and books and every other thing imaginable. I even wrote an article that drew an ironic conclusion that I was turning into my old professors. And while I claim that my desk is nowhere near as bad as it was before I endeavored to clean it, I can tell that I am back and am starting to accumulate items little by little. But, as with the vehicle, I attempt to clear the clutter on a regular basis and not re-collect junk.
Finally, there’s my home environment. I have lived in the same place for almost 20 years, and after dating the man I’d eventually have a child with, and subsequently having that child, I was once again forced to take serious inventory and de-clutter again—this time an apartment and most importantly a room full of stuff. In the final days before moving, I began referring to my room as the “Room of Doom.” Prior to no longer residing permanently in the apartment, I’d essentially used the room as a walk-in closet/dumping ground for all my books, magazines and papers, and OMG was it a lot to clean out. In my next blog, I will detail some of the treasure and trash items I discovered that had been collected from years past.
Overall, I’m proud of my de-cluttering process but alas I am not done yet. With the consolidation of two households, and all my stray junk, I have some hefty decisions to make in the coming six months. My goal is that by Christmas, most boxes should be reasonably discarded and that we should be working primarily with only Rubbermaid® storage boxes. I will try to keep you abreast of the project as it progresses.