I don’t want to be a min­i­mal­ist, I just want less stuff. I have a lifetime’s worth of accu­mu­la­tion, it seems. If this is going to work at all, than I need to break it down into manageable steps.

First, I need to fig­ure out what I don’t need any more. I have a pretty good idea of what I have. And I haven’t really needed to go through all the piles much since we moved in to get at any of this stuff. Obviously I don’t need it all then. It’s been four months.

The hard part is going to be part­ing with things that are still use­ful. I’ve been flip­ping back and forth today between get­ting rid of every­thing, and sav­ing it all but find­ing a bet­ter sys­tem for stor­ing it. Part of why I don’t use every­thing, is because I can’t get to it. I need some sort of mid­dle ground where I can get to what I will hon­estly use, and get rid of whatever’s in the way of that.

Ideally, I’ll take every­thing out that I can carry and only put back what I hon­estly really love and plan to use. It will be all clut­ter­ing up my bed, so I’ll be forced to deal with it. Once my hus­band fin­ishes build­ing my desk, this is what I’m going to do.

Until then, I need to fig­ure out what I would use if I could. I don’t want that day to be filled with inde­ci­sion. I have a pretty good idea of what’s hid­den away in all those boxes. If I don’t have a plan that I can print out and check off one by one, than it won’t hap­pen. I’m just that kind of girl.

1. The can­dles (scentsy and reg­u­lar) because I love pretty smells. I sac­ri­ficed one of my pre­cious elec­tri­cal out­lets so that I could plug in a warmer. I plan to keep one on while I’m in my room to make it feel more like my room.
2. Some of the pens, mark­ers, and crayons. The ones that work, but much less. I have a whole 3 drawer tower full. I’ll keep the lego box of crayons for my nieces to play with. That doesn’t take up much room, and keeps them enter­tained for a long time. The rest, I’ll limit myself to one cup on my desk and a cou­ple in my writ­ing bucket. I really don’t need more than that. Who needs a mil­lion pens?
3. I have to save my Sims disks because it reli­ably needs to be re-installed.
4. Jewelry can be saved in the lit­tle plas­tic tub I have. However it needs major purg­ing as I don’t wear much of it.
5. Office sup­plies. Keep the ink and paper, post-its and envelopes. The binders, fold­ers, etc can be donated?
6. The file box. File the papers. Shred the rest. Only use the one plas­tic box. The card­board one can be re-purposed?
7. The projects drawer is prob­a­bly fine. I do plan to make the paja­mas that I bought fab­ric for. The floss needs to be orga­nized bet­ter, but I still use it from time to time.
8. Old pho­tos can be scanned. Old CDs can be copied to the computer.
9. The var­i­ous tote bags I do use, they just need a home.
10. Sheets will live in the linen closet, once we make one.
11. Recipe box is a project in itself. Save any­thing worth sav­ing, get rid of the rest.
12. Cat car­ri­ers can go in the closet.
13. Exercise stuff. It needs a home.
14. The books … oh boy. 
15. The stuffed animals?

Solution

1. Store the can­dles and bricks in one of the empty plas­tic bins. If it doesn’t all fit in the bin, than get rid of some.
2. For the stuff that my nieces get to play with, use another bin. Put the crayons with it and some paper and col­or­ing books. The box of blocks will prob­a­bly fit inside, too. The drawer tower that the pens are in, can be reused to house the bath­room sup­plies that are in a pile of boxes. If it doesn’t fit, we really don’t need that much anyway.
3. Where am I going to put the games? The orig­i­nal idea was to use a DVD rack from down­stairs, but I don’t need that much space. If I clear out some of the books, I can use a shelf to put them on.
4. Throw it away, most is old ear­rings. The neck­laces can go to my nieces’ box for play or keep what­ever they want. The jew­elry boxes? I could get fancier than the plas­tic lit­tle tub and use the brown one for the lit­tle that I’ll keep. The other one holds for­eign money that my Dad col­lected. He might want the jew­elry box as a prop. It plays music and kids will be enter­tained dur­ing photo shoots.
5. The bin that the sup­plies are in, isn’t work­ing. There might be space on the new desk, or find a new bin. Email a local school to see if they want the used binders. One way to cover up the writ­ing on the edge is with col­or­ful duct tape, could sug­gest that. The fold­ers and dividers are in pretty good shape and shouldn’t be a problem.
6. If it doesn’t fit in the file box, than I don’t need to keep it. Scan any­thing that doesn’t need a phys­i­cal copy, unless I can find a copy online (state­ments). The box unfolds until I have a use for it.
7. It’s rea­son­ably self con­tained. The two paint by num­ber things I can donate to goodwill.
8. The orig­i­nals can be stuck in a small box until I’m able to do the scan­ning and copy­ing. It’s not a lot, and they can be put in a closet safely once in a box.
9. The closet can hold bags, too. They’re not going to dam­age the plaster.
10. Until then, they have to stay in the bin.
11. Keep the fab­ric binder since Mom made it for me, but get bet­ter pages for it so that I’ll actu­ally use them. The bar­bie pink case can go. If it doesn’t fit in the binder, than I don’t need it, especially since I can look recipes up online or in my cook­books. This is for the ones I col­lect from people.
12. Donate the lit­tle one to the SPCA, and keep the ones that my cats fit in. If I ever get a kit­ten, than I can spend another $15 for a new one. Or just use one of the big­ger ones I already have. I don’t really want three ani­mals, unless one’s a dog. Then I would need a dog car­rier, since it wouldn’t stay small enough to fit inside the cat ones for very long.
13. Find or buy a cute bas­ket to keep it in. Something open at the top so I can visu­ally be reminded that it’s there. Maybe I’ll use it then.
14. This needs to be set aside to its own day. I need to really sit down with myself and fig­ure out in my heart what I’m able to do. I will get rid of some to a used book shop, the ones I won’t read. The rest, I don’t know. I love my books. I love being sur­rounded by them. It was my dream to have a library. I now have one. I hate to give up on that already. I need bet­ter book­shelves, thin­ner ones. The hus­band and I have dis­cussed a few pos­si­bil­i­ties. He says he’ll build me some after he fin­ishes my desk. We just have to fig­ure out how to best go about it.
15. They’re out of the way right now. I think they might make decent props for my par­ents’ stu­dio. I’ll keep a few, then see if they want the rest. If not, a day­care or children’s hos­pi­tal may take them. The few that I do keep can go on the win­dow seat that the hus­band also says he’ll build me.

… but could you really tell by look­ing at these pictures?

This is the first thing you see as you enter my library room. A pile of stuff stacked in front of a closet. The closet behind is empty, and since it’s blocked I didn’t get a pic­ture. It’s got the same slope as the ceil­ing you see here, with two shelves along the short wall, and is only a lit­tle wider than where that door stops. The chim­ney is what stops it, but it’s all cov­ered over … in horse­hair plas­ter and crayon.

The blue tubs are our sheets and blan­kets for the bed. There’s books, boxes, art sup­plies, projects, jewelry boxes and bags with bags in them. Then there are sev­eral boxes with empty binders, fold­ers and dividers left­over from col­lege. At first I wanted to keep all my notes and every­thing, so I bought every class it’s own binder, etc. Then I fin­ished school and real­ized that not only did I not care to keep it all, but it also was really heavy and took up a lot of room. I got rid of all my notes, but kept the binders think­ing they might have a use someday.

I’ve used prob­a­bly about 5. I took way more than 5 classes. The printer is also sit­ting on another box filled with them, so they’re use­ful for that. Honestly, the boxes I put stuff in are more use­ful to me right now than the stuff inside the boxes!

We have quite a few clos­ets in our house con­sid­er­ing the age of the house, but we’re only using one. The rest are all empty. We don’t want to just cram all our stuff into clos­ets and for­get about it all as we’ve done before. We want it to be use­ful storage.

We’re just at a loss.

This is the stuff next to that other pile of stuff. None of it is stay­ing in my room. It’s the over­flow bath­room things and some empty tubs. Why empty tubs when we have so much that could go in them? I don’t know.  I want to go through it and get rid of all the unnec­es­sary dupli­cates of what­ever it all is. From look­ing in the boxes, it’s a lot of soaps, lotions, etc that were given to me, or I bought and changed my mind on.

How do you get rid of stuff like that?

The home depot box is about 3/4 full of coat hang­ers. I have no idea how we ended up with so many of those. The closet behind is again empty, but it has a tall armoir type thing in it, that I don’t know what to do with (it came with the house). It takes up less space being left in the closet, and since we’re not using that closet right now any­ways, than that’s where it’ll stay until we fig­ure out the answer to both those issues.

Anyway, it’s all going to be moved into the small closet in my husband’s room where he’s going to put in shelves to also be a linen closet. It’s a nice idea, but as with every­thing else around here … it hasn’t hap­pened yet.

The first of these book­cases, the full book­case, are books we haven’t read yet. Most of them are mine, some are my hus­bands (that I don’t intend to read, like Dune), and the rest were given to us but nei­ther of us think we’ll read. For some rea­son when friends move they decide that we both need to have all their books that they don’t want to take with them.  

Those doors are full, filled with most of my text­books and some mag­a­zines. In the move we lost a shelf for the book­case that is open, and the door broke as you can see. The box of text­books from the first photo has what would be on the sec­ond shelf in this case. The top open shelves hold our hard­cov­ers, and the one near the win­dow has the non­fic­tion books. Inside the paint­ball box is my prom corsage.

This is stuff that could go into a closet and I’d not feel bad about just stor­ing it away. The three cat car­ri­ers (the two plas­tic ones are sit­ting on a big­ger one) get used once a year. The small­est doesn’t get used at all except as a place to store cat toys when I find them around the house. The chair isn’t all that com­fort­able and doesn’t fit in the room any­how. The box is filled with papers, as you can see, that are wait­ing to be shred­ded. Max likes to sit in it.

These are the office bits. The box under my ama­zon box houses my Sims 3 games. The rest was all stuff that used to be on my larger desk before the move and desk down­size. The box with the M&m guy is pretty much filled with candy left­over from my Christmas stocking.

The draw­ers behind it are about the only use­ful stor­age thing I have, but it’s mostly empty, because the draw­ers don’t close very well.

These boxes should be a fil­ing cab­i­net. I think I might have saved too much, but at the same time, I’m wor­ried I didn’t save the right stuff. This is after a purge of paper when we moved in, to sep­a­rate out things that needed to be shred­ded or just tossed.

I’ve held on to (most of) my col­lec­tion of stuffed ani­mals. I don’t know why. I’m not as attached to them as I used to be. They’re out of the way, and high up enough to be out of sight, too. So, they’re the least both­er­some thing about my whole room, and yet still make it look cluttered.

The ones I would save are the cro­chet bed­time bear that my Memere made for me. The dis­ney store Mickey mouse (and his friends, who got cut out of the pic­ture), the sheep, and  a teddy bear or two.

The two news­pa­per wrapped frames that the rein­deer cat is sit­ting on are my degrees. I plan to hang them up, some­time, but I don’t really have any open wall where they would fit.

My moti­va­tion behind post­ing clut­tered and unflat­ter­ing pic­tures of my house is to a) maybe get some feed­back on what to do or how and b) put it all in a row so that I might be able to look at it objec­tively. There’s some­thing about sit­ting in the mid­dle of all this and being over­whelmed to the point of not being able to see how to fix any of it.

Question to the reader: Why do we save all this stuff and how do I get myself to part with it? And, when I decide what to get rid of, where do I get rid of it to?