Thursday, February 19, 2015

Day 51 - Decluttering

"We store so much stuff thinking that some day we will use it. I think throughout my lifetime once a year, every year, my family had cleaned out our garage or our storage spaces. Once every few years we clean out the junk drawer. If fact we have several junk drawers currently. We need to get rid of those things. Most of the stuff in them we don't use. It would actually be nice to have a drawer with nothing but a pen and note pad in it. I can never find what I actually would use!"

I have heard it said that The U.S.A. is the only place where we have storage units we rent to store things we don't use. Recently television shows have made this phenomenon popular with titles like Storage Wars, American Pickers and Hoarders. People just have tons of stuff these days. Some have argued against the consumerist waste and for the case of the collector. I get that but there is a fine line between a collector and a hoarder. 

In my house we have a rule that if we haven't touched something in a year then we need to consider if it should stay in our home. This obviously excludes categories of things like our important papers and our keepsakes. But for the most part we have a ton of stuff that we never use. Every year when we do our purge we end up with a bunch of yard sale items or donations. 

All this talk of cleaning reminds me that I still haven't got to those junk drawers. 

How do you manage your clutter? What would you add to this conversation? 

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