De-Cluttering Project-Day Four...There's this and then there's that...

I'm noticing how difficult it is to try and do serious de-cluttering when you have a husband and a five year-old. Perhaps this is why the clutter started in the first place. I don't remember having so much crap when I was single. I'm noticing that there are two types of clutter in my home: Daily Use Clutter and Other Half Clutter.

Daily use clutter is the stuff that we use on a daily basis that seems to be in the way even after you've put it away. Whether this is because you know that you are going to have to haul it all back out again the next day and so you still see it there even when it isn't or because you simply leave it out so that you can get to it more easily. A perfect example of this is my laptop. I have tried putting it away every night, but found it to be a big hassle to keep getting it back out when I want to do my writing in the evenings. Yes, I could use my desktop computer, but I find it much easier to do the bulk of my work on the laptop. Or, my daughter's tablet and markers. She is always writing little notes or drawing pictures and she refuses to put the tablet away. Perhaps she is just imitating her Mommy. I have a hard time enforcing the "put it away" rule with her when I have trouble putting my own writing tools away each day.

Other Half clutter is not exactly what you might think. Yes, most of it is generated by my other half, my husband, Robert. Note, I didn't say better half. This type of clutter is the stuff that your husband gets out to use for a certain task but then doesn't quite get to the other task and so the items stay out until he makes it the rest of the way to the garage, kitchen, basement or wherever this project might be. The other half of getting the project finished is to actually do the thing so that you can put the stuff associated with the project away. For example, there is a bottle of Gorilla Glue staring at me from my bookshelf as we speak. Now, I know and you know that a bottle of Gorilla Glue does not, in any way, qualify as a book. So, why is it resting on my bookshelf? This is the question of the day.

So, now that I've determined that there are two different kinds of clutter in my house, how am I going to address them? For one, I'm going to go down to the library and get that book on how to organize your stuff. There's a really good one down there that I started reading before. I think that if I can just set up some kind of system for daily projects and once in a while stuff, I might be onto something. I will post the name of this book later, after I've gone and picked it up. I would post it now, but my mind is so cluttered with daily stuff and once in a while stuff that the name of the book has escaped me. That's a whole other category of clutter that I'll have to tackle later.

Keep watching the blog to see if I'm making any progress. Until next time...




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