Getting in my Drawers (40 Days/40 Bags)

I don't think most people would willingly go out and buy a bag of junk to bring it home to decorate their house. But I guarantee almost everyone has a junk drawer in their house.

Maybe it looks something like this?



Here's the steps that I did to tame the junk drawer.


This junk drawer is that mishmash of coupons, take-out menus, stamps, and scraps of "important" papers. (If they were truly that important, would they be crammed into an overstuffed drawer?)

Start by taking everything out of the drawer and wiping it down.

Sort items into several piles. Start with the first item (for instance, a menu) and place it into its own pile. Then take the next item. If it is the same type of item as the first one, put it in the same pile. If it isn't, then start a new pile (for instance, coupons). Continue until every item is in its own pile. It may take a while to sort through a pile like this, but it goes quicker as you go along.






Don't go into this process with a pre-conceived idea of what the piles should be. Let the items themselves decide what types of piles you create.

Many of the papers were not actually important, but just papers that got shoved in the drawer "just because". Those ended up heading right to the trash.

Once everything is sorted into piles, figure out how to best organize the items, even if it means purchasing items to aid in the organization process.

The two items I used were a three-ring binder with plastic sheets and a coupon holder.

Going one pile at a time, I got rid of any expired coupons or menus for restaurants that are either out of business or that we don't visit.

In the coupon holder, I put coupons, rewards cards, and gift cards, plus checkbooks, deposit slips, stamps, and address labels. On the front of the coupon holder, I stuck a post-it note with a list of the contents so I could see at a glance what's in that organizer.

For the three-ring binder, I put menus (grouped by cuisine) in the plastic sheets, and included any current coupons with the menu.

The KonMari method suggests gathering all items of a kind from around the house, so I gathered up all scissors, tape, and pens/pencils/highlighters to add to the piles that I had created. For the scissors, I put them all into the drawer. Even though we have a LOT of scissors, I am keeping them all because scissors tend to disappear.

For pens and pencils, I tested every single one. If it wasn't working, it went into the trash. If the cap was missing, it went into the trash. If I didn't like it, it went in the trash. (See a pattern?)

I decided on five pens, two markers, two highlighters, and two pencils to go in the drawer. The rest, I divided up by type and placed in zip-top bags to store with office supplies.



The other items that found a place in the drawer are box-tops for education (already taped on paper and ready to submit when a contest comes up), silica packets (which I keep on hand in case I have things that need to be dried out), and mini super glue tubes.

Instead of going with one very long drawer, I went with two smaller ones.

That left a variety of miscellaneous stuff. For right now, I put them in a small plastic box. As I go through the rest of the house, I'll be going back to that box to see what needs to be kept and put away, and what truly is junk to be trashed.



Here's the end result of the two drawers.







In all, one small bag of trash came out of those drawers. That's bag #3 for the 40 days/40 bags challenge!

40 Days Challenge: Minimizing DVDs

For many years now, I've participated in the 40 Days/40 Bags challenge, where you make a commitment to try and declutter by about 40 bags of stuff during the 40 days of Lent. This year, the event starts on February 10.

Although I won't be writing a post about every single thing I do to meet this goal, I have been asked from people how to "do" decluttering. I figure as I go through things, I'll write up the steps I'm following, in the hope it helps someone else. I did an early start so that maybe some of these hints can help others.

Today, I tackled DVDs, CDs, and Blu-ray movies.

Overall, we don't have a lot of movies and CDs compared with some people, but there is a bit of "movie creep" that happens over time. A movie sounds great, so you buy it or it gets gifted to you, but once you watch it, you don't need to see it again. Then there's the kid DVDs that your child outgrows. Or, it is a movie you've had on DVD for years, but there's now a Blu-ray version that has more features with better quality that takes up less space. (Or, the worst offender...you have the DVD with certain special features, and then you get a Blu-ray, but can't tell if it has the same features, so instead of checking, you just keep both.) Whatever the reason, eventually the bookcase/shelf/rack that you have for the DVDs is now at the "staple a banana peel" stage.*

Whatever the reason, you're at the point where you need to buy more shelving space (a decluttering no-no) or you have something that looks like this.

Time for decluttering. Here's the steps I use.

* Remove everything from the shelves, sorting them as you go into two categories: DVD and Blu-Ray. Open each case as you sort it to make sure the correct movie is in the case.


* As you clear off a shelf, dust it. Once all shelves are cleared off, move the shelves (if you can) and vacuum underneath.

When all else fails, bring in a kitty to help with the decluttering.

* Beginning with the Blu-ray movies (which are usually newer) and then moving to DVDs:

1. Put any movies back on the shelf that you have watched in the past year and feel you would like to watch again.

2. Put up any collectible, "in the vault", or other movies that you know you can't easily replace (unless you are certain you don't want them anymore).

3. Once you have gone through that, go through all of the remaining Blu-ray movies one by one and be honest about whether you want to keep it or not.

4. Moving to DVDs, look for any duplicates that match a Blu-ray. Unless there is a specific reason to keep both, get rid of the DVD duplicate.

5. Repeat steps 1-3 for the DVDs, but as you go along, think about whether it is worth it to "upgrade" a movie to a Blu-ray. The Blu-ray movies will look better and the cases often take up less space. In some cases, you can even get a small box set of movies that is much smaller than six individual DVDs.

If you have a DVD or Blu-ray that you don't watch and could easily replace in the future (especially a DVD that you could upgrade), put it in the "get rid of" bag. (The exception is a DVD that you have for a child that you know you probably will only be keeping for another year or two. There's no reason to upgrade something with a short shelf life, so don't try and replace that whole set of Barney the Dinosaur videos!)

Also, make sure to read the reviews for Blu-ray movies online on a site like Amazon. In some cases, movie studios have made pretty disastrous "upgrades" when going to Blu-ray, either with a terrible transfer or reduced features.

For older movies, you might not need to upgrade to Blu-ray, unless it has been remastered or has new features on the disk, because the movie quality of a movie from decades ago likely won't be improved just by a new pressing.

If you have a movie still in its original wrapping (after a year or more), unless you bought it to be a collectible for later, it's probably a good sign to watch it or get rid of it.

Look to see if there's any in your "get rid of pile" that make good regifting options. If so, stick a post-it note with the person's name you are planning to give it to, and put it in another pile. If you can't think of a specific person, don't keep it to regift.

Today's success: 2 bags

If you have kid movies, offer a buyback program to your kids -- if they're willing to get rid of a movie, pay a yard sale price (25 cents to $1) if the child is willing to let it go.

Check with Amazon or in-person secondhand stores to see if any of them can be sold for a small credit. If you have a lot of a certain kind, you can try selling them on eBay or Craigslist (for example, a huge lot of 50 toddler-friendly DVDs).

The rest can be donated. Schools and libraries are good places for educational movies, and thrift stores are always an option for the rest.

In addition to the work I did here, my husband also went through his video games and was able to reduce by several. Looking online, we ended up being able to trade half of them back to Amazon for a gift card (about $58) and the rest will be donated this weekend.

How did today go? Here's the after picture. That's 2 bags down, 38 left to go!

*For those who haven't seen that particular episode of The Simpsons, it gets to the point where no one will take out the trash because they can always find a way to cram things on. This includes stapling a banana peel to the bag because it won't stay balanced on the pile of trash in the can.

Catching up with life

As you can tell by the date of the post before this one and this one, I've been a little lax on updating.

In short:

Moved into the new house
Hubs got the job of his dreams
Kiddo started kindergarten
I've been madly keeping everything in order.

Lots of other things to mention along the way, but no real need.  On my to-do list is to create a photo story of all that happened between then and now.

Spring is nipping at our heels, and that means the 40 bags in 40 days challenge. Basically for the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, you aim to remove one bag of clutter from your house every day. The definition of "bag" is very loose -- the goal is to reduce what holds you down in your life and assess what truly matters to keep.

Long and short, we've been doing the 40 bags/40 days challenge for four or five years now. It is a great way to go through belongings and really assess what is important in life.

After the second year, I wondered if it would be possible to get 40 bags out of the house in general. Compared with a lot of people we know, we have very few belongings. Yet, as we get ready to start this year, I think 40 bags is very do-able.

What I'm going to do a little different this year is document *how* we go through things, in the hopes that if someone else is trying to figure out where to begin, they can see if the method we use works for them.

I'm also reading the book Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up by Marie Kondo while I go through the 40 bags/40 days process.

Hopefully I'll be able to get a dozen posts up to show the process of cleaning around here, but if not, I do plan to post more frequently than annually! ;)