February and I hit a bit of a snag

The month we had two things that have caused chaos at our house.  The first is that we were awaiting the installation of new bookshelves for our living room.  We had two smaller pieces of furniture – neither of which were actual bookshelves – that were holding about 70 percent of our books.  We expected that the built ins would be able to hold about 90 percent of our (non-children’s) books that were either on the shelves or in boxes, baskets, or piles scattered throughout the house.  In addition to this, it was my husband’s month to host the monthly poker game.  As a last minute change, I agreed to host the monthly Bunko game at our house to resolve a scheduling conflict with another host.  So there has been a lot of upheaval, moving, cleaning, etc.  I have decided to put my big de-cluttering effort on hold for the greater goal of having a presentable house for hosting two events.  A very wise Bunko gal gave me this liberating nugget, “Your house does not have to be clean.  It only needs to look clean”. 

The exception to this de-cluttering slow down was the office.  Our home office is connected to the only bathroom downstairs and since the boys poker game is held downstairs, people would by necessity have to see our office.  The office has long been used as our junk room or dumping ground for stuff we needed to deal with but wanted to simply get out of the way.  So we focused our energy of cleaning up and clearing out the office by the end of the month and we made it.  We took at least 6 bags of trash or recycling out of the office.  And I filed a stack of papers that was at least 24 inches tall.  At the bottom I found some class action stock paperwork that I needed to have completed by 2009.  This is what the ReSpace blog refers to as the cost of clutter.  I’m pretty sure we were not going to get much out of the class action deal but one does not willingly pass up a few bucks for the effort of filling out a form.  Unless you can’t find the form.  Lesson learned.

The bookshelf units were installed in late February and it took a little over a week to get them stocked.  In the process, we rounded up books from all over the house and sifted through our collection rather methodically.  Just because we have all this space doesn’t mean we need to fill every square inch.  We selected 61 books to go to our local used book store as well as 4 books on tape.  We also had 4 books that went in the recycle bin because who really needs a 1996 Almanac in 2011?

So the total for this month is 5 items donated; 65 items to consignment; 1 large piece of furniture sold ($200 buys a lot of organizing supplies); and numerous bags of trash and recycling which I didn’t count as items but I guess I could have.  So even though I wasn’t sticking to my one item a day quota, I did manage to meet it with 71 items.  The running total is 206 items.  Next month I will need to get out my spring clothes and get lean and mean.  I still have the great luggage clean out to come as well.