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Post by dailystruggle on Jan 21, 2010 17:40:02 GMT -5
Ugh! This reminds me of my first cleaning attempts. My husband and I wanted to recycle aluminum cans. The problem was that we never took them to be recycled. We took the bags of cans with us when we moved. Then we used more cans and didn't bag them. We both suffered from depression for a while, and we weren't paying for trash removal at our new place, at first, because my husband said that he'd take the trash to the dumpster at his work. Well, he didn't. So, the trash piled and piled. We didn't do dishes and other chores either. Well, I finally got it in my mind to clean the place. When I bagged the trash, there was only so much room and I had so much trash, that until the bags of trash were moved out, I couldn't bag more. Well, I was going to put them in the foyer or outside until trash day. I convinced my husband to pay for trash service. By this time, we had rodents running around. My husband, worried that the landlord would come around during that week, insisted that we keep the inside. This ticked me off because I really wanted the trash out and I knew that if I had too far to carry it that it wouldn't be taken out. I also knew that my husband wouldn't take it out at that time. I was right. I ended up having to rebag trash because it didn't get taken out early enough for the rodents to leave it alone. I eventually ignored my husband. He confronted me about it and I said, "If you don't want it out there, you can drag it all back in." He didn't. Trash day came, I set it out, and my husband never bothered me about it again. Turns out, he was afraid that I wouldn't do what I said I'd do. Namely put the trash out on the curb come trash day and that our mess would become public knowledge. The world didn't end because the trash was in the foyer and outside. Our landlord never said a word about it. Now, we only have four bags a week out. I was putting sixteen a week out. That's how bad it was in our house. I'm still not completely done with cleaning the house, but when I find trash, I bag it and take it out now instead of ignoring it. We recycled the cans that we had after I doused my husband with cold water one Saturday morning and we took all the cans to the recycler. We made a lot of dough. We don't get cans anymore for fear that we'll let them pile up again. I smashed all those cans and bagged them. Don't want to do it again.
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Post by Evelyn on Jan 21, 2010 18:34:59 GMT -5
My previous attempts to declutter have all tend to bog down in my gardening stuff - planter pots, hangers for hanging plants, seeding-starting pots, stakes, cloches, fertilizer, top dressings, drainage rock, decorative rock, etc, etc, etc... I live in a small studio apartment, but am fortunate enough to have a south-facing balcony with plenty of room for plants in planters, and even more fortunate that my apartment complex has a community garden where I've had a 5'x5' section of raised bed for the last two seasons. But there's no good place for all the associated gardening stuff. So I'd start my decluttering with the gardening stuff, and... never get beyond it. There's just too much, it's too bulky and/or oddly shaped and/or dirty, and it's way too easy for me to get bogged down in minutiae like sorting out all light-colored and dark-colored decorative gravel (I can get sort of weirdly semi-obsessive about that kind of thing). So this time, I broke what I'd thought was a hard & fast de-cluttering rule against creating any new stashes of stuff, and having been temporarily stashing boxes of unsorted gardening stuff in my car. (It looks enough like piles of junk that I don't think anyone is going to try to break into the car for it. And I know it's not just going to stay there indefinitely because 1) I like to keep my squalor to myself, and am embarrased at having a carful of "junk" that anyone can see, b) enough of my gardening stuff is heavy enough that its weight really affects my sub-compact car's mileage and handling, and iii) come spring, I'm going to need that stuff (well, some of it, anyway ).) And it's great. All of a sudden I have enough room to find things and get at them; to sort stuff out; and to stage discards in the entry hall until I can haul them out to dumpster, recycle bin, or donation site. Once I've unjumbled things enough that I can clear out some space in the hall closet, I think I'll be able to set up a "potting shed" inside the closet and bring whatever gardening stuff I choose to keep back into that. Then I can start in on my rented storage unit full of gardening stuff...
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