Decluttering - do you have a plan?

[ImFree2doasiwant]

I started at the beginning of this year, and have done all the easy stuff, and am Stalling now as I feel it needs a but more thought.

Is anyone declutteringvwith a plan? Care to share?

I've used Olio and Facebook to give things away, clothing banks etc.

Gumtree freebies. The rest is going in bin

I keep reading about the Marie kondo art of decluttering
I’m going to have a look here tomorrow and see what we can do. We skipped a load of junk out of the garage today, that’s usually where overspill from the house ends up, if we can get it straight out of the house in future and bypass the garage I will be thrilled.

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I don't think im ready for Marie Kondo! I think i just need to be a bit more systematic about it. Room by room, draw by draw.

Marie Kondo is great. It is systematic. You do a category at a time rather than a room. Makes far more sense. Like when you clean you should do each job rather than each room. The order of the categories makes sense too as the sentimental stuff comes last by which time you've perfected your skills.

I do draw the line at thanking items for their use though!

The bit I really liked from her books was about presents. Don't hold on to gifts from people even if you don't want it as you feel guilty. The gift has achieved its goal. It made the giver feel good for giving it and made the recipient feel good and thought of when they received it. So now, if you don't want it, let it go.

I’ve decluttered loads of good quality toys and can’t shift them from the house as all the charity shops are shut. I’ve given up doing anything else until they reopen.

My declutter plan is part by type and part by sections.

So a couple weeks back we did our storage area (mostly because I wanted that cleared to be able to put stuff in while we prep to move. The top of it is covered in clear bags for possibly donating later). I also have drawers or cupboards on my list.

Today we started on board games from all over the house - got through a couple little boxes of 'bits', dealt with most of the broken ones. Hope to finish that up tomorrow. Over the Easter holiday, I'm hoping to deal with books as we've bookcases bursting.

I basically have a plan with list of areas of the house or types of things that have been annoying us (usually me), some notes on things (like with books, I had all my kids tell me their favourites so I can keep an eye out for and what I can prune more easily), and I go through it based on the energy I have: board games are fairly low energy and my children can do most of it, we just had to talk through how we want to store the bits, find a few tupperware containers for them, and discuss which games are too broken, which ones we can repair, and which ones do people actually play with (and play with nicely, which may alter how I store things). Books usually take a lot more energy because they're all over the house.