Decluttering Checklist from Magazine

When getting my haircut, one of my favorite things to do is read various magazines at the salon. I do not read the pop culture magazines, but rather Sunset, Food Network, Seattle Magazine, Real Simple, or other improvement magazines. For the April 2019 issue of Woman's Day, there was a relevant article, "The Ultimate Spring Declutter Checklist" that I found helpful and contained some new resources and products that I thought I would share.

• Make $$$ off electronics: Deluttr.com tells you up front what it'll pay for items like e-readers, smartphones, laptops, and CDs. If you're happy with the amount it offers, send the goods in (shipping is free!) and you'll get money (through direct deposit or PayPal or in the form of a check).
• Purge pens and pencils: Collect all writing utensils around the house. Test them out, and toss the ones that don't work, then place the extra ones to be donated to a school classroom. Assign a few to live in each room so they'll be there when you need them.
• Tame tech cords: untangle that drawerful of charging cables with the help of handy little cord clips. Sunficon Cable Clips are $10 for six at amazon.com
• Cull through toiletries: remove everything from medicine cabinets and bathroom vanity. Look for multiple and expired items. Toss things like old SPF and antacids, but take old prescriptions to your pharmacy for safe disposal. Send hardly used or never-opened products to an organization like Project Beauty Share (projectbeautyshare.org), which donates them to families in need.
• Recycle plastic bags: limit your stash by taking them to a special plastic bag receptacle (plasticfilmrecycling.org) and start using reusable bags in your car to reduce future needs for single-use plastic. 
• Thin out the fridge and pantry: input ingredients you need to use up at supercook.com and the site will give you a recipe using those items.
• Plan to use gift cards and coupons: gather the clippings clogging up your wallet or stuck to the fridge and thoughtfully schedule a time to go out to dinner or find a way to use that department discount before it expires. Keep them together in your car's center console so they'll always be handy when you're on the go.
• Give old towels new life: repurpose as small rags for cleaning or donate extras to an animal shelter.
• Donate old eyeglasses to a good cause: Lions Club will take your readers, prescription frames, and sunglasses and work with various groups to give them to those who need them. Contact your local chapter through lionsclub.org to find out how.

Book: The Minimalist Home

About a month ago, I moved from my downtown Seattle apartment to a lake condo. I have been maintaining minimalism for several years now, but had the opportunity to truly touch every item I own while I was packing. I took photos of the majority of the items that I decluttered, but did not take photos of the amount of things that needed to be trashed/recycled. Today, I finished reading, The Minimalist Home by Joshua Becker. This book is comprehensive, practical, and encouraging on key teachings on minimalism. It explains: how clutter creates stress, how having less stuff give you more time, energy, and money, why minimizing is more valuable than organizing, how our culture conditions us to buy more and more, and what serving others has to do with consuming less. Below are some of the tips and facts that I thought were helpful. Some are definitely given in other books about minimalism, but found this book to have a few gems to add to my toolbox of maintaining a minimalist home. Also, I have included some photos of things I decluttered while just packing.

• To have a "Aha!" moment, or a tipping point.
• For me, I was feeling overcrowded and desired more space. In addition, during that same time, my dad was going through some serious health problems and I was seeking something I could control. I realized, I could control the number of possessions I had in my apartment.
• Minimalism is not about taking something away from you; it's about giving something to you. Definition of minimalism: the intentional promotion of things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from them." Minimalism is actually optimizing--reducing the number of your possessions until you get to the best possible level for you and your family. It's individual, freeing, and life promoting.
• Benefits of a minimized home
• Is a better place to come home to because it can be more relaxing and less stressful.
• Is a better place to go out from because you will be buying less stuff and spending less on repairs and maintenance.
• You'll be able to take significance over stuff every time, and you will be able to contribute more than to consume.
• Chapter 2: The Becker Method
• Our goals in life determine the actions we take and how hard we work to reach them.
• Have goals for your home and your life in mind as you start minimizing.
• Most people want their home to take less time to care for and cost less money to maintain. They want less stress and distraction. They want more peace and space, more comfort and contentment.
• The pursuit of happiness runs on a different road than the pursuit of possessions.
• Try to make it a family project, if you live with family members.
• Be methodical:
• Start minimizing with easier spaces in the home and then move on to harder ones.
• Handle each object and ask yourself, Do I need this? 
• The endowment effect is our tendency to consider an object more important than it really is simply because we own it. This explains why it is so hard to get rid of stuff, because "it's ours."
• When asking, Do I need this? we're actually asking, Does this help me achieve my purpose or hinder me in that pursuit?
• For each object, decide if you're going to relocate it within the home, leave it where it is, or remove it. If you're going to remove it, decide if you're going to sell it, donate it, trash it, or recycle it.
• A minimizing accelerator: remove duplicates.
• Finish each space completely before proceeding to the next.
• Don't quit until the whole house is done.
• When you're done, revisit and revise your goals, aiming to make the most of your newly minimized home and newly optimized life.
• Chapter 3: "Us" Rooms
• Once you begin crafting a room around a specific purpose, the room begins to serve the purpose. Purpose can help you decide which possessions belong in them.
• The convenience fallacy is the tendency to want to leave items out because we think it will make it easier for us to grab them when we want them. Such as DVDs, small kitchen appliances, offices supplies, etc. Sure, by leaving them out, you save a couple of seconds when you want to grab them; but for the other 99.95 of the time, they're sitting out where they create visual distraction.
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Living Room and Family Room
• Relocate things that don't belong
• This is not minimizing but rearranging--returning items to the rooms that they belong
• Clear the flat surfaces (shelves, bookcases, tabletops)
• Display items on selves to visibly declare what is important to you
• Declutter the entertainment center: usually harbors a lot of small items that you may not need anymore. 
• Recycle electronics properly, get rid of old electronic components and cords
• Dig into storage areas in these rooms (cabinets, drawers, game closet)
• Remove furniture and other large items
• Pictures on walls: allow each decoration to tell a story of its value and importance
• Chapter 4: Personal Refuge
• Remembering the why of your bedrooms
• The average number of bedrooms in the US home currently stands at about 3.3, and the number has been creeping up over the years.
• Do not use a guest room as a overflow storage for things that you can't fit somewhere else but feel you "might need" someday.
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Bedrooms
• Relocate things that don't belong where they are
• Clear the floors
• Leave nothing on the floors except for furniture
• Clear surfaces
• Minimize items on your dressers, nightstands, and any shelving. Keep items that help you relax or recall happy memories. Remove anything from your sight that distracts you or stirs up anxiety, regret, or guilt.
• Decide how to use closets and drawers
• Will you store all clothes in closet or drawers? Make sure to define each drawers purpose.
• Simplify your bed linens
• Determine how many duplicates of towels, blankets, and bed sheets will you keep
• Pare down your decorations
• Get rid of furniture, if possible
• Make the best use of under-the-bed space
• Use it to store useful items that you do not want to leave out in the open, such as reading books, business files, keepsakes.
• Chapter 5: Iconic
• In new homes today, closet space, on average, accounts for 146 square feet.
• The US apparel industry today is a 12 billion business, and the average American family spends $1,700 on clothes annual. On average, that's 3.5% of family expenses
• Americans throw away 13 million tons of textiles each year, accounting for 9% of total nonrecycled waste.
• In 1930, the average American woman owned nine outfits. In 2015, that figure was 30 outfits.
• Studies has shown that as choice increases, so does paralysis of decision. Most of people can recall a time when they stared into a closet full of clothes, and still have no idea what to wear. An abundance of choice often results in less satisfaction, and sometimes poorer decisions.
• Step-by-step Minimizing For Your Clothes Closets
• Consider removing non-clothes items (such as toys, hockey sticks, skis)
• Set a goal for your clothing reduction
• According to the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals, most people wear 20% of the clothes they own 80% of the time.
• Categorize your clothing and start giving things away
• the clothes we love to wear
• the clothes we never wear
• the clothes we kind of like and wear occasionally
• Keep only one size--the size that fits you now
• Multiple sizes may feel like a safety net, but they may also be a painful reminder of how you feel in your own skin. And there is no proof that smaller sizes encourage you to lose weight
• Reduce your accessories
• Apply the same love to use, never use, occasionally use categories to your accessories
• Limit your accessories, and then you can more easily limit your clothes and have easier decisions when making new clothing purchase.
• Chapter 6:Clean Sweep: Decluttering the bathrooms and laundry room
• Keeping in mind the importance of the bathroom in our daily pattern; here are three benefits for a minimalist bathroom:
• It's usually a relatively small space and one where we spend a considerable amount of time. Clutter in a small space only seems like more clutter.
• Bathrooms get dirty quickly. A minimized bathroom is easier to clean.
• When we minimize here, we remove some stress in the morning, and a relaxing end of night for bedtime.
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Bathrooms
• Sort through your medicine cabinet (safely dispose of any prescription meds) 
• Pare down your beauty and grooming supplies
• GoodHousekeeping.com reported, "The average woman owns 40 makeup products, and typically, on average, women typically only use five of those 40 products, meaning we allow 87% of our collection to go to waste without regular use.
• Reduce your bathroom cleaning products to the basics
• Reduce the number of your towels
• Tip: use smaller towels because they will take up less space in your laundry.
• Clear off the countertops
• Convenience fallacy again--it actually takes very little time to remove a toiletry or beauty item from a drawer, and put it back after you're done with it.
• Declutter around the bathtub and in the shower
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Laundry Room
• Remove things that don't belong: typically becomes a storage area for all sorts of unneeded possessions that have nothing to do with laundry
• Take down unhelpful decorations
• Remove unnecessary laundry products, tools, and accessories
• Put the supplies you need where they're easy to reach
• Chapter 7: The Heart of the Home: Decluttering the Kitchen and Dining Room
• A goal of minimizing could be to enhance joy of being together with others around food--both for your family and for the people you invite into your home.
• In the US, the typical large kitchen in 2004 contained 330 different and a total of 1,019 items. Even a small one had a total of 655 items--which is three ties as many as in 1948.
• Today, about a quarter of US homes have two refrigerators.
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Kitchen
• Relocate anything that does not belong in the kitchen
• Notice physical boundaries (love multitasker and get rid as many unitasker tools)
• Remove duplicates and little-used items
• Give every item a proper home: designate drawers for silverware and utensils; cupboards for plates, containers, pots and pans, and small appliances.
• Clear the counters
• Purge the pantry
• Organize items with bins, boxes, or see-through containers so you can see at a glance what you've got
• Think about how you want to handle grocery shopping differently so you don't have so much food sitting around in your pantry
• The focus of entertaining is impressing others; the focus of true hospitality is serving others.
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Dining Rooms
• Relocate items that don't belong in the dining room
• Clear the dining room table
• Reconsider decorations
• Remove unneeded furniture
• Chapter 8: Freeing the Mind: Decluttering the Home Office
• An estimated 26 million Americans have a home office that they could legitimately claim a tax deduction for.
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Home Office--before minimizing your home office, clarify in your own mind how you want it to work.
• Clear out storage cabinets, drawers, and closets
• Get rid o anything obsolete or unnecessary (manuals for computers and printers are online now). Use cloud backup and toss out external hard drives.
• You should distinguish between equipment (durable goods--keep just one) and supplies (consumables--you might have a collection)
• Reduce the number of books on your shelves
• Simplify the walls
• Go through your filing cabinets
• Digitized what you can, but remember: be sure to use a good file-naming system so you can find the document you want when searching, be sure to back up your documents in at least one place or better yet two, for documents with sensitive information, consider using password protection
• There are "document conversion services" that will allow you to rent commercial-grade scanners for a short time.
• Remove furniture and accessories you no longer need
• Give yourself the gift of a wide-open desktop
• Remove digital clutter
• Chapter 9: Unburdening Yourself of the Past: Decluttering the Storage and Hobby Areas and the Toy Room
• One estimate puts the number of items inside the average American home at 300,000.
• Step-by-Step Minimizing For Your Storage Areas: expect minimizing your storage paces takes time
• Remove unnecessary large items
• Get rid of smaller, nonsentimental items you don't need (AKA junk)
• Get rid of collections of stuff from previous seasons of life (ex: highs school papers, textbooks from college)
• Reduce holiday decorations
• Pare down your sentimental items to only the best
• Minimizing can cause use to recognize and get rid of our "fantasy self"--an identity that we tried to create by buying stuff that never really fits us.
• Child's Play
• Studies have shown that toddlers with fewer toys focused better and played more creatively.
• Clinginess to possessions begins at an early age.
• Do you ever have trouble finding a toy you want? That will be easier when you have fewer of them and keep them better organized.
• Some of your toys and games take up a lot of space when you're playing with them. Making room in your play area will give you that space.
• Remember how you tripped on that toy and hurt yourself? That kind of thing is less likely to happen if you don't have so much stuff cluttering up the room.
• Don't you get tired of picking up toys when Mommy and Daddy tell you to? Now you won't have so many to pick up!
• When kids toys and games are still in good condition you can donate them to a church's preschool, a homeless shelter, an orphanage, a school, a children's hospital.
• Alternatives to owning:
• Borrowing=the average electric drill is generally used no more than thirteen minutes in its lifetime.
• Renting=such as a power washer
• Hiring=people who spent money to buy themselves time, such as by outsourcing disliked tasks (lawn care), reported greater overall life satisfaction.
• Chapter 10: Minimalism Maintenance Guide
• How to change your buying habits
• Avoid triggers: boredom, recreational shopping, impulse shop, emotional shopping
• Impose a temporary shopping moratorium on yourself
• Become a savvy buyer: calculate "clutter cost" and add it to the price tag
• Be calculating about your shopping: do product research, and make a list and stick to it.
• Restoring gift-giving sanity
• Average American spends almost $1000 during the winter holiday
• If you are wanting to manage the gift-giving traffic in your home:
• Tell your friends you don't need a gift.
• Request quality over quantity (two $25 gifts are usually less clutter than ten $5 gifts)
• Ask for consumables instead of durables and experiences instead of material goods. Such as gift certificate to a restaurant, movie passes, fruit basket.
• Suggest donations to charities on your behalf.
• Let people know what you need: like if a coffee maker recently broke
• Purge guilt-free. Eliminate the unwanted gifts without feeling guilty about it.
• Reasons and Seasons for Downsizing
• In the US, the average new home size in 1975 was 1,645 square feet. In 2015, the average new home size was up to 2,687 square feet.
• Benefits
• More money
• Less time and energy spent cleaning and maintaining
• Better family bonding
• Less environmental impact
• Easier perpetuation of your minimalism
• Wider market to sell

Resources that were mentioned in the book:

• Two in a Bed by Paul Rosenblatt
• The Paradox of Choice
• IRS Publication 561 gives guidelines for determining the value of donated clothing (and other goods)
• Article in the New York Times titled "A No-Frills Kitchen Still Cooks" where a professional chef, Mark Bittman, told how he decked out an entire kitchen for about $300 including every cooking utensil someone would need to cook like a pro.
• WellnessMama.com
• Becoming Minimalist website

 I have had this leather couch since 2005, and it has been moved to five different apartments. It did not make the cut for this move (even though its was almost brand new) because the two cat would have destroyed it.

The condo will have a kitchen table and four chairs, so there was no need for these TV-dinner table set. Which I think were actually used just a handful of times Bought in 2007.

There were more wall decorations that I got rid of than want is picture here. In addition, I got rid of duplicate games and kitchen items, along with my scientific calculator from high school.

Moving into a kitchen that will be entirely gluten-free and will need to stay that way; therefore, got rid of kitchen items that could have glutinous particles remaining. Also got rid of hair straighteners, blow dryers, and hair accessories since I do not spend more than 2 minutes on my hair; I kept them because they were expensive purchases. Got rid of more clothes and books, along with duplicate kitchen items.

Said goodbye to my DVD/TV combo from my bedroom.

Duplicate toaster oven at condo

Got rid of two black, IKEA tables. I no longer possess a single item from IKEA

I thought it could be fun to pickup rollerblading again in my 30s; it was not. Also getting rid of the clothes storage bags that I no longer would use, and glutinous toaster.

Duplicate laundry basket, non-allergy free pillows and old towels.

Shopping Tricks

About three years ago, going shopping was something that brought me so much "joy and happiness". At times, it was a shared experience with friends and family, and at times, I would shop by myself; a little "me" time. My mindset, and at times my self-worth was tied to wanting and owning the trendiest item. Also, when I would experience a positive outcome in school and/or work, I would go out and buy myself something new and nice. I was rewarding myself with things, and surrounding myself with more and more, but really, was I gaining more...?!?! I was fortunate that my desire for more, did not ever cause me to be in debt, but there were losses and missed opportunities. However, reflecting on that, I have given myself the permission to grow and learn, and still be open to new ideas and experiences.

One of those new experiences just happened. Recently, I moved out of Seattle after living there for seven years. My love for Seattle hasn't lessen, but I was seeking more, more connection, more tranquility, and a healthier life and mind. Therefore, I now live on a private lake. I am no longer looking for the next item to purchase at a department store, but rather, the next memorable adventure or new outdoor activity to try. 

I do not want to paint a picture that my home is stark and empty; I still have things. But I constantly evaluate and reevaluate the things that remain. And, if it comes to the point, when a new purchase is obtained, it is never impulsive. Below are some shopping tricks to consider, the next time you are about to make a purchase, either small or large.

Shopping tricks

• When you finally find those elusive perfect pants, buy two pairs. I recently found the most comfortable walking boot, and bought two of them. With the purchase of a boot that can be causal or dressy, I decluttered three other pairs of shoes.
• Shop your pantry before shopping at the grocery store! Pick out the unusual or bulky item that's been around forever and plan a meal around it.
• I hold every piece of clothing in my hand and ask out loud, "Want or need?" It could save a lot of money.
• Find a friend or two who have the same fashion style and shopping philosophy as you. Take them with you as often as possible. Having a second opinion that echoes your values leads to less buyer's regret.
• I use one reusable shopping bag and fill only that one bag per shopping trip. This limits what I buy and how much time I spend in a store.
• If something catches my eye, I name a price (to myself) I'd be willing to pay for it. Then I look at the tag, if it's more than the number I came up with, it doesn't come off the rack or shelf. That way I'm naming its value, not the other way around, and I stay in control of the money I want to spend.
• If you can think of four realistic scenarios to wear it in, you can get it. If the scenarios aren't in the next three months, you should probably pass.
• Reverse showrooming: Use Amazon to make a list of books I want to buy, then actually purchase those books at a local independent bookstore or check them out at a library.
• I have a limited number of hangers. When something new comes in, at least one thing goes out. No new hangers.
• Go digital: If you don't remember whether you already have a V-neck black shirt, the closet inventory website and app Finery (finery.com). It searches your past purchases and lets you upload images to create a virtual closet and keep track of what you want to buy in the future.

Organizing Challenge

• Shoes
• Increase visibility: Keep shoes that you wear most often on open shelving.
• Prevent dirty floors: Stop dirt in its tracks by placing in-season shoes on a rubberized boot tray in the entryway.
• Level up: If you have open floor space in a closet, opt for stackable shoe racks.