Living With Less Stuff - January 2016

As mentioned in my last Getting Tough on Stuff post of 2015, I've renamed my decluttering challenge for 2016 and the series will now be given the title 'Living With Less Stuff'.  I've also tried to keep it real this year, and due to the amount of items decluttered last year (over 1250), I have lowered the total I am aiming to declutter this year to at least 500 items, which equates to about 42 items per month. If I manage more, then that's great, but I didn't want to get too ambitious and not be able to achieve the target.

This year's challenge got off to a brilliant start this month, as a total of 135 items got donated or put aside for donation. Fortunately for me, there was a Give and Take event towards the end of the month and most of the donations went there, which helped to clear some much needed space in my sewing room.

Here's what it looked like last week

and here's the room now.

It's looking so much better.  I could even get access and do some cleaning of shelves and skirtings last Sunday, when most of the room got a bit of a spring clean.  There are still a few small areas to tackle, but I will do those when I get the chance.

The box left in the centre is the more valuable/collectable items I need to take to the charity shop and there's also a bag of books behind it to take to the Little Free Library.

Some other decluttering news was that OH donated a full drum kit to the school this month.  It was bought for LB one Christmas, but she never took to playing it.  The school were very glad of it and it felt good to donate it within the local community, so it can be used by other children. He was just glad to free up some space in his office, where it had resided for the last few years.

I think we learned a big lesson there, about trying too hard to encourage LB in a particular musical direction.  Turns out it's singing that she enjoys most and you don't need an instrument to do that (apart from your voice).

I'm now really looking forward to the delivery of our new bed in the next week or so, as this will encourage me to go through all the things I am currently keeping under our bed and in other parts of our bedroom, and get a bit more ruthless.  I'd like the bedroom to be as uncluttered as I can possibly make it, to aid sleep mainly, but also because we may be having some work done in there at some point this year.

I'm also aiming to completely empty one side of the linen cupboard on the landing, in order to give a permanent home to the vacuum cleaner, which currently generally ends up kicking around in front of it, on one of the other landings or in one of the rooms.

It's a small thing, but it will make a big difference to me, as invariably it causes the landings/rooms to look cluttered, plus I'm frightened that someone will end up tripping over it and falling down the stairs.

Slow, but steady progress towards a life of living with less stuff. I'll be back with another update next month.