Living With Less Stuff 2016 - June/July

After watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's series about waste on TV last week, I thought I'd better post an update on my 2016 challenge to live with less stuff.

For anyone who doesn't already know, this is a challenge I set myself, to donate at least 500 items from our home this year, which I have already managed to achieve.

This month's progress on the decluttering front has been a combination of general decluttering and the result of trying to follow Courtney Carver's 21 day decluttering challenge, which spanned both June and July.

In all honesty, I did my best on the 21 day Challenge, but didn't manage to achieve every task set, for various reasons. One was that I have been continually decluttering for over two years now, so some of the tasks had been done already, two, some tasks just didn't appeal or seem relevant to my life, and three, some I consciously chose not to do for emotional or other reasons.

Probably the most successful and useful task from this challenge, was to donate unseen clutter, and for this task I tackled the shed of doom, which I've avoided for at least two years.  It wasn't quite as ominous a task as I thought it was going to be, although it did take a while as I did it over the course of a week or so.

The result, however, was the ability to use the shed and it's contents for it's originally intended purpose, gardening and garden storage, as well as creating a pile of items to be donated to the next Give and Take event.  

I haven't fully finished sorting through some of LB's baby stuff that was in there, as I need to be in the right frame of mind for this task, so these items aren't included in this month's figure.

Irrespective of this, the number of items put aside for donation this month (and last) was pretty respectable at 74 items. Adding this to the 530 items already donated so far this year, this takes my running total to 604 items.

I've been checking on our council website for the date of the next G&T (Give and Take, not Gin and Tonic!), but there are no details posted so far, so I think it will be in September or October, as they tend to be held in local schools and therefore will probably not take place during the summer holidays.

The usual transitional space for all the clutter (i.e. the spare bedroom) has therefore been filling up again, but I can live with this as a temporary situation.

I haven't forgotten that I still need to do a post with photos of our Give and Take events and will hopefully do this when I go to the next one. (If you watched Hugh's programme last week you may have caught a glimpse of similar events that have taken place in other parts of the country).

I haven't really got any plans for any particular decluttering tasks to tackle next month.  There's nothing shouting out to me.  I may tackle the tool/decorating equipment cupboards in OH's office, if he's in agreement, as these haven't been re-organised for over 4 years, since they were built and are a bit of a mess.

I'll keep you posted.