Well, another month has passed and it is time to share how many items I have been able to clear out of our home. I started the year with a goal of giving. My goal was to give away 730 items. I am only keeping track of items I have given away to either the Goodwill, the free clothes store, or to other people. Any trash, recycled items, or items sold do not count. Sets or pairs count as one item. For example, a pair of shoes counts as 1 item instead of 2.
In January, I was able to give away 239 items. In February, I was able to give away 303 items. In March, I didn’t do quite as well as last month, but I feel pretty good about my total.
279!
That means I have given away 821 items so far this year! I have already met my goal which feels great! I am so excited, and I am determined to keep going. I still feel like I am drowning in clutter, but it is getting better each month.
Some of the items I gave away include a high chair (Which my sister-in-law took to CODA where she is interning.), some clothes that my husband can no longer wear thanks to losing weight, 55 pairs of kids shoes, some cotton crochet thread (pictured above) that I have no time to use, and much more.
I was able to find good homes for all of the shoes my kids can no longer wear. Most of the shoes had been given to use and I felt it only fitting to do the same. Many of the pairs were dress shoes.
We also cleaned out my 5 year old’s room. It had become a disaster area as evidenced by the picture above.
He loves having our letters of the week on his wall. (Check out my preschool blog if you haven’t been before.)
I am so happy with how much we were able to declutter. He has been able to keep it clean for a week, which is a big deal. I think he is like me. When there is too much stuff it is hard to know what to do.
Besides giving away all of those items I have also recycled and trashed hundreds of items. One project that I have been working on is reducing the amount of paper I save. For example, I hadn’t thrown away any papers of my daughter’s and she is in the 5th grade this year. Yikes!
I decided to take pictures of her artwork and only kept her favorite projects and items with her handprints on them. As you can see I ended up with two huge bags that have left our home and now have only one shallow tote box of our favorites. If I get tired of the tote box, I thought this idea from Blue Cricket Design and this one from Somewhat Simple looked like great ways to store the art projects and papers.
I have a couple of ideas of what I want to do with the pictures I took. If you go to this link and click on “collages” you will see a cool idea. I also recently found Refrigerator Artist and I am looking into uploading the pictures to that site.
I also haven’t forgotten about my goal of crocheting 50 hats this year. I started strong in January with a total of 30 hats. In February, I was only able to crochet 3 hats. I started getting back on track in March. I was able to crochet 10 hats. I made 5 newborn hats, 2 youth hats and 3 adult hats (picturd above). That makes a total of 43 hats crocheted so far this year. I am only 7 from my goal and I still have plenty of yarn.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading and encouraging me. Now, I better get back to work. Have a great day.
I am linking this post to the Amy’s Declutter Challenge at The Finer Things in Life.
