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Day 21: Dejunk that drawer!

“The first step in crafting the life you want is to get rid of everything you don’t.”― Joshua Becker

We all have that drawer.  You know the one.  I call it the homeless drawer, you probably know it as ‘the junk drawer’. It’s the one where you put ALL the things you’re not quite sure what to do with.  All the miscellaneous junk ends up in this drawer, it gets (over)full and then you go searching for a lighter (that you swear you put in there last year) to light your daughter’s birthday candles and you have to (embarrassingly) pull out all that crap stuff out onto the counter in front of everyone to find it.  {Or so I’ve heard.}

I hate this drawer (and this about the only four-letter word I don’t like to use).  So I decided to stop creating space for one in my house.  Full disclosure: Because I have three young children, when I find something odd, I have a spot where I keep it for about a week.  If no one claims or asks for it, then out it goes.  A great example:  I found this weird rubber thing that looked kind of like a connected ‘x’ and ‘o’ in my car last week.  I had NO idea what it was, but instead of tossing it, (which honestly is my first inclination) I stuck it in my little spot.  Well thank goodness because Monday morning when my daughter was filling up her water bottle for school it wasn’t latching properly.  She says, “oh I need the little rubber thing I left in the dirty floor of the car.  Ahhhhh, it was the thingy that keeps the water from leaking out.  Hallelujah I kept that or I’d be shelling out another 16 bucks at Target for a new one right now. {Shew}

So you can’t mindlessly toss everything, but what you can do is mindfully find a home for everything that is hiding inside your junk drawer.  If it doesn’t have a home, then most likely it doesn’t belong inside your home.  Simple as that.  All those pens and glue sticks and post it notes and AAA batteries (who knows if they’re even good ones) and screws and marker lids and pennies and paper clips…they need to hit the road back to where they came from.  Unless, of course, you’d like your drawer to be part of your command center and then definitely keep the pens and post its, etc.  But go through the pens and make sure they work, find a little box to put them in, tidy the drawer up and make a commitment to keep it that way.  (This is the one place in the house which needs constant clutter maintenance.  Because we’ve all become accustomed to having a junk drawer, it can clutter back up in the blink of an eye). But at a minimum create a purpose for the drawer.  Give it a title…announce it to your family, whatever.  Just make it serve you in a way other than a clutter catcher.

The great thing about de-cluttering is it creates a domino effect. Once you see how clean and amazing that one drawer or counter top or shelf looks (and subsequently makes you feel) it creates momentum and you want to keep it up.  So start with the junk drawer in your kitchen, then move on to the next drawer and so on.  Just keep moving. Soon you’ll have a nice filled up donation box to bless someone with AND drawers you aren’t scared to open. 

Light and Love,

♥k

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Thresholds

I had an “a-ha” moment the other day, when thinking about this journey I’ve been on for more than three years. We all have a threshold when it comes to our possessions.  Thresholds exist for most things…we have a threshold for pain, a patience threshold (one I’m constantly working on), a threshold for the number of shows our DVR will hold. My DVR’s threshold is extremely high and yet I still find myself having to go and pick through which of my kids 100+ shows I can delete to make room for what I want to watch. (More on this in another post). I had just never really thought about there being a tipping point when it comes to my possessions.

The problem is we think our possessions threshold is in direct correlation to the size of the spaces we live in and this is where we go wrong.  Terribly, overwhelmingly wrong.  See, as your house fills up with belongings you think, ugh, we need a bigger house.  And so you go about looking for a bigger house, usually buying the one with the most square footage (or most storage) within your budget.  The problem is you move all of your possessions into this new house without getting rid of all the things you don’t really need. This house has a ton of storage, you think you will never fill it up…But you do. Two years later you are overwhelmed (again) with the amount of STUFF you have accumulated, on top of the 15 (or so) boxes sitting in your garage/basement/storage room that you never got around to unpacking when you moved in.  Only now, you have also reached your mortgage threshold (see, they’re everywhere) and there is no way you can move to another, even bigger house.  And so you feel overwhelmed, and tired and just weighed down by all. this. stuff.

Now, having more space means you CAN have more things,  but it doesn’t mean you should.  At the end of the day, you are one person. One person with a threshold of what you can accomplish in a day.  You can only pick up so much, work so much, clean so much and even think about so much in a day. This is why our homes (and our heads) feel so overwhelmed.  We have met and greatly exceeded our thresholds.

So, how do you begin reducing your stuff? Pick a space in your house, a closet, a cabinet or even a drawer (the JUNK drawer is a good place to start). Open it, look at it’s contents.  Has this space exceeded it’s threshold? Go through and eliminate what you can from it.  Trash the trash, put the things that don’t belong there where they should go.  If you have multiples of the same item, keep the one you actually use and donate the rest.  You’ll know this space is within it’s threshold when you can look at it and no longer feel the overwhelming weight of too much. Then…move on to the next space!

Light and Love,

Kendra