These Decluttering Methods Actually Work! a reader’s story

I love this story from one of my international readers who gave me permission to share. If you live outside the U.S. and have ever dismissed Laundry Day because you don’t use a clothes dryer, I encourage you to notice how she makes Laundry Day work!

Dear Dana,

Greetings from Europe (The Netherlands to be specific); I have listened to most of your audiobooks and I have to say, I loved them! The writing style and the wittiness really clicks with me and also the way you narrate them is very good. And I wanted to thank you for writing them and actually helping me.

I’m a mom of two boys (9 and 11) in my thirties (well okay, I’ll be 40 next year) and I have always loved decluttering and organizing. Which I did many times. And it was never really improving our house. I had never realized that they were all organizing projects. Which never worked. I made more mess, not less. Every year or so I would begin another one but I think you can imagine how that went. I do have some pretty looking organising systems though.

Also I was always overwhelmed with laundry. I tried all the other organizing gurus but it’s just not me. But I never realized that until I read your books. Most of what you say are such ‘duh’-moments that I wonder why I haven’t thought of it before and cannot imagine it being any other way. A paradigm shift, if you will.

However I am now on my fourth laundry day and lo and behold it works! I do not have to worry about laundry during the week. I have not used all my laundry baskets in weeks. I have donated so much clothes because they don’t fit into my closet (which is… a container for my clothes). There are no laundry baskets which are actually procrastination stations (love that word).

And when everything was folded it didn’t fit into my kids’ wardrobes. I told my boys ‘hey I see that your sweaters don’t fit into your sweater drawer, which can we take out and donate?’ They gave me a few sweaters they don’t like. The first time that happened I was like, ‘What?’

It’s more of a laundry weekend, by the way, because here we don’t use the dryer for everything, so like half of it hangs on the drying rack and since it’s fall here, it takes a few days to dry, but it’s fine. I just fold it a bit later. I am almost looking forward to laundry day. (Did I just write that? My husband is also very confused with me regarding my sudden fondness for laundry).

Another example. My youngest has an enormous amount of stuffed animals and he is attached to all of them. None could go.
Until I gave him a container (a laundry hamper type thing) and told him that they needed to fit into the container because that was the room we had for it. And then within 30 minutes he had picked out his favorites and we donated about twenty stuffed animals. It was insane.

And and and I put the lids on the food containers in the kitchen. And threw out half of them. We apparently didn’t need them because it has been four weeks and there have been no food container emergencies.

So thank you thank you thank you! That was the point of this email, sorry for the rambling, but I hope I managed to convey that you made such a difference, just wanted to let you know.

Kind regards (‘groetjes’) from The Netherlands!