"Decluttering Challenges" are all the rage at this time of year. I get it. Bloggers know that this is the time when organizing-related website traffic surges. People are ready to declutter. The post-Christmas mess combines with time off work and excitement about changes in a new year, and decluttering fever hits. A decluttering challenge …
decluttering
How to Stop Cluttering (or Shopping) When You’re Overwhelmed by All the Stuff
This is going to seem like a stretch for a moment, but I promise to give you a surefire way to stop shopping, even if it’s a habit, when you’re ready to declutter because all the stuff in your home overwhelms you. To get there, though, I need to talk about soy sauce. As a young child, I loved soy sauce. I wanted to eat soy sauce on …
Help for the Person Who (Supposedly) Can’t Be Helped
One of the saddest stories I've heard in my role as Person Who Talks About Decluttering On The Internet was told to me by a life-long friend. I was about two years into my blogging journey, and she was one of the few people in my real life who knew I was telling my deslobification story to the world as Nony (short for aNONYmous). She shares …
Decluttering (and Cleaning) In the Midst of Illness
I regularly hear this question: How do you manage decluttering (or cleaning) when you're sick? Or even more difficult: How do you make decluttering progress when you suffer from a chronic illness? There are two reasons why I haven't given an in-depth answer before. First, I don't suffer from chronic illness and I try to stick to sharing …
I Don’t Think That Means What You Think It Means (Anymore)
If you've been here since the beginning, or even the beginningish, you might remember that I used to have young kids. My oldest was 7 when I started this deslobification journey. Now, instead of reminding him to pick up his toys, I remind him to shave. And we're deciding which colleges to visit. And figuring out when to visit …
Decluttering In the Midst of Remodeling
Over the summer, after a very long pause due to writing my last book, we finally got going on the unfunness of remodeling. We had our popcorn ceilings scraped and repainted, our floors replaced, and most of our rooms repainted. It's not even what I consider "real" remodeling (knocking down walls and such), but it was stressful. The biggest …
Decluttering Strategy: Use it (Up)
Over the summer, something terrible happened. It happened slowly, and the slowness made the pain so much worse. My beloved comforter, the one I'd pretended still looked fine for the past decade . . . started (quite literally) falling apart. I wasn't surprised. That thing was 21 years old. Yes. Really. To be clear, I hadn't kept it …
Decluttering Frames (But Not the Photos)
Over the past few weeks, we've removed things from walls so they could be painted, and moved every last item from one room to another while floors were replaced. It's not the least bit fun, y'all. But it's revealing. Things that once seemed perfectly fine become unfine. I'll take something out of a space because I have to. But if I don't like …
Decluttering or Tidying or Cleaning the Kitchen (Or Whatever YOU Want to Call It)
Some words are kinda sorta interchangeable. Or not. Depending on the person using them. If you want to get super technical, I suppose you could define decluttering, tidying, and cleaning like this: Decluttering - removing clutter from a space Tidying - moving things back into place and improving the general appearance of an …
