Julie's Boggle

Inspired by my favourite blogger, and the fact that we are having our bedroom windows replaced soon and will need to move or cover most things in our room, Tom and I had a bedroom “declutter” session last Sunday while Jon was napping.

It was great.

Between us we filled about 9 or 10 plastic bags with unwanted clothes and another couple with shoes (mine). Mostly items that were worn out or didn’t fit any more, but also ones that just weren’t getting used. It was hard, but better to go through a brief and traumatic goodbye than to live with a mountain of unnecessary “stuff”.

Tom was much better at it than I was when it came to being ruthless with clothes. He just rationalised. E.g. “I only use tracksuit pants to sleep in. I only sleep in tracksuit pants when I’m cold, which is not often. I have two pairs of tracksuit pants and I only need one, so the older ones can go.” Voilà.

I tried to emulate, with a little less success (my clothing uses and categorisations appear to be a lot more complex than his) , but still whittled my stock pile down so that I probably have only 2 – 3 times more clothes than Tom does at the end of it all!

(The clothes and shoes then went off to the big SCOPE textile recycling container nearby.)

We also filled a black bin liner with things that we really don’t need any more, and created a good-sized pile of paper to be recycled. Again, a bit hard to say goodbye to some things, but best to be brutal and honest about their need and usefulness in one’s life because the alternative is to drown in them.

Sitting back later, the bedroom looks a whole lot better. And we have a whole free shelf in our cupboard to start transferring medicines to, as a pre-emptive step in baby-proofing the bathroom.

Not bad for a couple of hours work!