Hi.
I'm Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and last week
I shared with you my true confessions from my filing cabinet.
And this week I want to share with you my top 10 true confessions from the rest of my
house.
I just moved out after 11 years in the same house and I found some things that really
made me laugh.
Hopefully you will have this laugh at my expense and take the lesson for yourself.
The top five things all have to do with one big theme, and that is that the only thing
constant is change.
So your lifestyle changes, your family changes, fashions change, and style changes [POP],
so you've got to make sure your belongings change along with that.
So first I want to share with you about craft supplies.
I got rid of almost all the craft supplies I had because my kids aren't little anymore.
We're not making popsicle stick crafts in the afternoon and we're not doing dioramas
for school, so that was an easy decision.
Ski clothes from when we lived in New Mexico, we obviously don't need that anymore.
The kids are way outgrown from those clothes, and also we can't just drive over to a ski
resort now, living in Texas.
So I got rid of that.
I really got a kick out of this one: floppy diskette labels -- yeah, that's pretty old.
Well, I found that in my office supplies and that was another easy decision.
But it just goes to show you, you have to touch everything and make decisions about
it every once in a while, otherwise it just accumulates.
Another thing I got rid of that was pretty simple for me was my china.
I picked out this china when I was 20 years old.
So I entertain very casually, I probably prefer to use paper plates than china at this point,
and I would not have picked that same pattern now that I did then.
So I have sold that china and am glad to not have to worry about it and store it anymore.
Another example of things changing, gift wrap.
I had accumulated so many rolls of gift wrap and so many gift bags after Christmas's being
such a big deal with my kids being little and also going to lots of kids' birthday parties,
Saturday after Saturday, I don't do that anymore.
So I kept a few little gift bags but mostly I realized that when I give gifts now, I usually
just buy a new gift bag or I don't need a gift bag for a gift card or something.
So all of those things have changed and I made sure that my belongings went along with
those changes.
The other lesson I want to share with you is that there are things that you keep because
they're perfectly good and if you don't have objectivity on your stuff, which is almost
impossible to do with your own things, sometimes you find yourself keeping things that you
don't even realize you're keeping, just because of this "perfectly good" concept.
So I found I was collecting unwittingly these Christmas tins.
And I was buying these ginger cookies from World Market and the tins [POP] were so perfect
for Christmas candy or whatever I needed to put in the freezer, and I didn't realize I
had about a dozen of these things, so it was funny how they had added up and I just had
not noticed.
So I donated all of them because I obviously wasn't using them.
Another example is cookbooks.
So that's a "perfectly good" thing and they are so attractive on the shelf and they kind
of give you that aspirational idea like, "Oh, I'm going to be cooking all the things in
that book," and, "I am such a great chef," and "Look at all my cookbooks on the shelf."
But really most of us either don't use the cookbooks at all or we have maybe one or two
recipes inside each one that we actually do use and the rest of the book we ignore.
So what I did was I scanned in those couple of recipes out of the books that I do use
and then I donated most of those books.
So I don't have all that bulk and space taken up.
Another example and a lesson and I wanted to share with you is that we talk about storing
things appropriately to their frequency of use so we talk about "A" things and "B" things
and we talk about "A" locations, and "B," and "C," and "D" locations, and one of the
things I found was these little discs that are used to make the spine of the Arch notebooks
made by Staples that I did some spokesperson work for -- I really like these notebooks
-- and they have the small little discs that make smaller notebooks, and then they have
the larger ones.
So I had taken these smaller discs and put them in a Ziplock bag because I didn't use
them, and I stuck them right in my top drawer.
And that was an "A" location for me, the most handy drawer where I have things I use very,
very frequently.
And I put this "C" thing that I don't use very much right into that "A" drawer and it
was getting in the way every day.
And it took me going through this and moving to notice that that was there and move it
to a more "C" or "D" location in case I needed those discs.
So another example was my journals.
So I ran into some journals that I was keeping kind of when the kids were little.
And I wanted to share with you the lesson of how important it is to have an accountability
partner or someone, a friend, working with you to keep you on track when you're doing
large organizing projects.
So we teach this concept and I definitely practiced what I preached, because I had my
assistant, Brandi, who is my camera person right now -- Hi, Brandi -- she was helping
me go through some of this stuff and making sure that I didn't sit down and go through
memory lane too much, because it was very tempting to look at these journals and say,
"Oh, look, we were on vacation" and start reading it.
And it's great to work with a friend who can make sure that you stay on target with your
goals for the day and get through your work.
All right.
So the last lesson, number 10, I want to share with you is about visibility.
The goal of any organizing project is visibility.
You want to be able to see what you have whether you literally see it on the shelf or you have
visibility to it via an index or a search, but knowing what you have so that you can
use it is very important.
So as I got rid of those ski clothes that I mentioned, I had some great after-ski boots
that were very warm and very dry and I kind of didn't realize that I had those.
I wish I had, because I had gone to Michigan and Chicago a couple of times this winter
and it really would have been great to have those.
I was traveling for The Woman's Day series, Project De-Clutter, where I was doing some
work [POP] with those families.
And since I didn't have visibility to those boots, I didn't have them with me and I looked
like a crazy Texan with ridiculously inappropriate shoes on the whole time.
So now I know that I have them, I've pulled them out, I can store them on a shelf and
see them and use them next winter.
I hope you've enjoyed this and gotten a good laugh at my expense.
And if you want some help making these kinds of decisions and going through this process,
we have a team of organizing experts available to you seven days a week on-line for a very
affordable price, about the price of a pizza.
And you can get access to us free for two weeks, get all your questions personally answered
in our Member Message Board area.
You can find out more about that at http://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.