New Year's Resolutions: Declutter a.k.a. Throw Stuff AWAY!

Ok. You may ask, what am I doing writing a New Year's Resolutions post two weeks after the New Year? Well, they say that most resolutions are broken within two weeks. Isn't that awful? Yeah, I thought so too. For a while, my response to that was just to refuse to make resolutions. Then I thought, no, that's the wrong answer. I think the answer is to make resolutions more mindfully, putting a lot of thought into them beforehand and being sure well before the New Year that any resolution I make is a life change I'm ready to commit to.

My big resolution this year? Declutter. What does that mean for me? Throw stuff away.

That may seem weird to you. Or maybe not. Maybe you're nodding your head fervently as you read this, saying "oh my gosh, I have so much stuff I could get rid of! Oh, the clutter. Oh, the mess. Oh how I wish it were just more organized."

Now, let's be clear.


I'm not talking one of those "Spend a year getting rid of everything until I only own 100 items" resolutions. Those, while interesting to read about on the Internet, are not, in my opinion, for real people.

Nor am I saying that in a year I expect to have a home that is always clean and tidy enough to be featured by Martha, or Better Homes, or Trendy Hipster Apartments or whatever. (Seriously though, I wish Trendy Hipster Apartment Decorating was a magazine, because The Nest just doesn't do it for me)

My decluttering resolution is this:  I want to throw away, repurpose, or upcycle five things a week.

That's it. There's no rule about what those things need to be, except that they need to be things I was not otherwise going to throw away that week. I reserve the right to fudge on the rules, too, if that means I can start in a small and manageable way.

By next year, what I hope is that I will have less extraneous stuff around my house. I hope that I will not have four months of back mail exploding from the constraints of my living room mail basket.  I hope that my fabric stash will be smaller and my "cool things I made" stash will be notably bigger. I hope that the clothes I don't wear anymore will all have been donated or refashioned into clothes I want wear all the time. And I hope that all the things I've been saving for a to-do list of craft projects that never get done will have been used up in the name of beautifying my home.

So, want to join me? You don't even need to do it every week. Maybe just sometimes. How about this? I'll try and remind you every so often, and when I do, go find five things to throw away, donate, repurpose, or upcycle.

For me this week, this means:

• Eating three of the CSA winter squashes that we have been saving for weeks and weeks (they were delicious!)
• Sorting through the aforementioned giant pile of mail, throwing away all the stuff we don't need, and keeping the rest. This is a huge project, so I'm counting it as the remaining four for this week. Hey, I said I reserved the right to fudge this if it meant making the task a little less daunting. 

How about you?