Weekly Declutter: Minimalist March Days 27 to 31

Honestly, I didn't think I had enough things to get to the end of the month. I got to Day 28 without much effort, really. But then, I realised that Days 29, 30 and 31 taken altogether total 90 items. I started to freak a little--and then I just started to collect and pile. Pile and collect. After a few days, I had this:

This is the chaos I lived in pretty much all month.

Day 27 

I won't enumerate everything here, but included is a school project of my daughter's, unsatisfactory spray bottles (kept to spray the dog when he barks, but they sort of fizzled, and sssssh, a bag of hallowe'en candy found shoved to the back of the closet.)

Day 28

You know what that stack of books with the red spines really is, don't you?

Not books. No. Guilt. Guilt I have had for probably forty years.

My mother gave me that stack of books back when I was about ten or so. They are all by the British author, Enid Blyton. My mom bought them all, all at once, en masse like that--and the pile just overwhelmed me. I was a late reader--and this was too much! As well, being written in British-English, I stumbled on the strange but familiar language. For example, characters would often "box" one another's ears. They did it fairly frequently, it seemed to me. To this day, I have no idea what they were doing. (I did read her two boarding school series, The Twins of St. Clare's and my favourite, Darryl at Red Roofs. I longed to go to boarding school ever after.)

Day 29

The only thing to note here are the roller blades. I meant to sell them last spring when we cleaned out the basement, then, a year ago.

Day 30

Finally letting go of the odd bits of blue willow china I have kicking about. (The box contains 20 pieces.)

Day 31

Just stuff.

I have items leftover.

I thought long and hard about whether I would put these towards playing another round of the Mimimalist game in April. The thing is, collecting items, though worthwhile, started to infringe upon doing other things-- and my dining room was a constant mess. I think it would stress me out to continue, right now.

So, unfortunately, though I'd love to keep going, I need to focus my efforts on something else with the limited amount of time I have: namely, getting my weight down and improving my fitness as well as other projects around the house.

So, below, are my "extra-credit" items. (A class assignment of my daughter's involved her "casting" a movie based on the S.E. Hinton novel, The Outsiders. Of all the things!)

Total number of items decluttered: Days 1 to 31: 496.

496 + "extra credit" of 6 = a grand total of  502

Not bad.

But it is a drop in the bucket if it is really true that the average household contains over 300,00 items. Yikes! I guess that means we're down to 250,000, now. Yay.

The very best thing that happened this month? My thirteen year old daughter cleaned out her room and her closet. She was amazing.


If you'd like to read any of the posts in this series from this month, here they are:

The Start: Days 1 to 5

In the Thick of It: Days 6 to 12

Gaining Momentum: Days 13 to 19

On a Roll: Days 20 to 26.

And if you'd like to join the girls in the google+ group, here's the page for that. I'm sure they'd love to have you! Here's a great article to get you started: 25 Things to Throw Out.