De-clutter: Baby Steps

There have been A BA-JILLION Facebook posts about New Years' resolutions.  Along with them are articles on how to follow through with them.  One that I found yesterday was from Refinery29.com called "Organizing is Turning You Into A Hoarder".  When I read the headline, I thought about that for a minute.  One of my resolutions was to become more organized, and have a place for the things that I owned.  Going a step further, I realized that if everything I owned was put away, I wouldn't really know what all I had.  If you're following along, that would mean that I probably would have a bunch of things that would stay "put away" and never used, simply taking up space.  SO... I decided that I should do something to change that, and aid in my plan of organization.

The article gives a lot of great advice, I highly suggest it for the organizationally challenged like myself.  I am known for keeping things for nostalgia's sake, such as bags upon bags of homework from 2nd-6th grades.  I remember thinking to myself as I put everything into a bag "I'll keep this to help my children someday" HAHAHA.  Kids say the darndest things.  I'm also known for keeping things "just in case".  There are usually a few instances that I look for something only to remember that I had gotten rid of it, resulting in keeping everything.

It's not going to be easy to quit this bad habit, and they don't make a patch for clutter-lovers unfortunately.  So I am taking some advice and beginning with getting rid of one thing a day (at least).  I am also challenging my boyfriend to do the same because I think his hoarding is as bad as mine if not worse."

Today was day one of "De-clutter Day-by-Day".  I looked around to see what I could part with.  With Christmas not so far behind us, most of the clutter are gifts and pre-holiday mess.  As I stood in my mess of a room and surveyed what was before me, I spotted the sore thumb in the room.  I have had two empty wine bottles on my dresser since I moved it into that room.  Since then, they have been holding a single bracelet each.  It was a cute decor item at the time, but now they just made me look like a sad wino.

It was actually a relief to get rid of something today.  My boyfriend has yet to get rid of something and his response to my challenge was "maybe", so I'm going to get on him as soon as this is posted!

Happy trashing, giving, selling and de-cluttering this year! - BellaBriBito