Msnikkidee does Decluttering: Part 2, Tripping over the clutter!!

OK, i have to be honest I have not been prepared for the amount of clutter that this decluttering malarkey brings. It has made me feel quite low.   For some inexplicable reason i was expecting to feel a certain amount of euphoria.  As I look at my previous success now covered again in clutter,  my first visible success has gone into hiding.  In he first couple of weeks i took out 4 boxes of books, 3 bags of wool and i have about 8 massive bags of stuff waiting to go to the skip, I am always finding stuff and adding it, i have just taken out a further bag of bric-a-brac and a bag of books that i had forgotten about, so with all my work i am still knee deep in clutter so to speak,. Then to add insult to injury I opened a drawer to put something in it, something else fell down the back and now I can’t close the door, its so annoying. 

I realise that my expectations were a bit on the foolish side, i have not allowed for the nature of me that is to spread, yes i am naturally messy, so i am not likely to be able to clean up and choose my loved items neatly. It also goes back to the point made in my previous post regarding the continuing realisation that i have too much stuff, the next realisation that clearly I have wasted a lot of money over the years in obtaining this stuff and yes, dare I say it, a bit of laziness in throwing stuff away. For example I came across the MOT certificates for my old car, the one before this, now consider this context, i have had my current car for 9&1/2 years. This and all the fads i have participated in over the years, car making, knitting, jewellery making etc stuff that i never saw through, most of that stuff has been moved a better home, but my point is it created clutter 

At least i have not found any other duplicate items, and am really happy that charity shops take bric a brac. I can't even begin to imagine what its going to be like when i really get started on my wardrobes and drawers. 

The not so short cut

So I went to B&Ms on Sunday after church, with the sole purpose of buying washing up liquid. - Good for me, there it was on offer even before I had entered the store- so you'd think I would have picked it up and walked on, right? Well actually in deciding that I wanted to compare the price with the "others" , it was on my way to these others that I knew in my heart I would not buy- I walked past a shelf with pancake mix, and lo and behold I wanted pancakes for breakfast. Now the thing is, normally, I would not touch any of these ready mixes with a barge pole, but right there on a whim, I thought yes, considering the time etc that it would be a good idea yes?  Well fast forward to this morning ( the reason I did not have them yesterday is long and arduous ) and I decide to follow the instructions - shake and bake it said- all I had to do it said, was to add milk up to the arrows and shake.  And here is where the short cut morphed into the long cut, firstly it took an age to find the arrows, then after shaking  for the prescribed time I could see around the edges that despite my vigorous shaking it was not fully mixed.  That added time and what about when it came actually making the pancakes, consider this: I believe myself to be considerably capable in the pancake department, so imagine my shock and horror when I fried the first one and it came out all gooey. It did not set properly and I could not turn it over, ( good job I am not into flipping them then) and the second one was not much better. In the end having cooked bacon that was getting drier by the minute, I ended up abandoning the mixture and making my own from scratch!!! Ha ha ha laugh on me, it was quick, easy and it behaved as I would have expected. To be fair, I can see the attraction of the so called quick mixes, but this is what I know for sure: I will not be trying them again anytime soon.  

Msnikkidee does decluttering

So hands up if you have  ever made a new year’s resolution to declutter your house/room/desk and may be started, but did not complete, it  or worse you do completed it but ended up buying a new lot of clutter in a sense replacing what you have thrown out???  Then you are back to square on!!!. Well that has been me many times. So this year, it was not even on my agenda, however a chance nosy at a friend’s  Facebook sates status had me knee high in clutter before I  really had time to think. 

And surprisingly I am very excited about this, I really think its going to succeed where I had previously failed in the past.  I like the premise under which i took this on, ( did you know that there are books written about decluttering?) this is not just about getting rid of rubbish, but more concentrating on what we love and getting rid of those things that do not bring us joy and do not work.  

I immediately outed myself, i took a picture of the first place I wanted to declutter  and posted it on our newly formed FB group, as such i have no choice but to follow it through, 

The surface clutter was easy, old bills and papers lying around and there was a lot of it, kept me busy.  I hit a major tricky patch when it came to my books.  Anyone who knows me, will know how much i love my books. I do get a lot of joy from them, even just by looking at them, so by this reckoning should just keep the givers of joy right? In the end i had to concede, as in get over this, if i wanted to succeed in the long term, and so to this end, I was rather brutal on my journey to  get rid of those books i knew i would not be reading again, but none the less, it was blooming emotional and i had to change my criteria more than once.  One end i still have 2 full shelves and then some to go through, but so far so good. The majority of what I have retained are my classics such as Robinson Crusoe, the jungle book, and other exciting books. I also kept a good few that were about my beloved country, Nigeria, not forgetting my professional/self help books. 

Wasteful 

Now did I mention that I found the bit rather emotional, this is a good point to say how really I was shamed, by my obvious taking for granted of my privileged life, I found several unused notebooks and worse still duplicate books, purchased by me,  my discussion with a fellow group member, leads me to believe that yes shame just about covers it as does indiscipline. 

i understand that this is the fist stage of what will be a rather long process, but I can already feel the benefits and I am looking forward to see how it will turn out. 

One of the reasons i feel that this will success this time, is motivation and it is based around desire rather than a feeling that  I should, which surely only leads to bad feelings, ones of guilt and shame.  It will be habit changing some of which has happened already, but that is another week’s blog post.