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redrosePosted as a comment to ozarque's livejournal, and I thought it worth keeping.
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/642105.html
Agreeing with the give it to your daughter now, unsorted, advice, and that hiring someone to do the lifting, if possible, is a good idea.
I had been decluttering in fits and starts for years, but at the start of this year, I really focussed on it. I have been sorting, purging, and figuring out where "away" is for all my posessions since then. Here is what I am learning:
-This is hard. It takes time and energy to look at the undifferentiated mass of stuff, and try to figure out what to do with it. What's worth keeping, what to let go.
-There is pleasure to be had in giving things I don't need or use to people who will need or use them.
-Having less stuff makes taking care of what I do have so much easier and more pleasant.
-When I feel like I'm getting nowhere, keep going. It only looks like I'm getting nowhere.
-I find it useful to deal with one category of object at a time. At the start of the year, I purged my papers. I shredded phone bills from 1993. I threw out old magazines and catalogues without reading them. I boxed some stuff, because it sparks my memories. At some point (possibly my next project), I will go back and figure out the best way to store these things so I can enjoy them. Maybe arranged as collages in a 3 ring binder. Maybe I will just decide to let them go. Then I moved on to my craft books and patterns. I've reduced them to a single bookshelf. If I'd tried to do both the craft stuff and the papers at the same time, I wouldn't have been able to do either.
-It helps to break categories down to smaller tasks. In dealing with the craft books and patterns, I dealt with the following subcategories:
-----printed off the internet and clipped from magazine patterns
-----magazines full of patterns.
-----------Pile 1: those I will keep intact.
-----------Pile 2: those I will cut pattern(s) from.
-----------Pile 3: those that have nothing I want in them, and can be sold or given away.
-Give yourself credit for the work that you have done. Last night, I put the origami paper next to the origami book, and moved the braiding books around and put them closer. That's not much, but my room is now a little bit neater and more organized than it was before! It sounds like George got a start, and that's good, no matter how small the start was.
-There will be times you get a whole bunch of stuff done in a day, and times when you do very little. It's okay. Just do the little, til the interest and energy return for the bigger bits.
-The amount of stuff you have was not collected in a day, and it will not be cleared up in a day.
I hope this is helpful to you, or someone else. I've been finding the whole process exciting and worthwhile, even though it's sometimes a drag, and boring, and a pain.
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/642105.html
Agreeing with the give it to your daughter now, unsorted, advice, and that hiring someone to do the lifting, if possible, is a good idea.
I had been decluttering in fits and starts for years, but at the start of this year, I really focussed on it. I have been sorting, purging, and figuring out where "away" is for all my posessions since then. Here is what I am learning:
-This is hard. It takes time and energy to look at the undifferentiated mass of stuff, and try to figure out what to do with it. What's worth keeping, what to let go.
-There is pleasure to be had in giving things I don't need or use to people who will need or use them.
-Having less stuff makes taking care of what I do have so much easier and more pleasant.
-When I feel like I'm getting nowhere, keep going. It only looks like I'm getting nowhere.
-I find it useful to deal with one category of object at a time. At the start of the year, I purged my papers. I shredded phone bills from 1993. I threw out old magazines and catalogues without reading them. I boxed some stuff, because it sparks my memories. At some point (possibly my next project), I will go back and figure out the best way to store these things so I can enjoy them. Maybe arranged as collages in a 3 ring binder. Maybe I will just decide to let them go. Then I moved on to my craft books and patterns. I've reduced them to a single bookshelf. If I'd tried to do both the craft stuff and the papers at the same time, I wouldn't have been able to do either.
-It helps to break categories down to smaller tasks. In dealing with the craft books and patterns, I dealt with the following subcategories:
-----printed off the internet and clipped from magazine patterns
-----magazines full of patterns.
-----------Pile 1: those I will keep intact.
-----------Pile 2: those I will cut pattern(s) from.
-----------Pile 3: those that have nothing I want in them, and can be sold or given away.
-Give yourself credit for the work that you have done. Last night, I put the origami paper next to the origami book, and moved the braiding books around and put them closer. That's not much, but my room is now a little bit neater and more organized than it was before! It sounds like George got a start, and that's good, no matter how small the start was.
-There will be times you get a whole bunch of stuff done in a day, and times when you do very little. It's okay. Just do the little, til the interest and energy return for the bigger bits.
-The amount of stuff you have was not collected in a day, and it will not be cleared up in a day.
I hope this is helpful to you, or someone else. I've been finding the whole process exciting and worthwhile, even though it's sometimes a drag, and boring, and a pain.
