30 bags in 30 days decluttering method

Yes. Great thread. Count me in.
A bag a day sounds reasonable.

I'm in from this weekend, roughly.

When I moved from a four bedroomed house to my wee bungalow, I shed masses of stuff to the charity shops.

Last year, when I moved from my wee bungalow to my even weeer supoorted living flat, I shed masses more.

Hopefully this weekend I'll be moving within the complex, and have shed masses more - and yet..... I've had most things packed since well before Christmas (delays in building materials for the refurb) and I've only once had to dig into a box for something, I've missed none of the rest of it. So I feel sure I can do another 30 bags!

I take mine to the local Hospice Shop.

I will join you too. Have made a great start by donating 4 carrier bags full of good quality books, and now have a huge pile to be sorted out for my next trip. Clothes next, but I have to be in the right mindset.

Well done !

My New Year resolution is to have a major daily declutter .

I admit it -I'm a terrible hoarder - things end up being shoved in plastic bags and boxes and forgotten .

I started off with the kitchen and found a lot of stuff past the sell by date .
My father has food crazes and it's probably why .

I've given a lot of in date food away .

Then , I started on the conservatory and I've decided that the next time well meaning friends bring stuff over which they don't want , but I do ( ! ) - I'm going to say no politely , but firmly .

I found a lot of things which someone brought over , because he thought I'd like them . And some huge space consuming broken old boxes have gone .
The charity shops wouldn't accept them
I've wondered if he tried to dump them there and having no luck gave them to me !

And a huge unwanted shop display unit went out too .

Tedious and boring -I'm making myself do an hour a day .

Everytime my will weakens - I watch one of those programmes about hoarding !

I have a pathological horror of having stuff that I don’t need or use. I’m on a permanent Swedish death clean!

Ah, the doombags and doomboxes

I've used that approach to 'tidying' since I was a child, and it's a hard habit to break. All the small things that don't really have a home get stuck in a bag or box 'for later' and then the bags/boxes go in a cupboard and I forget what's in them. Sometimes I end up buying another item as I can't find the original (Sellotape being the most likely item for this treatment).

I've bought some felt cubes to go inside cupboards and the intention is to keep similar items together so I have more of a chance of finding them, and when any cube is unable to take more items it will get cleared out. I'm good at coming up with systems like this, but hopeless less good at sticking to them, or even getting to the point where they are actually in place.

I started with a cupboard. When I had cleared the cupboard and got rid of all the broken/useless/unidentifiable items in the bin and put everything away where it was meant to be or given it away I was able to use the cupboard to store things that had no home. By the time I had done all the cupboards (months!) there was a lot less clutter sitting around and the rooms were easier to clean as most things had a home.

I found about 10 empty shoe boxes in one cupboard 🤨 I covered them with lovely contact papers and used them to house small things.

This is a mystery to me, I’m apparently an alien.
I don’t keep anything that’s not being used. I know where everything is. I couldn’t find something unexpected in a cupboard because I could name every item in every drawer or cupboard. Nothing is left in the wrong place or lost. I don’t think I could fill one carrier bag with unwanted stuff.
I imagine this makes life easier but perhaps you hoarders lead happier lives and I should try to be more like you.

Please can I flag up charities/centres that work with/for homeless people. Our local "Homeless Centre" will accept clean, warm clothes, towels, toiletries, etc. They are particularly glad to have warm coats, socks, and strong footwear: both"men's" & "women's". (Underwear can also be accepted if in a decent & clean condition.)
On a different note, we pass on cardboard boxes and "packing materials" to a local charity shop: they're always glad of these for when people buy crockery, glassware, ornaments, and other breakable items. (We simply enquired whether they could use this stuff!) Clean jam jars (with lids) go to another charity where there's someone who makes jam and chutneys for fundraising. (Not forgetting Freecycle/Freegle! IMO this is a brilliant way to give away all sorts of "stuff".) I speak from experience: a few years ago we "downsized" (and cleared out lots of stuff) and I can honestly say that little went to the tip.

Why is it that we become so sentimentally attached to stuff?!

I try so hard to declutter …

At the weekend I braced myself to sort out the zillions of mugs, glasses etc in the kitchen cupboards in order to free up space to put all the stuff currently on top of the cupboards.

I did really well 😇😇 until DH came into the kitchen! “You can’t get rid of that, or that …!” (Mugs that he’d never used, had even forgotten he had and had no sentimental value whatsoever!) I should have known better and hidden them until he was at work!

He’s worse than I am! If he can’t find something straightaway he buys a replacement, so we have duplicates of his clutter. Actually, make that triplicates 😱

I’ll join, please, I need the nudge that you lot will provide!

VB000 Thanks for that link, that could help a lot.

But….am I a hoarder….I have four trophies that are / were my daughters, can’t bear to throw them away. Surely I need to save them for when she realises she wants them ……. Help me?

Hope I can be motivated just where to start? but a brilliant idea, good decluttering to you all and won't you feel good in 30 days

I’ll be okay, once I actually start, it’s getting the motivation to do that!! 🥹

Gingster

I’m not a hoarder but Dh is. He has two rails of clothes that he hasn’t worn for 10 years at least. What can I do about that?
Every so often I say, ‘let’s have a clear out’. Last week he through one hoodie away! 😤

Mine takes them out of my recycling bag and wears them all crumpled to prove how useful they are.
I already have a recycle bag in an unused wardrobe where I put things as we go along.
I'm joining in, yesterday I started on a guest bedroom and have bags ready to recycle. I won't manage to get rid of them every day as I'm pretty rural but I will have filled thirty bags by the end.
I also found tablelamps in one room that just needed moving to be useful I hope that counts as recycling.

Must try harder …

I'm like MerylStreep don't hoard things and love a good sorting out session. My husband won't let me near his stuff though and he has a lot of it - grrrr
I'm an avid reader but my books are given to the library I run whenI have read them. I just keep a few old favourites. Family heirlooms have already been given to those who want them. Not a lot to clear out when I turn my toes up.

dogsmother

But….am I a hoarder….I have four trophies that are / were my daughters, can’t bear to throw them away. Surely I need to save them for when she realises she wants them ……. Help me?

I got over some of that by asking my children to take things away when they got places of their own. My son did that fairly quickly, but my daughter is her mother's daughter .

The next stage was to bag up everything left behind, and ask her to go through them. Nothing happened. Then I hid the bags, and waited.

Sure enough, the inevitable 'what have you done with. . .' came to pass. It was about certificates, which of course I had kept, but I said they were in the bags she had already checked.

Panic, until I 'found' them where I had put them for safekeeping. She was lucky. I wouldn't have deliberately binned them, but could easily have done so accidentally.

After that she did go through the bags, and 99% of the items went out, to charity or the tip.

It took ages, as she lives miles away and there were long gaps between the stages, but we got there in the end.

watermeadow not necessarily happier. You probably don't spend hours hunting for things or spend loads of money buying things you have already bought twice but can never find when you need it. You probably don't have to move loads of stuff to clean, or have drawers full of clothes you never wear.

Someone told me once that you have to let go of the old stuff to let new things into your life as you grow and change.

Another one who loathes clutter, as avid readers, once read, books go to friends or charity shops. MrJ has a small three shelf bookcase he keeps his bits and bobs on. Loft has an old dolls house which must go.

Since about 2015, (apart from Covid years), DH and I have done one car boot sale each summer.

Made a bit of money, but more importantly, made a bit of space. Some of the things we sold were inherited from my mother, stuff I didn’t really want, but felt bad at parting with. But I hardened my heart, what would the kids do with these things eventually? Chuck them in a skip. We may as well clear things now.

It’s quite good seeing someone else making use of it, and once it’s gone, you don’t miss it.

I think Doodle that they must be bagged and hidden, as much as she says she doesn’t want them the day (I believe) will come when she will want them or at least to ask after them.
Certificates ( educational) they all eventually took.

I've just done a second spare bedroom and found loads of children's socks and books too young for GC. I vaced and looked at the room and moved a chest of drawers and a chair. DH had to help with the Chest of drawers and could not believe the illusion of space I had created we have lived here 10+ years it makes you reassess that sometimes things need moving. Also, bag two is ready to recycle.
I like this, Guesswhat. Thank you for the idea and for getting us all motivated I'm going to tell my DDs about it.

Just boxed 24 pl sets of china. Charity shop.

Our daughters don't want it, same reason to us, can't go in DW. They each had selected a few pieces, enough to use together for a family do. Coffee/tea pots, sugar, creamer, gravy, torten platte, tureen, big platters/bowls.

I've just binned two lever arch files of notes from university in 1986 . I resisted the temptation to read through them all (they were all hand written) but glanced at the exam papers, complete with notes and scribbles, and rings around the ones I (presumably) answered. I have no idea why I kept them, but they must have been in three houses, unopened.

We had a declutter of 25 yrs stuff last year, prior to a house move. It was a mammoth task. As we were moving to a smaller house we had to be ruthless so loads of books had to go and all sorts of ephemera we’d gathered over the years. There was a box full of guidebooks to castles and gardens etc, they all went as did loads of magazines that had been put in the attic and never looked at again. In fact, the vast majority of what was in the attic was recycled. We found five guitars, in various places. Five. No one is a particularly skilful player so why we had so many, I don’t know. 🤔

Despite that, we still had to get rid of more stuff when we moved into our new home. My kitchen has about one quarter of the storage space I had before, plus we had a dining room but don’t now, so that kind of thing had to be severely culled.

My main tip, once you’ve decided to part with things, is to take it to its destination (charity shop/dump/etc) as soon as possible. We started off by putting things into the garage but then that got congested and we didn’t have room to move and we had to spend days going to various places to get rid of them. Instead, the bags and boxes went straight into the car and when we went out somewhere, we’d swing by the charity shop, re-use centre or whatever.

Good luck everyone, you’ll appreciate all your new-found space!