Keep calm and declutter - Q&A with "tidy" expert Marie Kondo

I do so agree with you FRANKIE but it is just so hard to do. I have file upon file of research notes on Family History but I don't think anyone else will be interested.

I would just like to say that I read all the messages above with great interest - but must warn you all that over the last couple of years I have had to clear out houses of elderly relatives who had died.
All their beloved knick knacks, books, pictures etc meant nothing at all to me and my brother, and with no hesitation we took everything that was useful to charity shops, and threw away anything and everything that was old, worn out or just useless.
It has made me realise that everything I consider to be precious is going to be just thrown away one day, so I have started to give my four children and nine grandchildren anything that they like.
I made them all albums of themselves, with photos from new born to present day, so now I only have a few precious ones in frames dotted about.
If you don't like the thought of someone going through your personal belongings and just binning most of them, please do it yourself NOW.

We have downsized so have a tiny curiosty shop here & my partner refuses to throw out stuff but I do try

I'm sure you're right about everybody just having more stuff. But things like a partner's photographic collection ( as mentioned by Culag above) are in a different category, I guess. I still have my grandad's detailed plans for a road trip to South Africa he never made. Perhaps, Culag, we should both try to transform these things into a display or montage or some other artwork somehow...or find someone else who would.
Delighted to be Grannyknot's pot luck reading over Easter, anyway! Cheers Grannyknot and Yogagran, really hope you enjoy it! And yes, Yogagran, Kindle authors do get paid too - might buy some more face cream myself!

I am amazing at de-cluttering someone else's junk as of course it means nothing to me - but doing my own? There's always tomorrow for mine.
I'm just TOO sentimental for my own good!

It does look good Grannyfran I'll download it later tonight.

It's a fundemental law of physics - clutter will always expand to fill all available space. I have found that it fills unavailable space too!

I needed a "pot luck" book to read for the Easter Weekend so '1-Click' and I have your book grannyfran

Re the OP and the questions. I am convinced that having more money is what contributes to having more crap stuff. When I had a lot less disposable income than I have now, I would buy e.g. one pot of face cream and when it was finished, buy another one. Now there are about 6 pots of face cream on my dressing table, all half used. Likewise cleaning stuff, I would have had one or two types now I have one for glass & mirrors, one general purpose, one for baths etc etc. And while this may not be exactly the type of clutter you mean, the area below my sink looks like a bomb zone.

So perhaps the answer to less clutter is simply having less. Or as my friend says "happiness is wanting what you have".

Sorry, no question just ramblings.

Does the author still benefit from Kindle purchases grannyfran

I tried the "sample' on my Kindle and have now gone on to download the whole book. I'll be starting it as soon as I've finished the book I'm on at the moment

Thanks Ana and Elegran,
I guess I should throw away the fourteen printed out early drafts now that it's a proper book! Am very attracted to the idea of an 'industrial shredder'! At work a secure shredding company used to visit with a truck and mince secure documents on site. I once asked the operator if it could manage paper clips and he said 'Paperclips? This thing would shred a gun!'
Another novel in that, somewhere!
Hope you keep enjoying Sister B.

I am now reading the book and it is very good.

Just been reading the Amazon reviews of your book, Grannyfran. It sounds really good!

www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Wishes-Sister-Fran-Smith/dp/1910153001

My late husband was a great photographer and I have 3 large storage boxes of family snapshots and also larger home developed and printed 'ace' shots. I thought I would sort these one winter but it was too upsetting. I can't throw them away, my son hasn't got room for them or time to sort them - I'm stuck.

I'm shortly moving to a tiny rented house, then in to house sit for a friend then into a house half the size of this one. I thought I was doing well having reduced my stuff by a third and was feeling rather smug. Last week the removal man Mr P....... stood looking at what is left, sucked his teeth, shook his head and muttered that it wouldn't all fit in the new house.
It was a salutary lesson to realise that what to me are precious things with a history attached are to him cubic footage. I now have 10 days to clear the next third, eeek! Yoga gran, I too have destroyed old diaries. I don't think mine sound as exciting as yours but I definitely wouldn't want my children reading them.
My most exciting purchases in the last few weeks have been an incinerator and an industrial shredder. Sad but true.

Your Swinging London diaries sound wonderful! My sister says she has never looked back since burning her diaries. They were full of gloomy self-analysis. They served their purpose and then were binned. Very sane.

I've just destroyed several years of diaries that I kept through the 60's and early 70's. I didn't want people discovering just how exciting London was in that era! Some of the entries were written in shorthand which I could no longer read so things were very interesting then and embarrassed

Thanks Yogagran! It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't found a big pile of writing. Starting from scratch would have been too scary.

grannyfran Congratulations, that's an amazing achievement

Take heart all. I had to de-clutter like mad when we moved quite happily from a big house to a much smaller one. In the process I found lots of my old bits of writing. Always a scribbler, but very untidy too, I had tucked them away in lots of different places! One set were letters I wrote to DH to make him laugh when he was recovering from a stroke. There were piles of them! When I put them all together they added up to 30,000 words. I had accidentally written the beginnings of a novel.
And guess what? It was published in February. It took me two years, but I turned the piles of scribbles into a book called Best Wishes, Sister B.
I de-cluttered myself into a published writer. Talk about unintended consequences!
Of course all the writing has meant that the new house is a bit cluttered now...

Been watching too much Antiques Road shows and convinced my retro stuff will 'be worth money in years to come'. Can live in hope. My MIL used to watch that programme, arms folded, and every item worth anything she would say, 'ooh I had one of them and I chucked it in the bin/gave it to a jumble sale/threw it on the fire'......etc

I had this magnificent rule "what I have not used/worn for six months goes out". But - the big but -whenever I try to declutter and throw stuff out, without a doubt I shall look for it a fortnight later; it will be that item of clothing that just goes with those trousers/skirt, which I have not worn for a long time. Hence it now goes into the
loft for another six months, and perhaps then I shall actually really declutter or won't I?

I have, however,bought this little machine with which I could transfer all my old photographs and negatives to the computer/memory disc, it helped to get rid of a few boxes. A very emotional process though....

Oh Gillybob, if ONLY it were that simple! Trouble is, unless I keep the stuff, I fear that my OLD mind and heart will not be up to challenge of remembering soon! I prefer "vintage" to "old" cos that adds at least one zero to the price tag!!

Oh, I am definitely in this club. I wish, I wish I could declutter. I am of the 'that will come in useful one day / I can't bear to throw that away' persuasion. I feel so great when I manage to clear somewhere out (rarely), but also have a DH with a paper-hoarding habit, and a DD who wants us to keep all her stuff from childhood and teenage, even though she is 34 and has a bigger house than we do! I believe some of my problem stems from a Services childhood, moving every couple of years and not being allowed to keep anything when we did.

Glad to read about others having trouble with the hoarding obsession of their OHs; I am not alone! There is also the realisation that so many things thrown out with gay abandon in a more careless phase would now fetch a good price as genuine retro, so how to decide what other investmentswe may have, albeit unknowingly? I must agree with Gally regarding 'fed up of': pesky things, prepositions, but I have always thought 'with' was better here