An Admission and Some Actual Progress for Week 43 (Decluttering and Simplifying 2010)

This will not be a surprise to most of you, but I’m admitting it anyway: I won’t be finished decluttering our house by December, the designated end of these weekly decluttering updates.

But I will be ending the weekly updates then in favor of more articles and information that are of practical use to you. I will still be writing about decluttering frequently — whenever I genuinely have something to say. Whatever form the posts take, this blog will always be about living a simple, deliberate life.

Decluttering, as some of you have pointed out, is a continuous process. Our house needed a lot of decluttering, however, and it was important to me to set a goal of some kind. So I decided that within a year, we’d have most of the clutter removed, put away or at least contained. And we’ve made amazing progress, although it has slowed. During the hot summer, it practically stopped.

That said, I have some genuine progress to report on the projects around our house.

We worked in the yard again this morning, mowing, picking up debris and generally tidying the place up. We have a whole acre — a silly amount of land for two guys — and we’ve gotten way behind on the yard work. That’s partly because the lawnmower had to go to the shop twice this spring and partly because I rebelled from doing the yard work for a couple of months. I wasn’t feeling well for part of the time, but it was really because I recognized the silliness of it all more acutely than ever before and couldn’t really see why I should bother.

I’m back in the real world now, living happily within the bounds of my current situation and working to improve it.

We were at home all day Thursday, giving me a chance to catch up some laundry and cook a real meal. We also finally cleaned off the top of the refrigerator and a long shelf above that. Both were dusty and cluttered, and both are clean now. The knickknacks (great word!) are now reduced to only a few. It might be nice to dump them all, but that shelf looks too empty with nothing on it. This should have been among our first decluttering projects, but it wasn’t.

It’s nice to have some mild weather here in Texas, and it’s nice to be getting things done again. There will always be more clutter to eliminate.

Gip Plaster

Gip Plaster is a web content writer. Previously a journalist, online bookseller and even a corporate advertising guy, Gip now specialize in writing high-quality content for websites — his and other people’s. Learn more here.