Trash in Plain Sight

You’ve got trash all over you house, though you may not realize it. (Yes, this is another one of my de-cluttering lessons.) There are two rules to keeping a clutter-free house:

1. Constantly get rid of stuff

2. Don’t let stuff in

Today I’m going to focus on the first one—getting rid of stuff. I’ve said this before but I can’t stress it enough: just about anything is potential trash. And if it pains you to throw things away, well, you might need focus more on #2.

“But why throw something away when I could donate it?” you ask. “After all, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Some things can and should be donated: gently worn clothes, furniture that is in decent shape, appliances that still work. And that’s about where it ends. When you donate crap that nobody wants, all you’re doing is bogging down the systems for good places like the Salvation Army and Goodwill. And if it’s your “trash,” what are the chances it’s someone else’s “treasure?”

Here, I’m going to give you some examples of things that can be thrown away, things that you thought you weren’t allowed to dump.

Mugs: The other day a friend gave me a really cool mug for my birthday. I enjoy drinking tea and hot cocoa. I truly appreciated this mug and wanted to keep it. But when I went to put it away in the cabinet I realized that I had way more mugs than I could ever use. I surveyed my mug collection and threw out two old ones. They weren’t broken or even ugly. I just didn’t need them. Now I have my new, pretty mug and two fewer mugs. (When you can replace two things with one, ah, that’s such a rush!)

DVDs: We have a Netflix account. We get movies in the mail just about every week and now we can stream movies from the internet. Do I really need to own any movies? I can’t think of one movie that I want to watch enough times that it’s worth it for me to own. So I threw out the three movies that we did own. Betcha didn’t know you could do that, huh? I would throw out CDs if Frank would let me.

Kitchen utensils: I had a good food chopper from Pampered Chef that’s served me well for about five years. It’s the manual kind but it has fewer parts than my food processor so I use it for small jobs. Then I received an even cooler food chopper for my birthday. I think 99% of people would have kept the Pampered Chef one and the new one. Not me. I said Buh-bye to the PC one cause really, if I have this new and improved one, when am I ever going to use that again?

Goodie bags from kids’ birthday parties: I just found one buried in our craft box from a b-day party a few months back. It’s full of junk from the Dollar Store. Sure, Leo might have been mildly amused by a few of the trinkets in there but where am I supposed to put them? Right back in the craft box? No way. I put the whole thing in the trash, where it belongs! (Let me just add that I, too, am guilty of dispensing Dollar Store toys to kids at Leo’s birthday parties but you can feel free to throw it all out.)

Socks/underwear: Socks and underwear are not expensive, especially if you get each in packs from Target. So update them every now and then. But you gotta throw the old ones away. Remember it’s “Out with the old, in with the new” not “Hang onto the old forever, in with the new.”

This weekend we are going to clean out a closet. I’m giddy with excitement. Frank just better not stand in the way of me and the trash!