Lots more things

Lots of "stuff

Here are a lot of odds and ends- a hairbrush that pulls hair- to the garbage, ice cube tray whose cubes I don't like, to greenpoint. Odd shoes, stretched out bathing suit, shopping bag with a hole: all to Orange bin.

Clothes to Kleidespende

More paper to recycling!

 These clothes all went to the Kleidespend (donation box).




Lots of catalogs and pieces of paper found while going through bins (still looking for tax papers).



A very nice pair of patent leather shoes from T2. The toes were scuffed and if they were mine, I would have spent the 10€ to repair them. Since they are too small for T2, I decided not to repair tham and they went into the Orange bin.

Tidying Up

Sometimes decluttering is not just about discarding things: sometimes, it means organizing them. The girls' hair ornaments are a constant struggle. Today, I made a small dent.


I started with everything here, and what remains is this one, organized, group. Everything else was discarded as either broken, unnecessary, or causing damage to the childrens' hair.

Artwork, paper and clutter

Sometimes I look around and wonder how I can keep decluttering and yet the apartment is still full of clutter. Then I look around at the artwork that the kids create every week (not even considering my own bills, magazines, and books!) and realize where it comes from.

Here on the left is 2.5 weeks worth of the children's creations. These are the finished works, worth keeping, not the drafts or errors. I separated them by child and placed them in art folders. I have one for each child for last year, one for each for this year, and this helped me remove some of the hanging artwork, put it in folders and replace it with newer art.

The three pictures below are my own paperwork, bills, magazines dealt with yesterday and today and ready for recycling, as well as some of the kids' draft artwork or first thoughts, that they don't want to keep. All to paper recycling.

Bags and more (6-11)

• 6-9. Bags given to my daughter's kita. I won't count the many plastic bags seen here, in the canvas bag- I accumulate them and pass them along to the kita on a standard basis. I'm counting the 4 permanent bags, including the canvas one in which they are packed, which I passed on today (after asking if they would like them).

• 10. I wouldn't normally count this (plastic container), but since I have had it here in Germany, brought from the US, for 4 years and emptied it out into another, permanent gift wrap container, I will.

• 11. One might think this was normal trash, but since the girls held onto it for 6 months, removal counts as decluttering.
  

Tidying Up

It's been a few months since we have done a thorough tidying in the girls'room. Since we are thinking about what they will need from the US, it seemed like a good time to go through and see what is actually still of use and what needs to be discarded, recycled or given away.

• So, here's a piece of electronics that is too young for the girls and
• too technologically obsolescent to be desired: one day outside with a note saying" Free for the taking", then the Orange bin.

Here are the crayons and pencils that I cleaned out of their art box.

• This entire bag is filled with broken pieces of toys, tchotchkes from Überaschungeier, toys from fast food chains or that come attached to children's magazines, and the equivalent.
• 
  

Here are various odds and ends, broken school materials, broken headphones, more tchotchkes.

• Here are magazines, catalogs and other printed material that has been cluttering up my shelves

Culling Files

Now that the computer has been recycled, no need to keep the original invoice, the replacement invoice, the warranty and a few other papers found while wandering through the files (as well as the usual bits discarded from the kids' stash of Überraschungseier toys.

A closer look...

Last night, when I was chatting with my friend about the difficulties of decluttering, and how if one has an easy opportunity, one should take it (that is, I would grab the boxes of childrens' toys and donate them before actually sitting and going through paperwork), I felt a bit revved up.

So I did some "fine" work: here you see CD-ROMs that are no longer viable, belonging to recycled computers and OS's that are 7 years out of date, as well as empty toner cartridges. The DVD's and CD's can go into our new Orange recycling bin and the toner cartridges will go to the recycling hof on Monday. I also went through a large box of "stuff" and turned it into a smaller box of paperwork and stuff and the remainder is in paper recycling or garbage.

This type of decluttering doesn't help the overall look and feel of the apartment, though, and I needed to wind this session up with a 10 minute run through that cleaned off surfaces (that had gotten covered while I was digging through bins) and reducing it to a state of visual order: that's what makes the room and the soul calm.

Another collection of magazines and paperwork for recycling, a tchotcke I hid from the girls— when they didn't miss it it went in the garbage, and sadly, a favorite chair from Ikea. Although the whole chair didn't need to go: just the canopy that was irretrievably damaged. The base itself stays and is used.

15 minute fling

I still read my Flylady e-mails to help me keep up the fight against sinking into clutter and here is the accumulation of a week of trying to read through and get rid of paper that masquerades as something I need or want to keep. The reason it takes some time is that I am actually reading the magazines and I tend to run behind depending on what my external life is doing: they are bundled and sent over once a week, so they come in a bolus.

Paper multiplies when allowed respite.

I'm a little sad that I can't post the full bag of papers that we de-cluttered today (they had already been taken to recycling): this is just what I found during the commercial break when I was watching Bones. (Our Valentine's Day was watching TV together— we will try for a movie out next weekend, when it will be easier to get a babysitter.)

It seems that no matter how often we go through the stacked paperwork (which grows on a weekly basis) that after we have dealt with what needs to be dealt with and filed what needs to be filed, we have lots of paperwork to be recycled, shredded and/or discarded.

Sometimes it feels like a Sisyphean task, but today I had a pleasant reminder that we are actually reaching deeper into the piles than we have before, even though they grow weekly: I found a check written to me by a friend in the US two years which she had sent to me here and which I had clearly not sent back to the US to be deposited. So after a quick e-mail conversation, we have plans to meet up again this year in NY, where she can hand me a replacement and save herself the cost of an airmail stamp!:-)

On the walls

As we consider staying in Germany even longer, I am bringing some of the personal possessions that we left behind back in suitcases each time we visit the US. I always liked these two.

The Children's Room

One of the biggest issues in trying to decrease the clutter and chaos in my environment is that the kids are like entropy: they increase chaos wherever they are. This is actually the first weekend that we have spent home in the last 9 weeks so, to celebrate, we went through the children's bins and boxes and took out everything broken or used up or useless. A total of four bags.

In celebration, I reorganized their bookcase.

It's not just getting rid of things

The thing about de-cluttering is that it's not just about getting rid of things. It's also about finally getting things done and organized, about finding ways to display things one wants to display and store things that one wants to keep.

It's only been about 7 months since we moved in and we have finally gotten the last two lights up. There's a bit of a story to go with that: it's not that we have been stumbling around in the dark for the last half year: we have standing lights.

We had a lovely 3-light halogen for over our dining table, but it just didn't work in the new apartment: rectangular and the new room was already wired to a central point. In addition, the bedroom had a (bare— I know!) bulb hanging from the ceiling so we did have some overhead light when desired. The ceilings ranged from 12 to 14 feet and our ladder was a bit low, the German doesn't do electric and we didn't want to spend real money on a dining room/living room light when we couldn't find a buyer for the old one.

This summer was pretty darn hot for several weeks, though, and I was panting. There aren't a lot of good looking ceiling fans in store here in Germany, as I have noted over the last few years.I'm a person that likes air, so we also have standing fans but this spring's heat wave simply overpowered them. I found a ceiling fan/light combo that we liked on Amazon, set up an installation date with our handyperson, got it in, and then C blew us off twice. We set a new date for after the summer and then we left the country and came back 7 weeks later. When C couldn't make that date, we gave up on him, which is too bad: he was hreat for a while.

However, one electrician later, we have a great ceiling fan/light and a new (only 2.99€) light and cover in the bedroom. I'm really glad that we used a professional, because the living room ceiling is dropped (from 14 to 12 feet, don't ask me why people do this) and he was able to affix it properly, something I am always concerned about with ceiling fan.

Yeah! If you look carefully, you can see a gap: that's because the lights in the apartment were originally gas-fed and the fittings are a bit different. It really makes a difference that we hadn't really noticed as lacking before.

Double duty.

A post pertinent to Germany that fits in so well here.