The Declutter Diet: Lightening Your Load by Lessening Your "Stuff"

Do you ever think about your weight? I know I do and have my whole life...and it's an often "not-losing" battle. Did you know that there is also the weight of things around you, holding you down, penning you in right in your own space? Well, together we can do something about that and make you, your space and your life lighter and more manageable.

So where do we begin? By setting up for one project at a time. I always told my kids when they were getting ready to do homework just take one book out of their back pack at at time, otherwise it would be overwhelming.

Interestingly enough I had a great conversation with a friend of mine about choosing between getting to any number of her pending projects when she would rather be baking or cooking or being outside in the nice weather. One of her projects is years and years of photos, some in albums, most in boxes here and there.

Here's the set up that she could get to in bits and pieces whenever she felt like it:

1. Set up a long folding table in the basement where it's out of the way and can remain "in use" for when you get rolling. (I used my dining room table which was inconvenient but ok).

2. Take one or two boxes or albums of photos and start a pile by decades, not topics yet. (I realize that now everyone's photos are on the computer, phone or in the cloud, but many of us had actual photos and negatives and those of us who do have many more decades to sort. (Here's a great tip to remove photos stuck to albums: take a hair blower on low and hold it over the photos. The glue melts enough to peel the photos off in one piece).

3. Once all the photos are sorted by decades, make room and re-sort by years within the decades.

4. Once the years are sorted you can easily separate topics out if you like, Christmas with the family, first day of school, baby's first year, vacation trips or just keep them as yearly collections. You get the idea.

5. Rubber band the sorted sections with an index card and label with a marker what the topic or year is.

6. What I did with mine and I highly recommend this company, was to send them to scanmyphotos.com. This is a great company that works with you, is very explicit as to how to pack the photos. In a short time you get the originals back, (to give away as tokens to the subjects, perhaps) and thumb drives that you can upload. When you want to you can make photo books for yourself and for gifts!

And for those homes that have little kid clutter, a great source is motherly.com.

Thanks, J.D.B. for being my inspiration for this week's blog!

Whichever project you choose first, please contact me and we can set up a schedule to get you started.

Please feel free to "like" my post and share it with your friends.