Next Avenue Logo
Advertisement

Finding 465 Things to Toss in The Declutter Challenge

The 30-day junking was harder than this author expected

By Jacqueline Damian

(This blog appeared originally on ThePoconos.com.)

My 30-day declutter purge ended not with a bang, but a whimper. After culling drawers, cabinets, shelves and closets throughout the house on the 29 prior days of the challenge, I was stymied by the demand to unload another 30 items on Day 30. Thirty items — that’s a lot.

 

In frustration, I grabbed the tin I keep on my desk into which I pop any new business card that comes my way from a friend, service person or store owner. The box has been with me for a while. There must have been a couple hundred cards stuffed inside, many of them embarrassingly outdated. I threw away half of them and, theorizing that 100 cards must somehow equate to 30 items in the new math of the purge, thus called an end to this curious challenge.

(MORE: Take the 30-Day Declutter Challenge)

 

The 30-day purge involves discarding one item on Day 1, two items on Day 2, nine items on Day 9 and so on, for a month. You can throw out, give away, donate or sell the outcasts. It doesn’t matter, as long as you get them out of the house. If you make it to the finish line, you will have jettisoned 465 items. Don’t you feel lighter already?

 

I began the exercise at the prompting of my friend Stephanie, who was nearing the homestretch of her own purge and urged me to join her. But in truth, I’ve wanted to cull my overabundance for a long time. Like 56 percent of the people over age 50 who were questioned in a recent University of Kansas poll, I have too much stuff.

 

 

Stephanie recommends having a staging area — preferably in the garage or basement, apart from your actual living space — to sort and stash your discard piles. I don’t have a garage and my basement is a dim, cobwebbed land of doom, so I used a work surface in my office. I also kept a diary, noting the daily discards and tallying up the numbers. My purge was bifurcated by vacation, and it took me four days to complete the last two days’ quotas. Nevertheless, finish I did.

 

I made it a point to cull only my things, not my husband’s. It didn’t seem fair to drag him into it, especially since he’s one of those folks who hates to throw anything out — the sort of guy who will keep a wire hanger from the dry cleaner’s because you never know when you might need to fashion it into a useful tool.

 

One exception was the mutually-owned kitchen, where I raided drawers and cupboards to jettison unneeded utensils, stray packets of soy sauce from the Chinese restaurant and untold detritus from the aptly named junk drawer.

Advertisement

 

Another was the bathroom medicine cabinets. I tossed squeezed-out tubes of ointment, combs with broken teeth and old lipsticks, and then attacked the prescription bottles. Why we still had my late father-in-law’s expired medications is beyond me. I wound up taking them, and some other ancient meds, to the sheriff’s office for safe disposal.

The challenge started off easy and got progressively harder. On Day 6, for example, it was no big deal to grab a couple of things off my desk and four paperbacks I knew I’d never read again, and call it a day. But on Day 13, in search of 13 items to eliminate, I had to actually take the time to go through my scarf drawer. I love scarves and although I wouldn’t call myself a collector exactly, I have accumulated quite a few. It was not hard to choose 28 to either throw away (ripped or stained scarves) or donate (scarves I haven’t worn in years). That heroic total got me off the hook on Day 14, since I had already met my quota, with one scarf to spare.

 

In this way, the challenge became actual work. I found that if I were to meet my totals, I had to zero in on a closet, cabinet or set of drawers and methodically reorganize it. The effort couldn’t be random. Plucking an item here and an item there, as I had done the first week of the challenge, no longer worked when the day’s quota was in the double digits. Deliberate, thoughtful action was necessary.

 

“You have to look at everything and make decision after decision,” Stephanie advised.

Difficulty Parting with Books

 

Jacqueline Damian is a writer and editor living in Milford, Penn. She wrote Sasha’s Tail: Lessons from a Life with Cats, and pens a weekly column for boomers for the Pocono Record. Read More
Advertisement
Next Avenue LogoMeeting the needs and unleashing the potential of older Americans through media
©2024 Next AvenuePrivacy PolicyTerms of Use
A nonprofit journalism website produced by:
TPT Logo