Cleaning 100 Things - And Getting Rid Of The Rest

Several years ago I moved from a 1,200 square foot apartment to the 400 square foot cabin in the woods where I live now.  I soon found that I essentially had three households' worth of stuff crammed into my single home.  And sadly, I was not alone.

I have become a decluttering fiend in the time since then - and even so, I have to confess that I have a long way to go.  At the very least, decluttering is an ongoing battle that can never be won.  I mean, until you die.  And you're lucky, and you go to a place where there is no clutter, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

I've been thinking a lot about the "100 Things" challenge since I read about it a while back.  (Sarajean recently wrote an awesome post on the challenge - you should check it out!)  100 things is a little radical, even for me, but it brings up a good point.  How many of the things in your house do you use, and how many things do you just HAVE?

If you're anything like me, cleaning the house is as much a process of picking things up and moving them around as it is actually cleaning.  Fully half of my house cleaning regimen is just putting things back where they belong, throwing away or recycling trash, and sorting through the stacks of mail that accumulate over the course of a week.

This process highlights what you actually use in the course of a week.  Take a minute to mentally picture all the things you'd touch if you were to clean your house right now.  These, obviously, are the things that you have used.  So what about all the other stuff?  The bookshelves full of books and knick-knacks, the plastic tubs full of hobby supplies, the collections of collectibles (which typically are anything but valuable)? 

Put it another way: anything that you have to dust, aside from furniture, is by definition something that you never ever use.  Isn't it amazing to think of all the things in your house that you don't use?

Here's a radical thought experiment.  Get a picture in your mind of everything that you need to put away and tidy up.  Now delete everything else from your home.  Everything off the shelves, from inside the cupboards, from under the bed, from the attic.  Can you imagine how airy and uplifting that would look?  Your home would look the way it did before you moved in, when you walked through the rooms and noticed the volume of space, the way the sunlight tracked across the empty expanses of floor.  The feeling set you free.

And it can again.  Not today, not tomorrow, and not immediately.  But you can do this - you can take one thing, or ten things, and find it a better home.  A home that is not yours.  Give it to a friend, sell it online, or donate it to charity. 

The clutter in your home isn't the stuff you need to clean up.  It's everything that stuff is sitting on.  It's the stuff that's crowding those things into tiny little patches of kitchen counter, to the far corner of your desk, to the edge of your coffee table.