Progress Report

Just a quick update on where I am with the decluttering.

Pretty much the wardrobe is done.  I'm quite happy with the 30L white boxes, which are now all full and labelled.  The ramshackle looking pile in the corner (see below) is actually board games except for the white box on top, which is a present for my brand new nephew - born last Thursday.  As he lives 200 kilometres away, it may be a few weeks before I get to meet him.

I have cleared out all the stuff on top of the bookcases (see below) and all the extra books that I won't read again (Paulo Coelho recommends you give books you are unlikely to read again to a library. I, instead, give them to the Salvation Army or friends).  As soon as the body corporate manager gives me permission to add a new TV attenna point to my apartment, I will be able to rearrange the dining/lounge room and move these book cases out.  

You will note that the desk top remains rather messy.   There is also a white box to the left of the blue chair.  All these things belong to my husband, who assures me he is getting around to them.

At least this side of the room (below) looks like a baby girl's bedroom thanks to the wall stickers my sister-in-law gave me and the teddy bears. 

It's amazing what you find when you look

I have spent a lot of time complaining about the difficulties of decluttering, but today I am going to talk about one of the benefits - you find a lot of stuff that you had completely forgotten you had. Here are some of the things I have found so far:

• fabulous black espidrills - I have a pair of cream espidrills that I bought a few years ago.  These black one I bought on sale last winter, put them away and promptly forgot about them.  I am now kicking myself because I spent all last summer thinking "gee I wish I had a pair of black espidrills".

• bucket hat - I know this doesn't look like much, but I love this hat because it reminds me of Manchester bands and a night club I used to go to called Clockwork Orange.  I have not seen this hat for nearly four years.  I had assumed I left it on the boat my husband and I went on, on our honeymoon.

• a present for my sister-in-law.  Who knows how many years ago this was bought.

• a roll of great Christmas wrapping paper - you know how they say to buy cards and wrapping paper after Christmas when they are on sale?  Well that's only for organised people, coz the rest of us put it away, forget about it, and just buy more the following December.

• Glow in the dark stars - how good are these.  I'm going to stick these up in my daughter's bedroom.

Speaking of my daughter's bedroom, here's a picture of her in it:

and yes, that really is a cot in the background that we have actually got her to sleep in (thanks to Ferberisation).  Here's some more progess photos:

I am not quite there yet, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Getting things done

I get the impression that some people in my life do not understand my current obsession with decluttering. The reason is best summed up by David Allen in his Getting Things Done Live Audio Seminar:

What is stuff? Stuff is anything that has landed in your world, psychologically or physically, that doesn't belong where it is, they way it is, for all eternity, but you haven't decided what to do with it yet.

Stuff yells at you "do something with me". You can't stand that yelling so you dumb it down and numb it out.  But you can't selectively dumb down and numb out. You also shut down the channels to enthusisam and inspiration in your life.  If you have numbed out all those things yelling at you because you have allowed them to come into your life, I guarantee you, once you retrieve that energy, it will blow you away.

I love this because it explains why I can be shut down by a messy kitchen.  I'm not sure why, but I was labouring under the belief that I should clean the kitchen first thing every morning.  This morning I got up and it was particularly bad.  I found myself watching TV to the point that I thought "why am I watching TV? I don't usually just sit and watch TV during the day".

I realised it was because I just couldn't face the kitchen.  So I wrote down on a piece of paper that I would work on the kitchen at 4:30pm - like an appointment. I then was able to spend three hours solidly working on other things I needed and preferred to get done.

Things Take Time

One of the things that decluttering makes you realise, is how much time you spend on things. Time that you would prefer to be spending on something else. 

This was particularly highlighted for me when I decided to tackle a pile of magazines that I pulled out of my coffee table. I have long had an addiction to magazines.  This is inspite of the fact that I am well aware that they promise so much and deliver so little. Well, actually, I used to read Smash Hits as a teenager and loved it.  In my 20's I moved onto The Face and loved it too. (Wikipedia tells me that these magazines were both created by the same person.)  These magazines were relevant to me at the time and let me know about the music and fashion that could actually become a part of my life, that is, I liked them and could afford them. For some reason, now magazines are full of $2,000 handbags and $500 t-shirts, all of which look like crap; who buys these things?

But I digress - back to the pile of magazines.  My intial strategy for dealing with it was just to flick through them  (about 20) and see if there were any pictures suitable for my vision board.  I thought that they were all magazines that I had read and decided to keep (new rule - never keep a magazine unless you own a library), but a number of them I had only half read.  So of course, that meant I had to read all the unfinished magazines as well as look for pictures before I threw them away. 

I started reading a copy of Vanity Fare, but after a time period that seem FOREVER, I had only read a couple of articles and there were lots left.  It was then I realised that I have no interest in learning about some rich woman who can no longer afford the upkeep on her mansion in the Hamptons, nor do I care about some Wall Street bloke who has become the go-to guy for the USA government since the global financial crisis because he doesn't work for any of the banks, etc.  So I tossed it.

I then picked up a copy of Shop Till You Drop.  I bought the first issue of this magazine and found a great pair of shoes in it, which I bought and to this day they remain my favourites.  As a result, I keep coming back to this magazine to hopefully have similar experiences but every time I am disappointed.  This magazine has become one of the worse offenders for advertising luxury brands (seriously, who spends $5,000 on one outfit?) and its full of demands - buy these jeans! read this website! decorate your home all in white!  If one of your friends spoke to you like this you would tell them to piss off, yet so many woman's magazines are the same.


In the end, I invoked the economics rule of sunk costs.  A sunk cost is a cost paid in the past that you cannot recover.  The idea is, that you should not think about sunk costs but only the benefit you can derive in future. This is at odds with how people actually behave. People buy things and then try to get their money's worth. So the more you pay for something, the longer you hold onto it and use it, trying to justify the cost. For example, you don't throw away magazines you haven't read.

The more you think about this however, you realise this traditional approach only makes sense if you don't place any value on your time. If you look at things from the sunk cost perspective, you say - I bought these magazines over a year ago, I'm never going to get the money back that I paid for them,  reading them is going to take up time that I could better spend on other things, hence I have got all the value out of them I am going to get and so should throw them away.  So I did, and it felt great.

Well and truly in the thick of it

Now I have everything off the floor (more or less), the plan is to move the four bookcases out into the living area and set up the cot in the left corner of the room as seen in (or rather, cut off of) this photo below. The black plastic that you can see behind the red ladder is covering the dismantled cot.

I was also rather pleased to realise the other day that I have the whole of the top of the wardrobe cleared out and have started putting the things to go into it in 30 litre boxes with lables. They are a good size but not too large and heavy, so you can pull them out without having to be an olympic weight lifter. I was thinking, that the right side of the wardrobe is also finished, but then I realised that the red ladder in the photo above is supposed to be going in there so I will need to do a bit more rejigging.

Today, being a Saturday, I had planned to get stuck into things.  Unfortunately, I got the results of a blood test yesterday, which showed that my thyroid gland is overactive.  In the past, it has been just slightly out of whack, but now its gone the full monty. My doctor has told me to do nothing for a week to try to calm it down (and she means nothing, to the point where she has given me a certificate so my husband can have a week off work to look after me and our baby). I hope it works because pretty much the only cure if it doesn't get better is to cut out the nodules causing the problems and then take tablets for the rest of my life.  

I really don't want to be on medication for the rest of my life, so I have spent much of the day in bed and the rest on the couch. Yesterday, I was thinking that an overactive thyroid is not so bad - I have almost got down to a weight I am happy with, I can eat as much as I want and I never get cold anymore.  However, doing nothing all day has made me realise I really don't feel well.  I have the jitters like I have drunk 10 cups of expresso, but I'm still tired and wish I could just fall asleep. 

The decluttering continues, however, with my wonderful husband in the process of moving the two bookcases into the dining area and setting up the cot. 

Spot the difference

No really, I have been working on this ...

Anyone who has questioned the buddhist maxim "everything is connected", clearly has never tried to declutter their house. I know a comparison of the photos requires a magnifying glass to see the changes, but most of the things crowding the room are required for regular use, while the wardrobe has been packed (with extraordinary and disheartening efficiency) with all the things we never use. 

So over the past fortnight I have been concentrating on moving things out of the wardrobe to a storage locker.  There are now 12 things in it, including golf clubs (used once over the past 11 years), a box of video tapes (last watched over 6 years ago), a christmas tree and decorations (at least they get used once a year).  This will allow me to create a home for the things we do use in the wardrobe and get them off the floor.

Another tricky aspect about decluttering is that it opens your eyes to how much clutter surrounds you.  So I have also been working on other areas of the apartment:

• the two guitars and two violins we own are now safely housed in my parents' back room,
• my Thomas Gannon coffee table is now a giant toy box, while the 3 year old magazines and newspapers that were in its draws are now cleared out,
• a collection of stray homeless items are now in a "find a home" box for dealing with as I progress.

The silver box I discussed in my last post appears to be working.  In these types of things you can never sit back and wait for the universe to come to you, so I called my boss so he could give me the phone number for HR and wrote it down on a catalogue while talking to him. Of course I ended up throwing out the catalogue before I called HR, but then I thought, "OK silver box, lets test you out".  I decided I would look under the silver box to see if I could find the piece of paper with the phone number for HR (and my employee number, which I would also need).  The silver box was sitting on the desk with nothing underneath (you can see it in the second picture above, on the left hand corner with a CD-ROM box sitting on top of it).  So I opened the draw below it and pulled out a bunch of papers.  The last piece of paper was the one I was looking for.  I called HR and 10 minutes later they had emailed me my pay slips.  I now just need one of my husband's payslips, and I have all I need to apply for the baby bonus.

New Project: Decluttering

My husband and I have lived in our apartment for nearly six years, I have never been happy with the amount of stuff we have in it.  We now have a baby who needs her own room - here is what her room looks like at present:

I once read that the best advertising works by making you envy your amazing future self which possesses the item being advertised (Ways of Seeing by John Berger).  This is what makes decluttering difficult - you pick up something you haven't used for years and you imaging yourself using it so you want to keep it.  Decluttering means you have to admit that you are old and boring and never do the fun stuff you used to do.  It means facing up to the fact that you have wasted thousands of dollars on things you have only used a couple of times. It means accepting that the "future" you with the advertised item is no more amazing than the past you without it.

Being me, I, of course, own a book on decluttering called Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston.  It claims that clutter clearing "is one of the most powerful, transformative aspects of Feng Shui" and mentions that decluttering gives you energy.  I have found this to be true.  In the few days before I started decluttering I was getting out of bed at 11am and spent a lot of time on the couch.  Yesterday, the day after I started decluttering, I was up at 8am and spent the whole day being active.  Today, I was up at 8:30am.


Clear Your Clutter also explains how the bagua relates to your home.  The bagua is a 3x3 grid which links different areas of your home with different aspects of your life.  The room above affects two areas:

• Career / Life Path / Journey - which is definitely the area in which I feel my life is most blocked at the moment; and
• Helpful friends / Compassion / Travel

 The website Feng Shui Palace explains this second area in more detail.  Amongst other things, it says:

"This part of the home (the front right gua) is associated with getting you into the synchronicity of life. When you are in-sync, you don't have to expend any energy getting help with anything. It is also usually easier to make money when you are in-sync with life."

I find this interesting, not just because it mentions money, but because I have been trying for months to get my application for the $5000 baby bonus sorted out and each time its a case of one step forward, ten steps back.  The problem is that I need to send in pay slips to prove I don't have an income while on maternity leave.  To get the payslips I need to log onto the HR system at work.  I was going to do this from home, but I couldn't find my token, so I went into work one evening, but I had been locked out of the HR system because I had not logged into it for over one month.  I called the IT Help Desk, they said because it was after business hours all they could do was arrange to email me a new password the next day.  I couldn't make it back the next day, so I left it.  About two months later I found my token, so I thought "great, I can get IT to send me a new password, log in and get my pay slips".  But when I tried to log into work from home I was locked out completely from the whole system.  I called IT, they said that because it had been too long since I last logged in my access had been cancelled. Yesterday, I thought I would just telephone HR and ask them to post me my payslips but I couldn't find the telephone number even though I was certain I have placed it in a particular draw.

Feng Shui Palace suggests getting a silver box, placing a written prayer of thanks for what you want in the box and putting it in the Helpful Friends etc area of your house.  I went into the room to see if I could find something appropriate to use for the box, thinking I didn't have anything.  First I saw my husband's glasses case, which is silver, so I was going to use that.  Then I saw the rewards pack that Ford gave us when we bought a car from there a couple of years ago.  It comes in a silver box (and is more clutter I intended to get rid of).  I took out the rewards paraphernalia, which is now out of date, and put in a green (the colour for money in Feng Shui) card saying "Thank you for sending me the baby bonus."  Clear Your Clutter says that these "cures" don't work as well when a room is cluttered, but we will see what happens.