Frugal and Thriving
I’m still a slob. There is almost anything that I put ahead of cleaning. At the beginning of the year I made myself a promise that I would go through things in my house religiously – once every 30 years or so – and REALLY make a difference. I also promised myself (yes, I talk to myself a lot) that I would make every effort to make a donation to the Disabled American Veterans, aka The Veterans Thrift Town in Fort Smith, plus our local library, once a month all year long until all was under control.
To date, we’ve made 6 donations to the Vets and 2 to the library – a mixed success rate, to say the least.
I took a break, but now I’m starting with Phase 2 of my decluttering/purging/reorganizing/cleaning promise. The biggest areas of concern were tackled in Phase I. Large areas needing help from my husband remain our basement, garage, and the shop. The problem is that basically, he would like to throw away MY stuff and vice versa. So I’ve put these on hold to ‘discuss’ another day.
Today I started on Phase 2 of our Office clean-up. I tackled a 4-drawer file cabinet that I discovered was a repository of old records from my website, Creative Artworks. I shut down the website last June. All the records were obsolete, just taking up space. So, I –
- took almost everything out of the drawers
- saved manila file folders that were still usable
- gave away hanging file folders whose colors were really annoying (yuck green, even yuckier dirty mustard color) saving the many I still had whose colors are good (purple, a really nice shade of blue, bright yellow, etc.)
- I put the things I could use back on the office shelves
- put the hanging folders that were good, but that I didn’t want, in the ‘donation’ area,
- threw away a large trash bag of obsolete ‘stuff’ that will go out for pickup tonight to be whisked away by the good trash people tomorrow.
The next step will be to relocate stuff that I can now store neatly in the file cabinet that have been looking for a home. I’ll clean out the office shelves more in the process and then clean when all is where it should be (assuming it gets that way.)
I’m making definite progress on my promise, even though I’m one-and-a-half donations behind to the local library. They collect books to sell to the public in order to raise money twice a year. They either just had a sale or are going to have one very soon; so as soon as that is done, I’ll get more serious about finding books around here that can be donated.
I still don’t like cleaning that much, but PURGING is beginning to feel really good!
creativeartworksblog 