Three-step Decluttering Plan

My Progress on Decluttering

A few weeks ago I posted that I wanted to declutter my house once and for all. I’ve managed to get my bedroom mostly the way I want it except for three large boxes of pictures and frames I don’t know what to do with. And therein, I realized, was most of my dilemma with clutter. To get rid of it and maintain a decluttered space you need a plan of attack and defense against future stuff coming into your space.

I’ve seen the magazine articles of course and talk-show segments on how to keep shoes, clothes, toys, and other flotsam contained to bins and organized closets. Unfortunately I do not have the floor space or closet space for bins. My house has a minimum of square feet and is decidedly lacking in storage options—no garage and no attic, just a crawl space where the insulation shows through, no floor. What little I have of closet floor space is primarily taken up by boxes of mementos and collectibles I’m not yet ready to let go.

So, I’m working on what I can get rid of—holiday stuff I no longer use, extra cookware that rarely sees the light of day, paperwork that has expired past its usefulness, and, yes, those clothes held for the time when I might fit into them. Really good for me, I’ve actually started giving away books. I forget plots easily so can reread things after a certain amount of time goes by, but why bother if it wasn’t that good in the first place.

Three Steps to Decluttering 

First—I take one room at a time and go through every storage area—cupboards, drawers, closets. The keep-or-give-away criteria touted by every expert—if you haven’t used it in the last year get rid of it. I needed to be more ruthless in culling out belongings. Yes, I may use an item once a year, give or take, but often have something I use more frequently that works nearly as well. I am getting rid of anything I don’t use regularly.

All those childhood mementos we save for our kids, whether theirs from school or their baby days or family memorabilia from past generations—if we don’t want to display them and they’re sitting in boxes collecting dust, chances are the kids won’t want them either. If they’re old enough, ask them and either purge the items or hand them over now for the kid to take care of if he or she wants them.

Second—you still need a plan for a specific place to dispose of your unneeded items and then to get them to that place sooner rather than later before the giveaway bags and boxes just add to your clutter. Some charities like the Salvation Army have bins in public places that take only clothes. Organizations such as Big Brother/Big Sister take clothes, small kitchen appliances (think toasters), dishes, and knickknacks, which they sell to make money for their mentoring programs and will pick them up for you.

Habitat for Humanity took furniture, big appliances, and everything else I managed to get past my mother when I helped her get ready to sell her house and move into a smaller apartment. They even sent a truck for the stuff. This was in Georgia. I don’t know how they work in other states. Many places also have local charities and churches that need items for their fundraising sales, though you will have to transport the items to them.

Third—don’t refill the clutter. Stop renewing subscriptions to magazines or periodicals that tower next to your chair and rarely get read. Find another way to relieve stress besides shopping. Bypass tag sales and store bargains unless you need a specific item. Refuse to buy other items just because they have tempting price tags. Refuse free things you don’t need. This is the one that inundated me with a good chunk of my clutter problem.

My mother didn’t mind getting rid of her decades’ worth of stuff if she could give it to family—even with the truckload to Habitat for Humanity, all three of us kids managed to wind up with boxes upon boxes—family pictures, kitchenware our kids could use when they move out, knickknacks with specific memories, etc., etc., etc.

Do yourself a favor and the person who will have to deal with all your things when you’re gone and learn to say no. I’m getting there.

Other Feehan Series

More on Christine Feehan

The Carpathian series continues with Dark Challenge and Julian, Aidan’s twin, who is sent to protect Desari, a singer targeted by a human ring of vampire hunters because of her haunting voice and the fact that she and her band are never seen during the day. He goes to a concert and instantly sees in colors and is inundated by feelings that have been lost to him for centuries.

Julian soon learns that Desari, her brother, Darius, and the band are also Carpathians, also centuries old—a first for the female lifemate in the books—and a group unknown to the other Carpathians. They had escaped from an attack on their people as children, raised by Darius, only six at the time, all the rest younger, and knew little about lifemates or other realities about their species. Desari and another female, Syndil, have powers not shown by female Carpathians in other books who were all what Feehan calls fledglings—very young and inexperienced, their gifts not yet developed.

Syndil can heal the earth after fires or other natural disasters. Desari’s voice can weave a spell around friend or foe and hold them in place or call them to do her bidding. In previous books, the only real power the females had was to pull their lifemates from darkness and help them keep to the honor code of their race. It was nice to see the women as more capable than just to be helpmates.

Dark Fire is Darius’s story but continues with the band and his family, which now includes Julian. Darius finds his lifemate, a human woman with a psychic link to animals. Unlike previous human women converted unintentionally or accidentally, Tempest willingly agrees to conversion to keep Darius strong and safe. He had decided to grow old and die with her. Only parts I didn’t like were when Tempest made stupid decisions used to deepen or continue the conflict and tension of the plot. I think it would be so much more suspenseful if—usually the heroine—did the smart thing and still wound up being dragged into the conflict.

Other Series

Christine Feehan is a prolific writer and has a wonderful imagination although her characters tend to have the same physical and personality characteristics—the males all dominant, demanding, and bossy, the females accommodating out of love but also smart and willful when necessary. She has a series about people who are also leopards, a new one about shadow riders, people who can enter shadows, be invisible to others, and travel long distances quickly.

These stories also center on the males having a difficult time finding compatible mates but have the more typical plot of an obstacle, an enemy, having to be resolved—stopped or destroyed—before they can safely become a family. Out of all of them, I prefer the Carpathian series for its imagination and intricate world.

I’ve only read one book in another series with bound usually in the title. Bound Together is about the oldest brother of a large group of brothers who is undercover in a motorcycle gang to stop a human trafficking ring. I guess it’s also about a group of sisters, some married to the brothers, who have various powers in controlling the elements. These are not social-consciousness raising books. They are primarily for entertainment and I can’t find anything entertaining about the sordid world of trafficking or pedophilia, which also plays heavily in the brothers’ stories. I won’t be reading anymore of these books though I liked the characters.

The Carpathian Novels

The Carpathian Series

I’m six books in to the currently twenty-seven novels Christine Feehan has written about the species she calls the Carpathians. They can live for centuries, though they can be killed or die from disease, especially the children. The race is dying out as few pregnancies go to term, the children born mostly die in their first year, and of those who survive the vast majority are male. Why this is happening hasn’t yet been answered.

The species requires human blood to survive but does not kill or harm those they feed on. They can create illusions in the human mind so that the person preyed upon feels no fear and has no memory of the incident. The males of the species require a lifemate to keep their emotions. Without one, after living two hundred years, they lose their ability to see colors and feel emotions. Their sense of duty to their race’s survival is the only thing that may keep them from turning to the thrill of terrorizing and killing their prey, the one emotion left to them, which is a sacrilege to their race and turns them into the undead—the vampire who kills humans and unturned Carpathians alike.

Book by Book

The Dark Prince introduces Mikhail, the Prince of his people, who holds the race together and searches for answers to their possible extinction. His lifemate turns out to be a human woman with psychic powers who he successfully turns into a Carpathian. This had been tried on normal human women by vampires, but they went mad and had to be destroyed by Carpathian hunters for preying on children. Female Carpathians don’t turn—except maybe by a vampire, which hasn’t been said yet—and are the light to the males’ darkness, their only hope not to lose themselves to the darkness within.

Dark Desire concentrates on the Prince’s brother, Jacques, who is tortured by a vampire and buried alive for years. He loses his memory of who he is but hears the thoughts of his lifemate, a child of a Carpathian male and a human woman, and draws her to his rescue—Carpathians sleep buried in the earth, which rejuvenates them. She knows nothing about the race and thinks she has a blood disorder that requires frequent blood transfusions.

Dark Gold is the story of Aidan, an ancient—a Carpathian who has been alive for centuries—living in San Francisco to combat vampires who have congregated in the area. He finds a psychic human woman, his lifemate, who he turns. Most of the book concentrates on her struggle to adjust to becoming another species.

Dark Magic is about the Carpathians most skilled healer and vampire hunter, Gregori. He is also one of their oldest males and close to turning. The Prince’s lifemate is attacked while pregnant with a daughter. Gregori heals both mother and child and imprints himself upon the child to create his lifemate. Claiming her at the age of twenty-three, very young for a Carpathian, she struggles to accept the curtailment of her freedom. Lifemates cannot be apart for any stretch of time without emotional and physical repercussions, and males are naturally possessive and patriarchal.

Interesting stories but the books started to become repetitive until I read the following one. I’ll post about it next week.

Am I a Hoarder?

Am I a Hoarder?

 I don’t think so, though despite the boxes and bags of clothes, kitchen items, and other paraphernalia I’ve donated multiple times, my house still overflows with stuff, to the point where I’m embarrassed to ask people over. I’m holding on to the notion that since I’m willing to get rid of things I no longer use—and yes, I have also surreptitiously donated items of others in my house without telling them—that means I am not a hoarder.

The people I live with—I won’t name names—are definitely a cross between hoarders and pigs. I haven’t decided which characteristic dominates. My house is small and we have no garage. We have a basement but more than half of it is taken up as bedrooms and a laundry room. We can still walk through, generally without incident, and I know where the things are that I use on a regular basis. Other things I need once in a while? No guarantees I’ll remember in which safe place I stored them.

Anyway, here is my argument that it’s not me but the people I live with:

#1

I begged—okay, I ordered—my husband not to put a mattress and box spring we were replacing, as well as a recliner, out on the front lawn. He did anyway and they sat there for two years before our neighbor took pity (or just couldn’t stand seeing the blight on the neighborhood anymore) and got rid of them for us. We don’t have a truck, asked relatives who do to help but for one reason or another it never came together, and didn’t have the funds to pay a removal service.

#2

My oldest moved back a year or so ago and keeps spreading. He has taken over the couch and surrounding floor, the kitchen buffet, and the rest of the basement. I have picked up after him and charged him for the service, thrown stuff back into his bedroom, and of course nagged. I need a new strategy. My husband’s armchair and surrounding area in the living room and man cave are no neater, nor is my youngest son’s bedroom. I can’t remember the last time I was able to vacuum any of their floors.

#3

I generally have no luck in getting my husband to mow our fairly large lawn more than twice a year, and when I had to spend two summers in Georgia to help my parents, neither he nor my sons took care of my vegetable garden, which is now a bed of crabgrass. Bushes, even saplings, have been allowed to take over the yard—oh, I digress. That really doesn’t have anything to do with hoarding, I suppose.

In that case, I will rename the post. This is a bitch fest. The question is what do I do besides bitch? We are in the second day of a heatwave, so nothing for the moment. The temperature will go back to the seventies midweek, however, so I think I’ll take the next week and a half and be ruthless. Anything not used on a regular basis is going.

That doesn’t address the yardwork or how to keep stuff from accumulating again. Maybe by next week’s post I’ll have some strategies to share.

The Fresh Air Fund

The Fresh Air Fund

I recently became Facebook friends with the grown-up who used to spend a week or two with my husband, me, and our kids in the summers before he became a teenager. We haven’t seen him since then but the affectionate connection still exists. He has a son of his own now and travels back and forth to the South, where his family lives, and NYC where he pursues a career as a rap artist.

Not being particularly savvy at the computer and not having a smart phone, I don’t quite understand how to go on the sites where his music can be found, so haven’t heard it. There is also some way to vote for his album in some kind of contest. I think this paragraph shows my ignorance. Nevertheless, it’s really nice to be able to at least personally offer my support.

The Organization

I don’t know if there are similar organizations in other cities around the country, but the one in NY has been around for decades and brings together many children from the city with families in rural areas to give them experiences of nature and the slower pace of living they might not have the opportunity to explore in the city.

They interview prospective host families, check the home, and give advice on helping kids to adjust to a new environment. Bugs and wildlife not found in the city can be frightening to a child not used to them and of course being away from home, especially the first time, can cause anxiety. Different needs are addressed, such as skin and hair care, the ability or inability to swim or ride a bike, etc.

The kids come in on buses to a designated pickup area and are returned the same way. Contact people are always available if some problem crops up. Host families are required to contact the child’s family to assure them of his or her safe arrival, with maybe other calls once a week or so depending on the child’s needs, though the hope is that he or she will bond with their host family.

One of my kids was a preschooler, the other not yet born when we first became a host family. We have wonderful memories of those years. I recommend the experience.