How to throw things out.

Elsie is on holiday at the moment so I'm not sure if she'll be posting, but in the spirit of Elsie I am posting on de-cluttering, one of her favourite things. As I get ready to (hopefully) move house, I am doing a lot of it.

My new rule for de-cluttering is: if you only ever see an object when you do a clean out, chuck it away. My normal pattern is to find it, admire it, relive the memories, and then put it back away until next time I do a clean out. Now the hard rule is chuck it.

There is a book at my parents house which is just below the Bible in importance. It is full of wisdom and revelation. It is The Messies Manual. It is a book about cleaning, for messy people! Because messy people think about mess very differently to cleany people. For example, 'Frugal Messies' keep junk they don't need just in case one day they do need it. For slightly 'Sentimental Messies' like me, junk isn't just junk, every piece of junk has a lot of associated memories, and when you find the junk, all the memories come back, and you can't throw out the junk because you are throwing out the memories.

So having realised that all I want is the memory, not the junk, I am now taking photographs of my junk as I throw it out.