Rebel and Liberate July

Share your decluttering activities and ideas.
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Harriet
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Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Harriet » Thu Jun 30, 2011 10:46 pm

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all homemakers labor under the tyranny of clutter, but are all endowed by their Creator with certain undeniable Talents, that among these are Sorting, Donation, Tossing, and the pursuit of Clear Livingspace.

Clutter is the status-quo. It's the old TYRANT that's been there a long time, making us live differently than we want. It takes the form of a smug pile sitting defiantly in the way, or a worrisome disarray of papers we fear might hide something important, or a guilty collection of donations that never get to the right people, so no one is blessed.

July and The Half-Point of 2011 have arrived, so let's use these 31 days to revolt! Let's change our old status-quo thinking and stop putting up with oppression. Think differently! Why not evacuate the inhabitants of an ENTIRE countertop, floor area or desktop to a safe sorting space, get that surface clean again, and allow only the freeing items of your choice back upon it! Liberation can happen faster than we think.

What are we rebelling against this month?
What have you got?

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Harriet
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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Harriet » Fri Jul 01, 2011 4:45 pm

Handy-Dandy Reference :D for decluttering AHEAD of Focus Cleaning :idea:

first of month - finish decluttering closets
7/4/2011 laundry
7/11/2011 storage
7/18/2011 outdoor
7/25/2011 kitchen

Tweak as desired to fit your lovely home!

Looking for Indiana's Focus Cleaning threads instead? HERE'S YOUR SLIDE! (calendar is at top of forum)
If you don't believe in miracles, you're not being realistic.

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Nancy
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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Nancy » Fri Jul 01, 2011 9:27 pm

I took a load of stuff I had in the trunk to the thrift shop today. Yea for progress.
Dropped off some books by the library also.

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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Harriet » Fri Jul 01, 2011 11:44 pm

Closets this week. We had a call about the little girl we'd saved clothes for before, and it seems the family truly needs school clothes. A friend will be making a trip there soon so dd is culling some too-small clothes. I fear dd has had such a growth spurt since then that we may be sending too-large clothes, but that is better than sending too-small. HRH took an old suitcase and stored some off-season clothes that way. I told him fine, just be sure to label!

Kind of an embarrassing declutter - HRH tugged something out of the couch crevices and thought it seemed awfully roomy. He kept reaching and finding more and more! :oops: He found a couple of his own socks, but also other things of the whole family's. Lots of pens! One of my tape measures! Hair bands and socks of dd's. Our couch is stealing from us. Not many coins, though. Too bad!


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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Nancy » Sat Jul 02, 2011 11:31 am

I forgot to put in a couple of top with horizontal stripes so they are going in the car trunk today for the next trip to town the white capri's they went with are gone so no need to keep these!
I'll see what else I can find to load in with 'em.

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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Nancy » Sun Jul 03, 2011 1:15 pm

I had a moment of clarity last night watching buried alive extreme hoarders. It helped me to understand the focus and goal of the process before moving out. Even if we do not have to move we still have to move some stuff out so we do not become like those people. Getting rid of stuff does help relieve stress and is a gift to our children.

I have some more plastic containers to go that we are not using no need to keep them around if they are empty. Our neighbors continue to get ready for their estate sale the end of next week.

I have some journals to de-clutter!

So it's onward and upward with this for me hoping that it helps to make more progress this week. Getting to the journals will help plus they are in the basement and it's cooler down there.
As are the containers I mentioned above.

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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Nancy » Mon Jul 04, 2011 11:27 am

I have torn up 4 journals with two more to do discovered that this is actually quite therapeutic!
I can do a couple during an hour long TV show so that was great to discover. I still have a couple more to do from the first stack. I brought up another stack to work on this week later on. This gives me quite the feeling of success and accomplishment yea!

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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Nancy » Mon Jul 04, 2011 10:17 pm

I have been working on getting rid of journals today.
Ripping shredding and burning them.

H. has been helping me and we shredded up the first batch,
he burned one batch, I took over after that and thought I was done so I
vacuumed up the floor :arrow: boy was I wrong :o then I found two more stacks in the basement ACK!

So I ripped those up shreded some more, and have taken out the bags of ones that were shredded to go out in the trash tomorrow. Two more baskets to shred or tear up later on.

Now I only have four journals of these mead. comp. note books for notes planning and such in the house now from this year. This has been a good day for a project like this! Boy was this project ever worth it! I am liberated from having to lug those journals around any more yea!!! :mrgreen:

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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Harriet » Mon Jul 11, 2011 6:18 pm

The Hoarding: Buried Alive show last evening was pretty interesting. This was a lady who found a way out of hoarding by abandoning her house and moving into a small apartment, supposedly until she sort of got her sanity back or until her daughter needed the house. A year had passed. They showed her apt, which was very stylish and clean. She felt that her house must have been broken into during that year, because things seemed much worse to her when she got back and she saw some bare walls where she believed nice paintings had been hung. Others didn't seem so sure and thought that there was just disrepair.

My first thought was to remember lots of silly jokes about police responding to calls and thinking someone had ransacked a house but the owner says, "no, this is the way it always looks". It was kinda like, "how can you tell if a hoarded house has been robbed?", but I'm sure it wasn't funny to her. Nancy had mentioned in PWYC, this lady was very interested in recycling and had gotten caught up in rescuing items that still had use, but then she didn't get them to the right places and finally the piles were almost to the ceilings in every room, filling every room. She was very successful in her early life and was used to a lot of respect, so things didn't go well when she was questioned in any way. :shock:

I also was thinking at first that the daughter's finance was really smart and calm. But, no on the calm part, because the lady sure knew how to push his buttons and he hers, and they ended up in a tirade, with the daughter in tears. Yikes. You HAVE to question the wisdom of bringing a MAN to a session between a hoarding mother and her daughter, because the conversation is bound to be a little nuts and he will respond like a MAN, of course. But later he was the one who said there were rats, and a hidden camera mounted high proved him very, very right. Wow, were there rats. And when HRH walked through and watched the later part, when 3 rooms had been cleared, he said the pregnant daughter still shouldn't move in until they would "tent and fumigate, but nobody will have the sense to say that". But lo and behold, the fiance did say those exact words, "tent and fumigate". So I guess he was a help after all.

The lady took 5 weeks and got 3 rooms of the house interior looking great. But I don't think that was supposed to be even half the house. The fiance said even though the lady did have equity in the home, he and her daughter would be taking on a $200,000 mortgage, so I think really it was a large house and it had a pool. The daughter was due to deliver in 2 months and the lady thought she would be ready to hand the house over by then. I hope so.

That's what is different about "Hoarding: Buried Alive" on TLC network and "Hoarders" on A&E network. "Hoarders" has a lot of prep time about people, but then does everything that is "hands on" in 2 days of filming, so it can get a lot more ugly and frantic. If it were a relative of mine, I would want TLC involved, not A&E.

Oh, lucylee, the daughter had photos of the pool area from her childhood and it was a great, spacious place. Hard to believe the lady had thought it wise to bring in items and place them in piles right up to the EDGE of that pool. I thought that mirrored hutch might fall in if it were bumped against by the people. Yes, it was dirty water. They showed images of a stuffed toy floating in it that looked super grungy/filmy. You just can't leave a pool unattended.

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Re: Rebel and Liberate July

Postby Nancy » Tue Jul 12, 2011 4:01 pm

Thanks Harriet for that great info.!

I put the last sack of shredded journals, and various note books I had bagged up to toss later found those this past week in to the garbage can to go next week it feels so freeing to get
this stuff out of here now! Yea!!! Emptied out the fire pit of ash from them too.

I have items loaded in to the car trunk to go to the thrift shop again now for this week too.
So making progress is such an awesome feeling! Added to those items this afternoon again yea!

Got the dining room de-cluttered now awesome progress is happening around here.
Worked on the "corners" in the living room and added some videos to the pile to go.


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