Those of us in North America are sweltering outdoors in August. Is it a little easier to choose tasks indoors these days? What will you be decluttering, organizing, paring, donating and generally scrutinizing during the month of August?
Check out last month's July thread for our every-day-is-different CoMpLePteLy RaNdOm 31-day Clutter Challenge (WHEW!), which resulted in so much bragging - ahem... ..chatting - that we reached 11 pages and over a hundred posts just to tell it all. To view the challenge itself, see the link in the first post of July.
We're going to do it again in October, creating our own daily challenges and "improving" upon this basic idea. One suggestion has been to omit Sundays to make it a little more do-able. Suggestions for particular daily challenges that might help most are welcome! A few of those were already suggested in the last few threads of July. What do YOU think?
If you'd like to go along with the Focus cleaning schedule, and it would help to declutter in the rooms ahead of each week, here are the rooms that are coming up in August.
week of 7/27 declutter the kitchen (Focus clean outdoors)
week of 8/3 declutter the living room (Focus clean kitchen)
week of 8/10 declutter in dining room (Focus clean living room)
week of 8/17 declutter porch/entry (Focus clean dining room)
Just keeping this all in mind as I go about. The other day I tossed a bunch of old thank you cards that I never would send (freebies we received, more suitable for business customers) and I kept the little square envelopes for use elsewhere. I tossed some cardboard boxes that were beyond reusing, even when taped together.
Got started with a small chore and ended up decluttering and cleaning whole laundry room. Extra plastic containers, bottles, etc. all tossed away. I found the fabric softener I bought leaked when I poured from the first time so put that in another bottle; consolidated liquid laundry soap and powdered. Then I cleaned all the spaces, tops of appliances, drawers in pedestals. Looks nice now.
I made 3 x 5 cards of the declutter challenge and separated them according to our declutter schedule Harriet has printed above. I will try to fit the extra 15 min in on my regular routine --- even 5 minutes at a time would be helpful!
I'm looking forward to October when we can work on the challenge as a focus.
Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible. --- Francis of Assisi
Decluttering every day at my parents' house these days. It's surprising that there's a lot more to do, since this is something I've been working on a while. Today the trash collection found our cans chock full. So that's a success.
Have been thinking of Sunny's record keeping for declutter. That sounds simple and do-able.
Right now as "bedrooms" week begins, working on my own master bedroom.