One of the big themes that I am get­ting in my life is the need to declut­ter. My guides have made it clear that my boat will come when I am ready for it, so to get ready and quit wor­ry­ing. So I am start­ing my spring clean­ing a lit­tle ear­ly and adding in some adven­tures in declut­ter­ing.  But aside from the fact that I am going to be mov­ing in to a space the size of a large clos­et declut­ter­ing has a lot of dif­fer­ent advantages.

Declut­ter­ing = Less Cleaning
If you get rid of the excess in your home then you have less to clean. You don’t have near as much stuff to end up in the wrong place and you have a ton less stuff to dust. I hate to dust, and I swear dog and cat hair hangs on to everything.

Declut­ter­ing= More money
I hate yard sales, but if you have a bunch of old clothes or knick knacky things you can make mon­ey either with yard sales, ebay or craigslist.

Declut­ter­ing= Good Karma
If you are like me and you don’t want to take the time and trou­ble to sell your old junk then there is always Good­will or Freecy­cle. Both are good options for pass­ing on your old and unwant­ed items to peo­ple who need them.

Here most peo­ple would show before images. I am not going to do that. No way. My place is such a wreck that I would be con­demned.  But I am going to start clean­ing. The last major declut­ter cleanse I did focused on my books. It was just before I bought my first e‑reader and I gave away 432 books.  Truth­ful­ly I prob­a­bly could have made a decent amount of mon­ey at a used book store with that haul, but I just passed them on. How­ev­er I have noticed that with the num­ber of free and cheap good qual­i­ty ebooks that I rarely re-read books any­more and since I pre­fer read­ing on a device ver­sus paper I can’t even remem­ber the last thing I re-read on paper.

In a very real way our pos­ses­sions pos­sess us. We have to spend time and mon­ey tak­ing care of every­thing we own. We clean it, we pay for repairs and upkeep and some­time we even pay to store stuff. Real­ly? There are some good rea­sons for stor­ing things, but for the most part you don’t keep things in a stor­age unit that you use reg­u­lar­ly and if you don’t use it then why keep it? My aunt recent­ly beat her stor­age bat­tle after over a decade of try­ing to get rid of her stor­age unit.  She would clean one out and some­how end up with anoth­er one full of stuff. The last unit we emp­tied every­thing but one box of pho­tos was giv­en to good­will or tossed.

A great sug­ges­tion from Lind­say Nixon is to ask “If I lost this in a fire would I re-buy it?” As I go through this not-yet spring clean­ing and declut­ter­ing adven­ture I am going to ask that about every­thing. I have a feel­ing my house is going to be pret­ty emp­ty by the time I am done.  At least I hope it is. Plus by get­ting the spring clean­ing done now I can spend those pret­ty and sun­ny spring days outside.