This blog isn't just about me throwing away stuff, because not all clutter is ready to throw away. Some of it you CAN reuse. It's a small percentage, but if you have a lot of stuff, it's still a significant amount of stuff you can recycle in some way. Which takes me to a day from this past spring...
"Oooh!" said my wife as we were going through stuff. I turned around and saw what she had found in a paper bag. "I am using these!" This was clearly not clutter.
They were a series of postcards and greeting cards from an artist in Salem. I had bought them years ago at some Halloween-season gallery showing. They had been sitting a bag all these years, unused. But we bought a bunch of 5x7" frames, cropped the cards down to size, framed them, and hung them up in the new kitchen. They fit really well with the whole coffee decor we have going on.
What's the difference between this, and the clutter? Simple. Instead of saying "I'll use that for some project, some day", we said "Let's do this", and WE DID IT.
As I've said many times here before, the "This is too good to throw away; I'll use this for something someday" is an excuse motto invoked by us pack-rats often to justify keeping something that we should throw away. If the "someday" never comes, then it's probably clutter. This however was that 1% counter-example.
So take a look around your home for unopened boxes of things you haven't used yet, or some other "I'll get a round to it" project. This will give you something to do next weekend instead of watching TV.
