Background
For a number of years my in-laws have been talking about the state of their garage and how they need to “sort it out”. A serious decluttering session would be required! Over the 10 years they have been in their current house the garage condition has been compounded by a lack of fixed shelving. Also the boxes, and boxes, that were put there when they moved and never touched.
We have tried to offer advice and ideas for getting it sorted but limited progress was made. They felt totally over whelmed with 50 years of stuff. There were always other more important, or interesting, things to do, the weather wasn’t good enough, or the caravan in Skegness needed turning around for the next guests.
Mainly they didn’t know what to do with everything and the baby boomer mentality of “just in case”, or “we can fix it” was holding them back.
Offering help with decluttering
One of our aims for 2016 was helping kickstart the process with a few days of concentrated effort. We did check they wanted this! Their aims and motivations at the start were as follows;
- Clear the garage so they have space for decluttering the house / shed. Creating a holding pen for things to re-home.
- Be able to keep their vacuum cleaner, and other practical household items, in the garage and get to them easily.
- To not increase the size of any of their current collections, other than my father-in-laws stamps. These do bring him a lot of joy.
- For us to leave them with practical tips for how to reduce the amount of physical presents people buy them.
- To buy less stuff, so they have money to go on holiday more often.
- To leave them with a list of places / ways to re-home different things including the Facebook groups and eBay tutorials.
The baseline
The garage in need of decluttering
The garage as seen from its back door.
A plan of action
The way we tackled it was that everything had to go into one of four categories;
- keep
- sell
- give away
- recycle
Inspiration and techniques from Courtney Carver at Be More with Less and The Minimalists. We worked our way through most of the space in concentrated bursts over the four days.
There were a number of conversations around the perceived value of things, and we challenged them on their plans to fix / paint X before selling it.
We were careful not to tell them what to do, but encourage them to think about the time it takes to load things on Ebay, a Facebook selling group, or take to a car boot sale. Whilst reminding them that giving items to charity is a donation (with gift aid) that helps the charity. It may also help someone who may be on a low income, or someone who cares about buying second hand for sustainability reasons. Most of my favourite clothing items are from charity shops, or cast offs!
They really got into flexing their decluttering muscles, and you can read in my next post how we got on.
4 Comments
The outlaws
Great blog Ms Green duckie
you have got it just wright as always. We can not wait for part two.
Love the old timers.?
Lourdes Garcia
I recently moved into a new room in house share accommodation in London and managed to re-home 30 books and some still wearable clothes and accessories via the local Oxfam shop, as well as recycle three big refuse bags with brochures, leaflets, press releases and catalogues of many of the exhibitions I have relished in the last 14 years in the UK. A barely worn pair of shoes tiptoed its way quite happily into new Housemate1’s room. The flat screen TV sitting on a table in my new room I very eagerly “donated” to new Housemate2 who, incidentally, has accumulated way more stuff in 2 years than me in 14. I find decluttering very therapeutical. Nothing (or very little) does matter.