Clothes, clothes, clothes

I clean pretty regularly.  I'm not perfect, but I clean the bathrooms every week.  I sweep daily (or at least near daily), dust weekly, and I wash the floors once a week.  I generally keep up with the laundry, change the sheets regularly, etc.  I could be better about sweeping the back deck, but it's hard to keep up with all the leaves around here.  You get the point.   (The husband is in charge of vacuuming.  He does okay with it.)  So my issue is not with cleaning, it's with clutter.  We have a pretty good amount of stuff for two people.  I mean you'd never think we're hoarders or anything (though you might be concerned about the pile of 30 books on and next to my night table, but as you are aware I like to read).  I'm totally guilty of the "But I might use it," "It was a gift," "I'm planning to use it someday," "No, you can't rid of that," syndrome.  I've gotten better with clothes.  I go through my closets once or twice a year and donate/throw away stuff.  I used to save all my books, but that got ridiculous because I read a lot.  So now I only save a few and I donate the rest.  Well, after reading The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I finally started getting rid of stuff so here's your warning, the next few posts will be about decluttering.  If this does not interest you, skip them, I understand.  Check back with me in a few months when I hopefully have a fun trip to tell you about.  

One of the early chapters in the book is about clothes.  I agreed that was a good place to start because as I said I usually go through my clothes a couple of times a year.  Well, this time I went all out.  I did what the author suggested and went through my closet and all my drawers.  I also talked my husband into doing this and we got rid of three trash bags and one box of stuff over Thanksgiving weekend.   We even did the coat closet.  I also folded some of my clothes the way the author suggested and rearranged some stuff in my drawers.  This also freed up a drawer for my husband in my dresser so he didn't have to have all of his stuff crammed into one dresser, now he has 1 1/2 dressers (his closet is much smaller than mine because when I moved in, I wasn't married so he sort of got the short end of the stick as they say).  Aside from the fact that I sometimes forgot what drawer I moved certain things to during the first few weeks, the clothes decluttering was a success and I feared I would go out and buy a bunch of new stuff, but I didn't!