Decluttering
At recycledfurniture.com decluttering creates an opportunity to sell furniture and buy furniture. And that’s good for the enviroment and good for you.
We recently bought a winter home in Florida and everything we bought in Florida was for that specific house. When we were done we found we had everything we needed and not a lot more to clutter up our lives. At our other home we have accumulated stuff over more than 25 years in this home and 15 years worth of stuff from older homes.
The more we looked at our clutter the more we became determined to change our enviroment which meant getting rid of a lot of stuff. If I hadn’t needed something I was saving for twenty years, I likely wasn’t ever going to need that piece of stuff for another twenty. And even if I needed that exact piece of stuff the very next year I decided I’d rather have the space and buy the purged stuff when I needed it in the quantities I needed and discard the rest in favor of decluttering.
So my rule was simple, if I hadn’t touched or needed the thing I was holding in the last year, it was either discarded or sold.
In the garage my life became very simple. I knew what I had and where everything was, with the results being clear isles at the side of the cars, room to store the new giant trash cans required by the city and boxes of great garage sale items other guys would need to clutter up their garage.
The basement was very similar in results lots of great garage sale items and getting rid of some old lawn furniture and ping pong table gave us tons of room we didn’t have. We even took a shelf we didn’t need in the garage any longer and put it in the basement to help organize our stored items.
But the biggest change that I see every day was in our office. Old office furniture stemming back from the days of huge computer monitors and desktop computers served to store a lot of unecessary stuff. These days we have two laptops, a need for file storage and a wanting for more room.
We sold the old computer desk and hutch, the office desk, bookshelves and printer stand. Once all the clutter was gone we were amazed how big the space was. And even more amazing was how many of our children noticed one of the walls in the office had tongue and groove oak paneling. It has been that way for all twenty plus years we have been here. The clutter was the first thing that caught you eye.
Now we have two regular desk, a printer stand/file storage and a bookshelve that is both attractive and functional. And the space still looks large. Here again I thought I had an idea what was in the office furniture….. I didn’t. I do now, and I know where everything is.
I am very careful what I keep these days, I like being decluttered. The net results was that the sale of furniture and garage sale items yeilded a net gain after purchasing the new furniture. The new furniture was new to us, looked brand new, but we bought furniture that was previously own and gently used.
A win-win life altering event.