Last night I folded and sorted 5 large Ikea bags of laundry plus one overflowing laundry basket.
Turns out...
There were only 12 pieces of clothing for me (not counting socks & underwear).
And only 8 items of clothing for The Monkey.
4 towels, 3 hand towels, 2 washcloths, 5 dishtowels, 2 dishcloths, 3 cleaning rags. Yes, there was so little laundry for the household stuff, me and The Monkey that I remember the count of laundry items.
The rest of the clothing was Bimmer Man's.
I spent and hour and a half folding mostly one person's laundry.
I quickly decided "what a freaking waste of time" as soon as I realized that I wasn't even going to be able to fit all of his clothes into his dresser drawers. So I just stacked everything on top.
And later that night I told him he had too many clothes.
I left it at that.
Not my clothes, he can decide what he wants to do with HIS stuff. It's not my job to de-clutter his stuff because I just can't make those decisions for him - but I can set an example and keep getting rid of MY stuff and pare down The Monkey's stuff. Maybe I'll inspire him to let go of things. I'm not trying to harp on my husband - we all see "things" differently and he likes his clothes, he WANTS his clothes (but my guess is that I also do the majority of his laundry and he has NO IDEA how long it takes to do laundry, if he did the majority of laundry then he may change his mind or he might still like ALL of his clothes, I'm not sure, but either way, de-cluttering his clothes is up to him).
I highly doubt that he will miss the 6 hole-y socks that I threw away OR the yellowed and stained white shirt that ended up in the trash.
My huge point for de-cluttering for myself is this: I have donated or tossed so many of my clothes, had it just been The Monkey's, mine, and the household laundry it would have taken me 15 minutes at the most to fold, sort, and put everything away.
I'm finally starting to see the benefits of not having stuff to take care of.
And frankly, it's pretty freaking awesome. I have less chores to do around the house (but the bathrooms, floors, kitchen, etc... still need to be cleaned and wiped and vacuumed), I have more time to do crafts and play with The Monkey, I have time to crochet and finish things that I need to do around the house, and I have time to blog again. It's pretty great, I must admit.
In fact, last week I had a friend over for lunch and it took me only 5 minutes to clean up, put stuff away and Swiffer dog fur.
I'm just excited that I get to be able to choose what I want to do instead of looking at household chores as something that I'm chained and handcuffed to. Clearing out clutter has been awesome, and I'm still motivated to do more. So I am.
What I've done and what I'm going to do this week:
- Get rid of 4 more knives (I realized that after a week I mainly used 5 knives plus one crazy sharp one when sorting dog food);
- I have one more sweatshirt that I don't like;
- One more pair of work pants that I'll never wear again;
- I think I can even go through my book case one more time this week and let go of a few more cookbooks
- I even have a rug that I can say goodbye too
- Maybe even 2 or 3 jackets.
This week will also be time to get the garden ready for winter
- I need to pull out old tomato plants and annuals
- Get the compost into the garden beds
- Get some leaves raked into the new garden bed down on the boulevard so the plants will over-winter well
- Mow the lawn one last time and leave the lawn clippings as mulch/fertilizer
- Put up a few Halloween decorations
Monkey activities this week:
- Pumpkin crafts
- Painting
- Button crafts
- Working on counting UP from 1 not DOWN from 3. (basically working on numbers)
- Learning farm animals in french
Happy Monday!!!
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