Decluttering - a step at a time

As I've mentioned before I'm in the process of trying to declutter out house now that we are empty nesters.  I've just been doing a bit at a time working on the basis that every little bit I do will eventually add up to get the job done.  I'm also working on not bringing more clutter into the house.

That's difficult when you have a hubby who loves to browse charity shops and our local Saturday market stalls who often have books/secondhand goods on sale.  And of course I'm not a lot better - case in point, I went to say hello to my daughter yesterday.  She's a Samaritan and the branch where she volunteers was having an open day and they had a stall outside selling amongst other things - books!  Of course I came home with two.  But in my defence I do have some already boxed up to donate back.  There is an Oxfam shop nearby that only sells books so I often drop books off there as you can get the car near enough to do so.

That's one problem I have with decluttering.  I hate just throwing stuff away so I try to recycle/donate as much as possible but it's not always easy to deliver things to charity shops, especially on my own.  Hmm I think I'm just making up excuses here or worse still procrastinating.

We were talking to someone yesterday who recommended a book by Marie Kondo called "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up".  Marie has a different approach to de-cluttering in that you should do things by categories.  So for example you would gather all your clothes together.  Everything.  All in one place for example your bedroom floor.  Then you would go through the items and only keep things which bring you joy.

That's probably a bit of a simplistic view of her principals (I haven't read the book) but I if I followed that rule I'd be walking around with no knickers on because I can't say that any of my knickers bring me joy!  They serve a purpose.  They keep my backside covered, definitely a good thing, but joyful?  NOT.  (And for those of you out there with delicate wispy bits of fabric known as lingerie that leave very little to the imagination, sorry but that's not my thing.  And even if it were I'm still not sure they'd bring me joy.)

I'd also struggle to get all the books in this house in one place to go through them in such a cut-throat way but there probably are some things I could apply it to.  Just had a great thought.  I could apply it to hubby's CDs which seem to end up all over the place.  Very few of them bring me joy so I could definitely reduce the amount of space needed for them.  Trouble is that would probably also relieve me of a hubby and OMG think how much space I would have then.....lol