I know I tend to keep coming back to this subject, but I just LOVE decluttering. When I run out of areas to declutter at my house, I ought to become a Clutter Coach and go help other people declutter their homes. Clutter Coach – I like the sound of that!

I just filled up the trunk of my car with more crap to donate. I know I could collect all this stuff and have one big garage sale and make some money, but I just don’t have that kind of energy. But of course I still get some money back when I write it off on my tax return.

For me decluttering is more than just getting rid of crap. It runs much deeper. It’s been a long, emotional process over the years but as I go through it I am forced to evaluate what is truly important to me. What do I value in life? Everyone puts different values on different things. You have to know what you truly value, or you’ll end up trying to hold on to memories or things that just don’t mean as much to you. Not only that but those things end of covering up and choking out room for the things that really are important to you, both literally and figuratively.

Take Luke’s toys for example. I’m ready to purge many of his toys. There are so many, and he only really enjoys 15% of them. The rest inevitably stay tucked away and hidden. He plays with books and balls. And tools. Sometimes trucks. The rest only hold his attention for very short periods of time, and he rarely goes back to them.

There is one key reason I hold on to things. I discovered it just a couple years ago but it has served me well ever since. I place memories on objects. Then I fear that if I purge the object, the memory will go with it. I have many keepsakes from my trip to Israel when I was 17. I also kept a lot of things that remind me of my two grandmothers who both passed away during my senior year of high school. I have slowly been getting rid of those things because I simply do not have the room and they were collecting dust anyway. You can say something is important to you but if it’s just sitting in a box collecting dust then I say, “prove it”. It is difficult each time I purge a sentimental item but it gets easier as I see that even as the objects are out of my house, I still remember those people and places just as well. In fact, my memory improves because my brain is not cluttered up from being surround by crap!

Decluttering has filtered into our financial habits as well. When wandering around a store, I find the temptation to purchase things is not nearly as strong as it used to be. When the temptation comes, I think about where I might put that, and would I really use it? Those two questions usually squash the temptation right there. Now that’s not to say we don’t buy stuff anymore. It’s just that now we put more thought into what we do buy, and it’s much easier to decide what we really want to buy. Marketing and advertising can make you think you want all sorts of things. But when you line them up with your values, most fall short. We are contemplating the purchase of a flat screen tv for our living room. It will be a big purchase (that we will save up and pay cash for, of course) that seems frivolous to me at first thought, but then I realize that we spend so much family time in our living room that the tv would not be a wasted purchase. We have a tv in the living room now but it’s very old and big and takes up a lot of space. It sits in an entertainment hutch – an empty entertainment hutch. It has numerous shelves and cupboards but they are all empty. (We have a toddler, you know.) We enjoy watching movies and baseball games as a family, and since we are adding one more kid to the mix, I say “why not?” So you see I’m not opposed to spending money, I’m just a lot more focused about it now.

Another great benefit to this process for me relates to cleanliness. I am not a naturally clean person. I hate cleaning. I used to dread it. But I don’t dread it anymore (well, I still dread cleaning bathrooms, but thankfully Mike doesn’t mind it too much). The reason I don’t dread it like I used to is because of this: You can’t clean clutter! I learned that from the Flylady, and it stuck with me. It is so true. The worst part of cleaning for me was having to move all my crap around to clean behind it, under it, over it, etc. Once that problem was eliminated, cleaning became a breeze! It takes so much less time and sweat. As a side note, my husband is not employed right now and he takes care of our son during the day. He also cleans, cooks, washes the dishes. We’ve always shared household duties but he’s picked up so much more since being at home. I didn’t have to do any persuading to get him to do it either. The story would have much different had we still lived in a house full of Mindy’s crap. He would have been tortured trying to clean around someone else’s stuff. Now the house is mostly clutter-free. We have a few spaces that still need work but we’ve come a long way, baby!