Decluttering Away the October Blahs

It's October. In fact, it's almost the end of October.

October is always a dodgy month for me, health-wise. I have to be amazingly careful about food and sleep and taking my vitamins and and and...otherwise I just turn into a big Blah.

No energy, no distinguishing features, and it's too much effort to put on a pair of earrings.

EARRINGS, for pity's sake.

I get around it by doing as much as possible in advance. Laying out my clothes the night before, cooking in batches, that sort of thing.

And I have a few days off this week, and that will help too.

The other side of the October coin is the Decluttering Frenzy. It's either manic energy or total apathy. Yay. October.

But...it's fairly normal for me.

I get the urge to clear off surfaces a LOT. Every few months in fact. I declutter at the end of the summer (back to school, yay!) in October (weird energy level swings, what?) in January (New Year, new opportunity to give things to the charity shop) in March or April (because spring has sprung) and...little bits and pieces whenever the mood strikes.

Wow. That sounds like a lot of clearing out.

It...kind of is.

The thing is, though, I find it relaxing. Other people enjoy cooking. Some people (I know precisely one) enjoy cleaning. Me? I enjoy lots of things, like pointless Internet surfing and making videos about TV shows I like.

But sometimes only going through the house with a bag for the charity shop, a recycling bin and a binbag will do.

The charity shop motto: give, and it will be given to you. So I take stuff to the charity shop all the time, and sometimes they have the perfect thing for me. A dress for a fiver. A handbag for £2.95. A pair of boots I have worn once a week for the last two winters for £4.50.

Most of the stuff in charity shops I don't like and I don't want. Which is good, because the idea is for me to have a net outflowing of stuff. We get enough coming in with presents and books we love and whatever to balance it all out.

I like having as little stuff as possible. Back before I had a husband and furniture I was inordinately chuffed by the fact that my university accoutrements (including my bike) all fitted into my Ford KA. But still, sometimes I catch myself holding onto stuff. Just because I haven't sorted it in a while or I haven't thought to throw it out.

For the most part, though, it's only MY stuff that I end up giving away. BH gives away some, and lets me replace clothes and recycle the old ones, but he doesn't really buy a lot, so he kind of has a fixed amount of stuff.

He's like my Dad in that respect. They're both generally of the 'don't buy much, then keep it forever' school. Every so often Dad decides to get rid of the stuff that he's not using any more, but...that doesn't need to happen very often, because he doesn't buy a lot. And he has a lot of space.

About a month ago my Mum went over to his house. Dad was getting loft insulation and he needed to clear his roofspace, which was piled up with stuff he hadn't looked at in years.

She was more than happy to encourage him to pitch it out, sort through stuff and bring boxes. Now he has a well insulated loft with maybe a dozen boxes of things stored there.

In that, I take after Mum. She is the declutter queen. 'Do you need it? Do you want it? What is it still doing here? Off to the Cancer shop!'

It's therapeutic for her. She came to visit in the summer, and she cleared out my spices, sorted the utility room and washed down the fronts of my kitchen cabinets.

Well, there wasn't really a great deal else to do. And that made her very happy. She'd spent the previous week staying in a place straight out of Hoarders, and I think she was still a bit traumatised.

I still have some places left to organise. This is because I go through and sort and put away...and the stuff I don't know what to do with gets corralled together, and gradually pushed into a smaller and smaller space until I decide what to do with it.

There's probably a more efficient method, but we don't really have a lot of stuff to begin with, so this one works for me.

One bin bag, two charity shop bags and several days later, I'm feeling good.

This is the only way I know that beats the October Blahs.

Doing OK so far.