Christmas Clutter Countdown Weeks 10 & 11

CHRISTMAS WEEKS 10 & 11
I made quite a bit of progress and am a little over halfway through with my second set of handmade Christmas gifts. I wasn't sure if we were going to have a family get-together this year, however I got an email from my sister saying they would travel up here if we could do a get-together at our home. We now have that on the calendar and everyone has been notified of the date and time. I met with my friend Iris to plan the invitation list for our annual ladies ornament exchange. I'll be printing and mailing the invitations in a couple of weeks. I purchased tickets for us to see the theatre production of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and also tickets for Robbie's birthday to see the Moscow Ballet perform The Russian Nutcracker. I also added a few things to my Christmas Wish List, although I mentioned one of the items (an embossing heat tool) to Robbie and he picked it up for me while he was out running errands today!

DECLUTTERING WEEKS 10 & 11
These two weeks focused on the living room. I only had two projects that I really needed to do in the living room and I finished both of those. First was to remove all the cushions and vacuum the couch. The second was to wipe down the blinds – we have three windows in the living room, each one is 4’x8’ with wide wooden blinds. I think it’s been a couple of years since I actually wiped down each slat. The top of the windows is about 11’ from the floor so about ¾ of the work requires standing on the ladder. I cleaned the inside of the windows while I had the ladder out and dusted and vacuumed behind and under the couch and end table that had to be moved so I could get to the windows. So glad to have this project done!

Another project I worked on was inventorying our VHS tapes and adding them to the Excel spreadsheet with our DVDs and BluRays. Now we have a complete inventory. We were able to declutter 30 tapes, most of them we had already upgraded to a DVD. These tapes will be donated to our library or community outreach center.

We hang our coats and jackets on the top rung in our closet, which requires one of those extension rods to get down. I got them all down this week and Robbie and I tried them all on to see if there were any we could donate to a local coat drive. We only had one sweater and a nice vest for the coat drive since we had purged our extras last year. Two of our coats had small stains on them, so I washed them and all the coats are now hung back up in the closet. I also took out all my blazers and jackets (I love jackets!!!!) and tried them all on and checked to see if any needed to be cleaned. I am so excited that most of them can now be comfortably buttoned up since I’ve been exercising and eating healthier over the past few months! I did have two that I really don’t like (therefore I don’t wear them) and they went in the donation pile.

I also tackled a mess in my craft room this week. Even though I had everything off the floor a few weeks ago, there were about 10 little piles (ok, some of them weren’t so little!) on my floor again. I’ve been wanting to rearrange some things on one of my bookshelves to make room for a few more magazine holders (which hold scrapbooking supplies not magazines in here) and put some of my plastic drawers on the floor next to the bookshelf stacked up, thus creating more storage space. (I know, I know we are supposed to be decluttering, but this is my scrapping room! LOL) I got that all rearranged and am very pleased with it. Then I worked on the other piles that just needed to be processed and put away. I listened to some Paperclipping Roundtable podcasts while I was working and the time went quickly.