Magazines

Yesterday I decided to go through my embarrassingly tall stack of old magazines.  I decided to do this because we need to clear out the basement to get it framed out and because I thought it was a quick and easy cop out job.  It would seem that I was wrong and as a result this is a post about a job half done.

So far I have corralled all the magazines in the house.  I'm afraid the total comes to 61.  I think the oldest is a BBC Good Food magazine from 2000, you can tell how old it is by the picture of shaggy haired, teenage Jamie Oliver on the front.  I thought I could take a quick flick through them all and be done with it in an hour.  What a fool I was, I am not the proud owner of 61 magazines for nothing.  The moment I open them I am transported into dreams of all the perfect lifestyles portrayed on their shiny pages and I just can't let them go.

Anyway, after 2 days of sitting around reading I'm nearly done.  I have a big pile ready to go, 8 more to look through and carpal tunnel syndrome from typing out vital recipes that I might not be able to live without.  Actually, I did come across a nice sounding spinach and feta filo pie which I might do Gary for Christmas so it's not all been a waste of time.

So in the absence of any proper clear out news here is a picture of Rose in her full witches regalia ready for Halloween.

Junk Drawer #1

This week really has been a total write off for me.  We recently had a Home Energy Evaluation done and are now trying to figure out how to make our house more comfortable and efficient to run.  I have 120 days to get insulation and a new furnace installed.  Anyway, with chasing contractors around for quotes and Rose's party prep there still hasn't been a lot done on the decluttering front.

So today, just for something to write about I emptied the junk drawer and the pen pot that lives on the kitchen counter.  Here are the contents...

In Good Riddance, Showing Clutter the Door, Susan Borax and Heather Knittel say that you need a junk drawer for 'household items (that) defy categorisation' I confess that mine is for stuff I can't be bothered to put away properly and don't want to get rid of even though I should.  They have a list of rubbish items commonly found lurking in the junk drawer.  As you can see I am guilty of the following.

• Rubber bands
• Twist ties
• Miniature sticky notes
• Pens that don't work
• Unidentified keys
• Paper clips

I am also a hoarder of key rings and expired coupons (not shown here, they live in a different junk drawer), small things that are too good to throw away like tiny torches from loot bags, hair clips for 2 year olds, spare buttons from clothes I don't own anymore and anything half decent from a Christmas cracker.  I am also building up a formidable collection of glasses cleaning cloths and yet my glasses are always filthy.  Am I alone in all this?

I had a good tidy up, put some stuff back where it should actually go and threw some stuff out but if you examine the newly tidied junk drawer (below) you will still see a big ball of rubber bands.  How can I throw it out when I've been building it since 2014?  Anyway, you just never know when you might need 600 rubber bands, perhaps I'll need to escape through the dining room window on a home made bungee rope one day.  There, I'd better keep them for fire safety reasons.

Scrap Metal?

This is a complete cheat's post and comes to you courtesy of my husband and father-in-law.

I've been quite busy over the last few days getting things ready for Rose's birthday party, making llama bags for favours and prepping jewellery for the girls to make.  As a result I've had no time for de-cluttering.  The men on the other hand have been busy going through the big pile of tools in the basement.  They have done very well and this is the resulting pile of things that will be going.

On the whole I am very impressed.  However, I did find this rather humble looking bag in the keep pile.

Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what's in it? No? 63 Allen keys that's what.  Please understand that I am only revealing this to prove that I am not the only person around here with a weak spot, see Drowning in Gloves and Winter Wardrobe.  I told Tom how many there were in the bag and in the name of accuracy and thoroughness he went round the house searching through untouched tool boxes, bedside tables and other likely Allen key habitat and found a further 18.  Wow.  That's a lot of IKEA furniture.  Here's a picture of some just to prove I'm not fibbing.

What on earth am I going to do with them all? Is there a special place where you can send Allen keys to retire or must they all go into scrap metal and be melted down to make new Allen keys?  Perhaps I could try to sell them all back to IKEA then buy some furniture with more free Allen keys.  Please help, all Allen key disposal/recycling/crafting ideas warmly received.

Winter Wardrobe

The weather here in Southern Ontario is being typically capricious for this season.  A couple of weeks ago it was a balmy 26 degrees, but now we are barely in double figures and it snowed on Tuesday.  Here's photographic evidence and more can be seen in my Instagram feed.

So time for the biannual wardrobe change over I think and a jolly good clean out while I'm at it.

I read quite a bit in my resource books about cleaning out your clothes.  One good technique is to take everything out of your wardrobe, get rid of 5 coat hangers and then put back only what will fit on the remaining hangers.  Another is to throw out everything you haven't worn for one year.  I'm feeling quite good about streamlining my possessions right now so I decided to disregard both of these methods and just go on a trashing binge.  I did pretty well and managed to get rid of all this...

• 8 summer tops and t-shirts
• 4 hoodies and sweaters
• 3 skirts
• 2 pairs of trousers
• 2 dressy tops
• 2 pairs of shorts
• 5 pairs of tights

Summer stuff has been stowed under the bed and in the back of the spare room closet and everything else is sorted into trash and donate.

My problem area in the wardrobe department is jeans and I'm only writing about it in order to shame myself into getting rid of some more.  I have 2 pairs of skinny jeans (1 white, really?), 4 pairs of boot cut and 3 pairs of gardening and painting jeans.  A grand total of 9.  3 pairs don't really fit, in fact I bought 1 pair 4 years ago after a few weeks of very strict dieting and they haven't really fitted since the day I tried them on in the store.  Also, why 3 pairs of gardening jeans? I don't spend that much time in the garden.

I fear that this is not the full extent of the jean hoarding and when I tackle the basement I will find more in my sewing stash waiting to be turned into something else.  They may be waiting a very long time!

Am I the only person who holds onto denim or do other people?  Do you have an irrational fear of throwing other items of clothes out?  Please tell, I'd love to know that I'm not the only one.  Tune in next week to discover if I have managed to part with some more of the Jeans.  After all I can always buy some more!

More Shoes?

Rose was quite taken by my shoe sorting and arranging the other week and wanted to join in.  So here are 11 of her 12 pairs of shoes (her indoor school shoes are at school so not included in this picture).

She's cheating a bit because she pinched 3 pairs of old sneakers out of the donate pile in the garage so she can look like she's all carefree and bohemian with no need for possessions.  Nothing is further from the truth believe me.

She is getting rid of 3 pairs of sneakers (that are too small, I'm sure that doesn't count) and 2 pairs of sandals.  Here's her newly amended shoe selection.

This slimline selection will not last long as I owe her a pair of birthday boots and we'll be off to the store for snow boots soon.  Winter lasted so long last year that the soles of her old ones wore right through.  In April I resorted to filling the holes up with silicon bathroom sealant to try to keep us going for a bit longer.  This technique didn't work for me, if anyone out there has any tips for prolonging the life of a pair of well loved shoes please tell.

Finishing up the Closets

I thought of writing 3 more posts about finishing off the closet clear out, but the idea of that is so dull its making me reach for a bottle of something strong so I'm just going to write a list of everything.

• 7 Jackets (1 bought in 2010 with the labels still attached)
• 1 summer dress worn once in 2012
• 1 strange wrap style sleeveless top, don't know what I was thinking
• 1 unfinished silver top made from old t-shirt, unfinished because looks terrible
• 1 boys hoodie with only 1 sleeve, unfinished mending/conversion job
• 2 age 10 girls dresses, given to us and never worn
• 1 feather trimmed cape, Rose's not mine
• 1 iron that stopped working 3 years ago
• 1 box that its replacement came in
• 1 pop up gazebo that's still in the shipping company packing from our emigration
• 3 backpacks
• 2 lunch bags
• 2 sneaker bags
• 8 matching blue kids size coat hangers
• 5 matching white kids size coat hangers
• 1 fancy girls coat hanger
• 13 assorted plastic coat hangers with age/size printed on
• 1 light bulb changing pole with fittings

Lessons learned this week

• Buy less clothes in sales that don't really fit properly because they are a bargain
• Insist that coat hangers are removed from clothes before they leave the store

So much unwanted plastic seems to slip into the house unnoticed these days, especially with the kids, and coat hangers are the worst.  You know the ones I mean, the flimsy ones with age/size on coloured plastic bits stuck on them.  The problem is that they really don't last very long or look nice in the closet/wardrobe but you can't take them anywhere for reuse.  There must be acres of landfill filled with those alone.

If anyone out there has any coat hanger solutions, knows anywhere they can be taken or wants to start a campaign for only producing coat hangers from recycled materials please let me know.

Drowning in Gloves

The front hall closet is home to baskets and bins of all the hats, mitts and other paraphernalia that help keep us warm, dry or shaded when we go out.  Everyone was available to help at the weekend so we changed over ball caps for toques and went through the giant box of winter stuff that vacations in the spare room closet in the summer.

I'm starting with a list of everything I found in all the closets.  There may be more that I've not found yet lurking under beds and in other forgotten corners but this is plenty for now.

• 26 toques (see this post for definition of toque if you're not Canadian)
• 38 pairs of gloves
• 9 neck warmers
• 11 baseball caps and summer hats
• 4 pairs of earmuffs
• 4 scarves that don't belong to me

That's a total of 91 items of outerwear between the 4 people living in this house.  These statistics suggest that I have 2 problems.

1. I don't seem to be able to pass a bin full of bargain Thinsulate gloves without buying at least 2 new pairs.  This goes for tiny stretchy ones in all different colours too.
2. I like to knit and have a knitting-itchy-hats-for-children-who-don't-really-want-one habit, might be in training to be someone's grandma.

If it's neither of these things then i think there might have been an outerwear breeding programme in the cupboard.

I found these tiny gloves that belonged to Jacob when he was 4, not sure if he's going to wear them again.

To illustrate the extent of my glove-retention issue here's a picture of the rest (except for the pair in Rose's school bag).

We've gone through it all and got 3 bags all packed up and ready to be donated to people who need warming up this winter but somehow there are still 62 items.  I could blame it on Rose who insists that she NEEDS 8 winter hats but really its me and my glove thing.  I've got 8 pairs in the closet and 6 'just in case' upstairs.  I think I need help!

I've reread this post and it has struck me how ridiculous it is that I own 14 pairs of gloves just for me, I shall endeavour to cut that further to 7/8 before I get to the thrift store.  I might regret it when the apocalypse comes and there is a world glove shortage but for now I'll probably be OK.

Sunscreen anyone?

Front hall closet done.  It actually took a lot less time than I thought and nothing too, too bad in it either.  Just 3 things that really illustrate the dangers of having high shelves and keeping attractive baskets in hard to reach places.

First, and I have to say this demonstrates my general lackadaisical attitude to house work quite well,  I got out the step stool to wipe down the top shelf of the closet and I found these pushed right to the back.

Must have been placed there by the previous owners to make whatever odorous items they kept on the top shelf smell even more odorous.  Guess I've not looked up there in 3 years then.  Oops.  Anyone out there who likes a scented sachet? I definitely recommend these, after however many years in the closet they are still very, very pungent.

This next photo doesn't need much explaining really.  I'm clearly paranoid about harmful UV rays which is probably not a bad thing, but it might be best if I could find a single, visible place to keep the sunscreen in order to avoid acquiring so many bottles.

And finally, in January 2015 Jacob and I purged his room of GOOS (Good On One Side) paper and rather than throw it all out I made handy dandy notebooks which used to travel around with us as things to do when we ran out of activity books in restaurants.  I blogged about it here in The Parkers Abroad.  See the one on the top, it has Jacob's Christmas list for 2014 on it.  Fancy wanting an iPod touch, how quaint, he would be less than pleased to receive one this year.

I'm not throwing them out.  I shall write lists on them for the next 2 years.  Or just maybe sometime in 2021 I'll find them in the bottom of another attractive storage basket on a very high shelf.

Does anyone else own 10 half used bottles of sunscreen?  Does anyone else find the previous owner's belongings in their house 3 years after moving in?  Please let me know and reassure me that it's not just me.