Welcome to both my long time readers and my new readers/subscribers.
January and February have found me and my husband Steve streamlining our entire little house and systems, because even though we "declutter" our home on an ongoing basis, once a year or so we do a bigger deeper declutter and donate to Goodwill, and we also spruce things up aesthetically.
When are you moving to Hawaii?
Below is one of the "games" I play with myself to make decluttering and streamlining our home easier, and you can do it too. The best part? This organizing technique is free. No professional organizer who will charge you $100 per hour to help you decide what to declutter in your home is required. So here we go ...
Pretend you are moving to Hawaii.
Seriously.
Why Hawaii, you might ask, and what does that have to do with making decluttering your home easier?!
Turns out, a lot, because ...
If you live anywhere other than Hawaii already, you have to navigate a big blue ocean to get your "stuff" over to Hawaii, and pay a lot to do so too, so while you're trying to decide what you're going to take on your "faux/fantasy move" to Hawaii ask yourself:
Would I want to pay (lots of money) to schlepp this across the ocean to Hawaii on a ship, and then off the boat to my new home in a truck that I pay for too?
My guess is not so much. (Especially if you have checked shipping rates!)
How do I know this is true?
Well, many years ago I had an elderly friend who was moving to Hawaii to live with her adult children in her older age. Since her "kids" -- (in their 60s or so), were unable to come to the mainland due to work etc., she was on her own with her move, other than a realtor. (Who turned out to be not so great, just adding to the stress.) I took mercy on her, giving her packing and moving tips and resources and encouragement along the way.
No matter how much I suggested (kindly) that she not do it, she insisted on moving her big heavy carved wooden bed because she loved the frame and headboard and had had it forever, and so pay to move that big bed on a boat to Hawaii she did.
I called her after her move and she sounded stressed as she told me she had been "refinishing" her bed with touch-up scratch coverup -- all carved big headboard of it. She said one of the boards would also have to be repaired as it had broken on the way over, and she was still quite distraught about this and went on and on.
How much easier it would have been just to buy a new bed in Hawaii, don't you think? (Which probably would have cost less than shipping her bed too.)
Around about that same time, I kid you not, I happened to hire a new massage therapist who liked to talk during our sessions, (much as I mentioned that I don't like to talk during my massages.) She was telling me all about her upcoming move back to Hawaii and how stressed she was with deciding what to ship over there and especially how much it was going to cost to ship her Toyota van. (Vans are big, and heavy, right?)
Well, since I was trapped on that massage table as Hawaii-Moving-Gal-2 yakked on and on about moving back to Hawaii, I gave her some moving tips.
About six months later she called to tell me and her other CA clients that she was once again available for massage because Hawaii hadn't worked out, so she had moved her van back to the mainland, along with herself and all her "stuff." Van included.
Now I don't know about you, but neither of these situations sounds much fun to me, and also very pricey, and I've orchestrated enough moves of my own, (15 of them), to know I'd try to do everything I could to declutter and streamline my home and sell everything off but my soul before I'd ship it all to Hawaii! (My best moving tips are just $1.99 'til the end of February.)
So, as you go around your home to streamline and declutter your possessions this pandemic winter, ask yourself:
Do I really want to move this to Hawaii? Do I really want to pay a lot of money to move this to Hawaii? Do I? Do I?
If you do, that's totally fine, of course, but please just give it some cost and stress consideration before you do.
On another home note ...
Here's something we did in our home recently while decluttering that has worked really well ...
I don't like a cluttered fridge front, so these new magnetic lists work great and when I go to buy the goods I just take the magnetic list off the fridge to my computer and order away. The pens and eraser being right there too avoid that "Now where's a pen?!" thing-y. We labeled ours GROCERIES, HOUSEHOLD, ESSENTIAL OILS, REMEDIES. That's just what makes sense to us for our orders, but your labels will be unique to your family, of course.
Some things I DO feel are okay to leave on the front of my fridge ...
Like a couple of my favorite magnets I've had for years, but I ditched all the others. Suffice it to say not a lot of silver and champagne room service has been happening in most of our homes during this pandemic time, and when this pandemic is over my friends, I don't know about you, but I want to go someplace like this! And I'm hoping a uniformed butler with a posh silver tray is on duty! :)
Have fun "moving" to Hawaii,
Kathryn :)