We are currently in Week 3 of Joshua Becker’s excellent online course Uncluttered. I participated in this course back in the spring / early summer, but only made it to Week 3 before life got in the way of any meaningful progress. However, Joshua, in his kindness, allows participants to retake the course as many times as they like, without any additional fee.
Week 3 of the course focuses on decluttering common areas. Since we tackled the living room last time around, we decided to focus on the dining room this time. Our dining room has somehow become a dumping ground for everything – sports equipment, toys, shoes, papers, videos, just … everything.
I broke the dining room down into seven zones to make it easier to work through – the large bookcase, the small bookcase, the areas to the left and right of the blanket chest, the blanket chest itself, the shoe rack, and the dining room table. Here are some BEFORE photos to give an idea of the amount of stuff:
Small bookcase
Large bookcase
Left of the blanket chest
Right of the blanket chest
Shoe rack
Dining room table
Saturday, I decided to focus on the areas to the left and right of the blanket chest. I enlisted the help of my daughter, and together we drug everything out of the corners. After sorting through everything, we ended up with two and half bags of garbage, and multiple boxes of donations.
Donations for Goodwill
Donations for Holiday Bureau
We also had a bag of donations to Southern Thrift, as well as a box of books and videos to take to McKay’s Books to try to sell.
My daughter and I immediately loaded the Goodwill donations into the car and drove them over to the dropoff location around the corner. We placed the bin of Holiday Bureau locations back in the corner, temporarily. (The Holiday Bureau is located in East Tennessee, so we will take the donations next time we visit my parents.) We placed the other donations by the front door and will drop them off on the way to work Monday.
BEFORE
AFTER
Today (Sunday), we will hopefully be able to clear the rest of the areas. We are also seriously considering getting rid of our dining room table. It’s too large for the space and tends to just collect clutter. We were thinking of replacing it with a smaller, round table, but we will see what happens once we have freed up the dining room of more clutter.