CLEAN UP ON AISLE U

The clean up work never ends if you look hard enough.

But what if you never look?

We’ll get to that.

First take a look around right now.

If you start with a plan things get easier.

Like an outline for writers, a plan is a guide.

Remember, it has a beginning and an end.

But no one remembers that when they’re on a roll.

Clean up everything, then go back and get the places you missed.

Except that’s not a plan, it’s a never ending saga of where did all of this stuff come from.

Never Ending Clean Up Story

If you’re a certain age, and it’s not a category like a baby boomer, a millennial, or the small generational cohorts, is your mess really your fault?

Not if you become the museum storage for the whole family.

Note: I worked in museum storage. I built museum storage, managed a museum collection, and kept an even temperature and humidity for the delicate artifacts.

We had one rule that I dedicated a career in museum work to: access.

If you can’t find what you’ve got then you don’t have what you think you have.

Which leads to duplication.

Start in the kitchen.

How many strainers can you find?

Count the number of 2-cup measuring cups.

One is not enough? Two is not enough? Three? Four?

How many small mixing bowls?

This is a link to everything you need in the kitchen, thanks to Chloe Dominik.

The Minimalist Kitchen Essentials takes another path, but is that much different?

Where Does The Cleaning Start?

Before you start a clean up plan, ask yourself where everything came from.

Baby boomers have the only right answer: We don’t know, but it could be from our parents who got stuff from their parents to pass down to grateful generations.

Are we grateful, or are we hoarders?

It can be a fine line.

But it starts earlier. It starts in a thrift store, a Goodwill, a ‘collectibles’ store.

You outfit your first apartment with second hand stuff, hand me down stuff, and when you can afford to buy better you don’t discard.

Sound familiar?

We got hung up on longevity, as in, “I’ve had this for so long I could never get rid of it.”

I’ve said it more than once. I say it every time I do a clean up of my stuff left on dusty shelves.

The dust goes, the stuff stays.

Then we forget about it until the next clean up and see like it’s a lost treasure.

You can’t throw away treasure. Who would do that?

Answer that question and you’ll be on the right track.