Ugh, Being married to someone who simply can not throw/give a single thing away or even is aware of someone else in the family doing such a thing leaves me feeling like the basement & garage (temporary garbage dumpsters) are an albatross around my neck. Every winter I try to chip away at this task but get bogged down by the possibilities of; 1. making a killing selling this broken dusty item on ebay. 2. One of our three daughters may wake up some day and realize they have the strong need to clutter their lives with loads of crapp from my past. Heck I took my mothers butt ugly stuff and like a good daughter have tripped over the boxes filled with everything from silver plated tea services to stain glass pelicans. I worry that this younger generation doesnÂt understand the importance of tradition. 3. I couldnÂt possibly throw away any scribbled piece of art work as I have promised my self when the time comes that I have huge amounts of free time on my hands I will be scanning all of these master pieces for my daughters who must want them some day. 4. Now the hardest type of item to purge is the thing that I purchased that just didnÂt work from day one like the portable firepit that raised the height of dispersing smoke level with the surrounding seated folks, or the exterior heater that doesnÂt work in windy areas such as my yard because the heat blows away, and of course then there is the item that I thought I just had to have in the store but by the time I got home knew it was going directly down to the basement. HmmmÂperhaps we should have a virtual yard sale hereÂanyone interested in some cracked clay pots!!!! kt

Why is this so hard?

I'm sure taht you can find such organizers in any of the Big Box stores but Sears also has garage organizers which are quite nice. In line with that, I bought some shock absorbing floor mats at HD which are great for reducing leg fatigue. It comes on a roll and runs abut $4/ foot, IIRC.

It's important to control the new stuff coming in as well so the clutter isn't growing. I often just declutter on the fly now, e.g. if I open a closet I sometimes end up just scanning through it for things to get rid of. I think we can get so used to looking at the same stuff that we don't really *see it* and question whether it serves a purpose anymore or not. I never really strive for perfection in my organizing because it would just bog me down with indecision, so I try to focus on doing anything that will help the situation, even if that means getting rid of just a few things at a time, tidying up a shelf or closet here and there, going through a box of things. when I'm working on a project I do end up with a lot of clutter around it that I don't put away because I want things at hand, but I also do a bit of an inventory from time to time and pick out materials, tools, bits and pieces that I know I'm finished with and put them away to reduce the clutter, and one of the things that motivates me to keep going with a project is just being able to gather up all the materials at the end and put them back where they belong (tools back in the garage etc). Garages are hard though because we don't spend a lot of time in them. I've made some strides with ours to get it more organized by putting up tool/shadow boards and that has made it much easier to find the most used tools in there. But we do hold onto a lot of materials for future projects too, pieces of wood, metal left over from other projects and they do come in handy but also take up a lot of space. I think anything you do to make progress is a good thing, even small changes can make the most disorganized areas more functional This post was edited by trancegemini_wa on Sat, Mar 2, 13 at 1:05