Consolidating....

Continuing to listen to Deluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White, I've recently turned my mind to consolidating things - another concept White writes about with clarity.  I've been looking at a trouble spot that's needed dealing with for weeks now, and as I listened to the audio book I realized the solution was right in front of me.

Today I've combined the container concept with consolidation (which you really need to do in order to declutter well) and I actually solved several trouble spots.

A bit of show and tell here.  A corner in our bedroom has been troubling me since it was created during the Christmas holidays when things were being shuffled around to accommodate other things elsewhere in the house.  It is now beyond time to deal with it all: 

Ignore the photo-bombing happening in the lower left hand corner of the picture.  That was fairly quick to deal with - it was a simple matter of putting some things away and adding some other things to the donate pile.   No...  the real problem is the stuff directly in front of the bookcase -  namely a cardboard box holding some instructional art books and art papers and 3-ring binders, loose sketch pads and another 3-ring binder in front of the box, and (on the right) four stacked clear boxes with miscellaneous materials that are used in beading crafts.  

Oh, and those two round boxes sitting on the bottom shelf of the bookcase...  They hold some balls of cotton yarn, and never really belonged in the bookcase.  They were a temporary solution that had become permanent.  But no more.

Having known for more than a month what the problem was here, today I suddenly had clarity (thanks to Ms. White) that consolidation was my solution!  You know... putting like things together, counting them, and figuring out the best way to deal with them.  Oh, my goodness...  White has this nailed.

So everything in front of the bookcase got pulled away and sorted through.  Even the bookshelf had a look through again.

I knew I'd used a lot of cotton yarn last year, but when I opened the boxes I was surprised (and pleased) to see how no-longer full they were:

*****

Okay...  now, before I go on, I need to make a confession.  In recent posts I've been talking about how I've managed to get most of my yarn into the closet in my craft room.  Somehow, in all that reorganization, I'd completely overlooked that I've been storing cotton yarn in several drawers of a dresser in our bedroom.  It's not that I actually forgot, and I promise I wasn't being intentionally misleading, but now that I'm thinking about it (and dealing with it) , it's time to show what that collection of yarn looks like:

The good thing is that when I opened up those drawers I discovered that over the past year I had also used up quite a bit of yarn stored here, so there was plenty of room in the drawers to pack into them the yarn that was left in the round boxes above.  I was able to consolidate all the cotton yarn into these drawers.  

It must be said, though, for the record... I was ready to "respect the container" if the yarn didn't fit.  In other words, if all the cotton yarn didn't fit into these drawers (and into a small basket I've set aside for working on this month) it had to go.  I was prepared to just pick out what I liked the least until it all fit.

With that done, I was also able to get the sketch books and art-related books into the "art" bookcase:

Eventually I'll whittle the contents of this bookcase down further, but I have found that this "whittling down" happens in stages.  I'll call this Stage 2.   Stage 2 is progress from Stage 1 - Stage 1 being the cardboard box.  A cardboard box (in this house) usually signals that I have no idea where to put its contents.

The binders were culled through and all that were left were stored where it makes more sense for them to be (not in a cardboard box).  

And the boxes of beading tools and miscellany were consolidated into three different boxes and have a neat (if not perfect) place in the craft room:

The perfect spot for them would be in the craft room closet, but that's probably Stage 3 for these.  😉

And those pretty round boxes now hold some wool-blend yarns in my yarn room - a much nicer solution than I had before (which was the last standing cardboard box in my craft room):

Inventorying, counting, eliminating, consolidating...  all of these are helpful in organizing what we want to keep and getting rid of what we don't need or want anymore. 

And all of that is happening early this week with my books as I cull through them - for the purpose of downsizing, but with a goal of donating a bunch to the upcoming Friends of the Library booksale.   I've already made a surprising discovery and I'm kind of embarrassed, kind of looking forward to sharing it with you. 

I hope you'll come back!