If you find yourself in a similar situation and wonder where to start, think about the project in small bites instead of a whole elephant. Jordan Page, mother of eight children, runs her own business and has her own YouTube channel with a focus on saving money and productivity. About a year ago, I watched one of her videos about getting and staying motivated. Jordan reminds her audience that you eat an elephant one bite at a time. She uses this same mindset when tackling big projects that feel like an elephant. Jordan encourages people to break down these giant tasks into J.O.B.s (just one bite). This is the method I’m following to declutter my entire house. Sometimes I only have time for one drawer or five pots and pans, but sometimes I have time for 4 cabinets. This strategy gives you momentum while also stopping you from giving up. If you want to get some motivation for a big project check out her video below:
To start in my craft room I began in some of the smaller spaces like the cupboards and drawers. A lot of my cupboards are small, as you can see from the pictures, but they were chock full of school supplies.
As I sorted, I found multiple supplies that I never used anymore and bought for purposes that were necessary 10 years ago. For example tennis balls and silly putty from my first year of teaching. (I have not used them since.) I also had over 1,000 craft sticks, which is way too many. I don't even remember why I bought cotton balls, foam pieces, silly putty, or all the construction paper. I took out all the things that I knew I had too much of or would never use again and donated it. I got rid of all the blank CDs and I no longer make CDs for school and save everything to a thumb drive. I sorted through binders and music books and I set aside music books that I no longer have a need for to sell on a music teacher buy/sell/trade page on Facebook. I don't even know how many pads of post its I had. I know teachers use a lot of post its, but I have some at school and still had probably 50 stacks. The large quantities of pens and pencils got divided between our pen and pencil draw in the kitchen, my pen and pencil holders in my office, and my husband's pen and pencil holder in his office space. I still had too many, so some of them got donated as well. I was really excited to find brand new highlighters to replace the old highlighters I had that were drying up. One of my three ring whole punches has been broken for a while, so I finally tossed it. I also had two staplers that didn't work that got tossed as well. It was surprising to find so many empty binders because I feel like I'm constantly on the hunt for a binder and normally end up purchasing a new one, but there they were. Following this process of narrowing down school supplies, I found that my cupboards and drawers were actually quite empty. In fact, I consolidated all of my small school supplies like rubberbands, clips, stapler, 3-ring whole punch, and paper clips into just one drawer.
The next J.O.B. was filling my brand new hobby station. About 15 years ago my parents bought me this hobby station, as a Christmas gift, for when I eventually moved out. (No my parents were not trying to push me out. I was in high school at the time and they were trying to get me something practical as I rarely asked for big ticket items for Christmas.) Unforunately, this piece of furniture never got put together and I actually forgot about it. My mom and her boyfriend, Randy, put it together for me recently and it now is the new home for various crafting supplies. The top drawers holds all of my thread, sewing supplies like rotary cutter, pin cushion, and safety pins.
The second set of drawers contain elastic, velcro, and zippers, while also fitting my stamp collection neatly sorted. I narrowed down my stamp collection to fit into one drawer, by selecting only stamps that served multiple purposes. For example Christmas stamps, birthday stamps, thank you stamps, etc. I only plan on using my stamps for making cards in the future, so all the other stamps were not necessary.
The final drawer goes along with my stamp collection and includes inks, ink remover, and a few paper punches. I actually found even more inks in Vincent's room and will eventually go through and donate some of the remaining inks.
The added drawers of the hobby station allowed me to open up one shelf on my wall that I can now store my favorite music teachers resources, which include all of John Feierabend's music song collections. I also have my First Steps in Music curriculums, Feierabend Fundamentals, and some other song books for concerts. I appreciate being able to have all of my commonly used music resources right in eye sight. This will also make it easier to put them away after using them each time.
I was even able to get rid of another piece of furniture in my craft room, which was a bookshelf with pink and blue drawers. We are going to store that in the shed for now and will probably use it in Vincent's room when he gets older, but it feels so good to have downsized enough to get rid of furniture. I actually had already moved a whole bookshelf out of my craft room a few months ago before this minimizing process, so this is techinically the second piece of furniture I've been able to eliminate:
I didn't do much on my other shelving unit. I narrowed down the amount of paint I had to just one of each color. Now the shelf only has paints, paint brushes, and buttons.
Now here is a peak into the other drawers in my craft room:
And finally, I'm going to start keeping track of how much I donate and sell throughout this process. Here is the update as of yesterday:
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