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walkitoutI was putting something in the dishwasher the other day, when sometime fell down with a clatter. Not a glass clatter, so nothing terrifying, but a clatter. I looked around, and found a rectangular plastic doo-hickey that I did not recognize. I figured it was part of the dishwasher that had fallen down, but it was not clear to me where it had fallen down from, so I put it on the counter above the dishwasher and told R. about it.
R. took a look around, and then looked some more. Then he started looking for a model number on the dishwasher. He struggled. So I went looking for the owner’s manual for the dishwasher. I checked in the kitchen. I checked on the short shelves by my chair in the living room. While I was there, I decluttered and organized the owner’s manuals that were on that shelf. I went upstairs to my office. I checked the file there. I decluttered that file of owner’s manuals, and in addition to recycling about a quarter of the file, I took two out and put them in envelopes that I addressed to be mailed tomorrow. I had sent those items to other people, and figured they my want the manuals to go with.
I went upstairs to look in the filing cabinet there. R. has made it an absolute joy to use those file drawers — taxes in one drawer and house related stuff in the other. Finally, I went into the unfinished space up there, and in the metal filing cabinet I found the dishwasher related paperwork.
I decluttered that paperwork. We looked through it. We decided we could get rid of it all, because by that time, R. had found the model number online, and leafing through the paper manual, the only useful part was the troubleshooting guide and we could get that online as well.
So. Dishwasher woes (which R. was able to correct without any new parts) leads to filing decluttering in multiple filing locations.
Commentary:
Why do we have multiple place to look for paperwork? Actually, this normally works really well. I usually find things the first place I look AND it is usually very close to where I am when I decided I wanted the thing. While centralizing filing would give us a single place to look, it would require us to share management of the files AND it would mean I have to switch floors to find the thing I am looking for much more often.
I was pretty entertained that I was doing exactly what Dana K. White’s book, _Decluttering at the Speed of Life_ advocates for (when decluttering, don’t make it worse than it was when you started the project) but modified by my approach (if I can’t find something, clean until I can). The perspective is ever-so-slightly different, but in a great way. In the past, when I’ve been struggling to find something, it has turned into a Major Project along the way. This contained that impulse relatively well.
But it was only relatively well, because after the dishwasher thing, the Puttering turned into decluttering some kitchen cabinets (applying Dana White’s visibility rule — they don’t _seem_ visible because they have doors, but you are in there constantly, and if you are always shuffling objects you _don’t_ want to get at what you _do_ want, it is cumulatively a lot of effort). I also talked to R. (without any yelling or anything! Yay, me!) about how he stops me from getting rid of things I buy, partly by objecting to me getting rid of them at all (pulling them out of the trash) and partly by objecting to _how_ I get rid of them. He has committed to “trying” to do better at this. I don’t like “try”. I don’t require success. I do not want a bunch of litigation around repeating the offending behavior (“But I’m Trying So Hard!”).
We also decluttered the fridge, including vacuuming the floor of the freezer and R. got down on the floor with a damp towel and cleaned the floor of the freezer. That’s super awkward (you have to take the wire drawer out), and some of the volume / weight in the freezer was R.’s. He’d made some soup a while back and froze it. I had not been super impressed by that soup, so it was definitely His Soup. He decided _he_ wasn’t that impressed by the soup, so he tossed it. We tossed some other things in there, too. Weirdly, getting rid of expired food is easy for me, but getting rid of any food at all is hard for him.
A really long time ago (probably around 2011, give or take), I bought some barley from Eden Foods. It had an expiration date of 2013, and I know perfectly well that it was fine in 2013, and for some period of time after that. However, after around 2015, I wasn’t ever going to eat it, and I tried to get rid of it, and that was stopped. So it has sat in a container in the cupboard for over a decade, _while expired_, and about 8 years of that time, the person who bought it (me) had a high degree of commitment to I’m Never Gonna Eat That or Feed It To Anyone Else, while the person with the issues about getting rid of any food _also_ did not eat it. We had a long conversation about these facts and related issues.
While he was taking the barley out to the compost, I opened up expired pudding mix, sprinkles and so forth. I know, you may be thinking, but they are okay past their expiration — those things are kinda immortal! And you are not wrong. And also, the expiration dates were 2018 and earlier. None of the sprinkles were Ruijters — they were all crappy American sprinkles, from when the kids were really little. But I made sure they were _poured out_ into the trash, so they couldn’t be taken back out in their containers. And then, when R. came back in, I _told him what I had done and why_.
I am learning. Slowly, but I am learning.
He was sufficiently agitated that he decluttered his 4-5 inch stack of Mail I Should Go Through on top of the microwave. I may start using that as a metric for when to trigger another decluttering session.
R. took a look around, and then looked some more. Then he started looking for a model number on the dishwasher. He struggled. So I went looking for the owner’s manual for the dishwasher. I checked in the kitchen. I checked on the short shelves by my chair in the living room. While I was there, I decluttered and organized the owner’s manuals that were on that shelf. I went upstairs to my office. I checked the file there. I decluttered that file of owner’s manuals, and in addition to recycling about a quarter of the file, I took two out and put them in envelopes that I addressed to be mailed tomorrow. I had sent those items to other people, and figured they my want the manuals to go with.
I went upstairs to look in the filing cabinet there. R. has made it an absolute joy to use those file drawers — taxes in one drawer and house related stuff in the other. Finally, I went into the unfinished space up there, and in the metal filing cabinet I found the dishwasher related paperwork.
I decluttered that paperwork. We looked through it. We decided we could get rid of it all, because by that time, R. had found the model number online, and leafing through the paper manual, the only useful part was the troubleshooting guide and we could get that online as well.
So. Dishwasher woes (which R. was able to correct without any new parts) leads to filing decluttering in multiple filing locations.
Commentary:
Why do we have multiple place to look for paperwork? Actually, this normally works really well. I usually find things the first place I look AND it is usually very close to where I am when I decided I wanted the thing. While centralizing filing would give us a single place to look, it would require us to share management of the files AND it would mean I have to switch floors to find the thing I am looking for much more often.
I was pretty entertained that I was doing exactly what Dana K. White’s book, _Decluttering at the Speed of Life_ advocates for (when decluttering, don’t make it worse than it was when you started the project) but modified by my approach (if I can’t find something, clean until I can). The perspective is ever-so-slightly different, but in a great way. In the past, when I’ve been struggling to find something, it has turned into a Major Project along the way. This contained that impulse relatively well.
But it was only relatively well, because after the dishwasher thing, the Puttering turned into decluttering some kitchen cabinets (applying Dana White’s visibility rule — they don’t _seem_ visible because they have doors, but you are in there constantly, and if you are always shuffling objects you _don’t_ want to get at what you _do_ want, it is cumulatively a lot of effort). I also talked to R. (without any yelling or anything! Yay, me!) about how he stops me from getting rid of things I buy, partly by objecting to me getting rid of them at all (pulling them out of the trash) and partly by objecting to _how_ I get rid of them. He has committed to “trying” to do better at this. I don’t like “try”. I don’t require success. I do not want a bunch of litigation around repeating the offending behavior (“But I’m Trying So Hard!”).
We also decluttered the fridge, including vacuuming the floor of the freezer and R. got down on the floor with a damp towel and cleaned the floor of the freezer. That’s super awkward (you have to take the wire drawer out), and some of the volume / weight in the freezer was R.’s. He’d made some soup a while back and froze it. I had not been super impressed by that soup, so it was definitely His Soup. He decided _he_ wasn’t that impressed by the soup, so he tossed it. We tossed some other things in there, too. Weirdly, getting rid of expired food is easy for me, but getting rid of any food at all is hard for him.
A really long time ago (probably around 2011, give or take), I bought some barley from Eden Foods. It had an expiration date of 2013, and I know perfectly well that it was fine in 2013, and for some period of time after that. However, after around 2015, I wasn’t ever going to eat it, and I tried to get rid of it, and that was stopped. So it has sat in a container in the cupboard for over a decade, _while expired_, and about 8 years of that time, the person who bought it (me) had a high degree of commitment to I’m Never Gonna Eat That or Feed It To Anyone Else, while the person with the issues about getting rid of any food _also_ did not eat it. We had a long conversation about these facts and related issues.
While he was taking the barley out to the compost, I opened up expired pudding mix, sprinkles and so forth. I know, you may be thinking, but they are okay past their expiration — those things are kinda immortal! And you are not wrong. And also, the expiration dates were 2018 and earlier. None of the sprinkles were Ruijters — they were all crappy American sprinkles, from when the kids were really little. But I made sure they were _poured out_ into the trash, so they couldn’t be taken back out in their containers. And then, when R. came back in, I _told him what I had done and why_.
I am learning. Slowly, but I am learning.
He was sufficiently agitated that he decluttered his 4-5 inch stack of Mail I Should Go Through on top of the microwave. I may start using that as a metric for when to trigger another decluttering session.