Year Long Declutter, week 1 (12 items)

Those of you who have seen my house know that while I am by no means a minimalist, I am also pretty tidy and don't like to have a lot of unnecessary clutter around - necessary clutter is fine, of course!  Seriously, though. While I like to have decorative items and I could never go the Marie Kondo route and have fewer than 30 books (I mean, what drug is she on?) I also don't like to have lots of stuff I don't need.  I've always been good about getting rid of clothes which don't fit the kids (or which, these days, they don't wear, as they are no longer growing in quite the same way they used to); books which I won't read again/won't save to lend to friends; items we never use, and so on.  Of course, in the course of daily life, things accumulate, so I usually take the opportunity a few times a year to declutter a bit. I've always done a New Year's Day clean and declutter (which is mainly aimed at decorative items) and lately, I've done the May Declutter with an increasing number of items each day for a month (one on the 1st, 2 on the 2nd and so on). 

Last year, I saw another blogger do a daily declutter - one item per day - but she blogged it weekly (because blogging ite daily would be quite a palaver and frankly, who would keep up?) and I thought that would be a good idea for 2019. I then promptly forgot about it until lately, when I've been watching a lot of declutter programmes on Netflix and got itching to do some tidying. Ironically, I had the girls help me do the kitchen cupboards between Christmas and New Year's, but of course I didn't take photos of all the stuff we got rid of... Typical.

Anyway, I decided that one item a day wouldn't give me quite the satisfaction of my May declutter, which racks up over 450 items, so I'm going to try two items a day and see how I get on with that. The word declutter isn't perhaps quite right, as a lot of my stuff isn't that cluttered to begin with, but it will do for the purposes of this exercise.

I'm going to blog weekly on Sunday, though I forgot to start at the start of January, so am going to cheekily backdate this to catch up.  Here are this week's items (only 6 days this week, so six items - looks like seven in the photo, but I realised after photographing that there is still a screen protector in the screen guard envelope, so it's actually staying). 

I have a number of semi-disposable tape dispensers, even after getting rid of these. Sometimes the only tape available isn't a refill... The light blue one is a sturdier dispenser, but the cutting blade isn't very sharp any more, so it's hard to break the tape. All of this is going in the bin.  This stuff was from the desk drawers. 

This stuff is from the junk drawer in the kitchen. A citronella candle whose wick is burned down so far you can't use the candle, a couple of small locks & keys, a bicycle bell, a stand for displaying a decorative egg (I used to have one someone had made for me, but it broke. I could put it in the Easter box, but actually, I'm going to get rid of most of that stuff later on this year anyway.) A refill for a bin air freshener thingy we no longer have. It's called the junk drawer for a reason!