Frugal Village Forums banner

Fling 2009 Things in 2009 Challenge!!

71K views 2K replies 50 participants last post by  Judi Dial 
#1 ·
I enjoyed the fall fling in 2008, but now that I've flung 1,000 items, I want to see if I can de-clutter even further.

I am starting two months' late, but I am going to try to fling 2009 things this year. Just to add a twist, though, if I bring anything (other than groceries or necessary items [i.e, new hammer or something]) INTO the house, I am going to subtract it from my total flung. :) So skeins of yarn, strings of beads, new clothes, all that stuff, if it is semi-permanent, it gets counted against things flung.

As of tonight, I am at zero, and I hope to get things started moving OUT of the house tomorrow! :)
 
#1,531 ·
Madhen-it's awful in there and I won't quit until it's not. I bought 2 more units today. Dh is putting them together right now. DS is refusing to help. If I work all day today I can begin to put it back together. I cannot do the MIL drywall until then so that is my incentive. I'm just a bit overwhelmed today. All the clutter everywhere. But it's no worse than the MIL apt mess and I did that. So onward.
 
#1,532 ·
Good for you for being so determined! That is how things get done and I am sure you will be so pleased with how it turns out that all the work will be worth it! :)
 
#1,534 ·
16 things TO the dump 2 FROM the dump, (+14)

I sold: thank you notes, 2 paperbacks, an urn, a bowl, the antique folding table, an icecream condiment container, and the 4 frames (for the gallery) (+10)
Bought 2 books and a wire basket. (-3)

I forgot! I gave a rack to a dealer today too, a wooden dish thing like from Crate & Barrel.

22 more things shed than acquired. My total has been adjusted accordingly!
 
#1,535 ·
Keep at it Judi.

Took all the garbage out and the shelves have already been snatched. 2 more garbage bags gone. All the new shelves are in place (4). I have 2 partially full and a ton more to sort. By next Sunday I want to be starring at my shiny clean,updated pantry and have all the stuff out of the MIL. The tree cutters are coming for an estimate Mon. evening.
 
#1,536 ·
Snuck out the last 2 shelving units and they should be gone sometime tonight. Took 3 more bags of garbage out. Their going to riot if I don't tip them soon. I also emptied 2 or 3 more tubs into the pantry. i think I'm cooked tonight. My lungs are starting to squeeze. Later Mon. may be a good time to go at it again. Chow. (get it ,Pantry) Funny if your tired.
 
#1,537 ·
You continue to impress me, FW. Your determination is great, well done!!

I flung some expired coupons today. It was an effort - though I feel silly saying that. I think I frequently fall into apathy because things are pretty good already. I don't have a TON of work to do, so I tend to not do any work at all. I suppose it feels like there will always be time to do it. And it never gets completely out of hand - its just that for every little job, it takes so much effort to drudge up the motivation to get started. Does anybody else struggle with this? :(
 
#1,538 ·
Judi- (regarding the dryer) Dh finally figured how to get the door off and vaccumned the death out of it. It was full. Design flaw (dangerous one). I was placidly thinking it was safe as I cleaned the filter everytime. Gee. Dummy me.
It seems to be heating so far and DH says he can replace both coils for about $40. each and 10 minutes work. That would be good as I have 2 trees I want estimates on removal next week. Anyway thanks for all your input and effort.

Up early working on the pantry. Will go to Sams Club today, after dropping DD at school, to buy some foods to fill in. I want to get all the current food back intop the pantry today so I can take more out of the cupboards to check. This,like all my projects apparently, is involved.

Spoke too soon didn't heat up again. Stupid me most of my jeans are in there. God,please don't make make use those laundromat stinky,samoky dryers. It is raining like crazy too. Hmff.
 
#1,539 ·
Judi- (regarding the dryer) Dh finally figured how to get the door off and vaccumned the death out of it. It was full. Design flaw (dangerous one). I was placidly thinking it was safe as I cleaned the filter everytime. Gee. Dummy me.
It seems to be heating so far and DH says he can replace both coils for about $40. each and 10 minutes work. That would be good as I have 2 trees I want estimates on removal next week. Anyway thanks for all your input and effort..
Whether it was the lint in the cabinet or it's the coils, cleaning the lint from the cabinent is a GOOD thing! The other thing that typically failed in the machines I saw was the thermostat, but your DH is in a much better place to know/look/diagnose than I am way over here!

btw, give yourself a fling point for all that lint!

I started cataloging the 7th box of books this a.m., that's what I've done today!

Judi
 
#1,540 ·
Emptied 3 more tubs and organized a bunch of items. Dh is being - "grouchy" yah thats the word i"ll use this morning. (Go away)
i pretty much have a general idea where most things will go. Just a matter of sorting out the bad dates and shelving the stuff left in the MIL. Then theres still the floor and the dreaded cupboards.EEEEk k k!!!
 
#1,542 ·
60 more clothing items packed in the car to drop off tomorrow. It's sad to say that I found a set of blues clues sheets and my youngest is now 13.
 
#1,543 ·
I flung 7 more items today but I was forced to by Mother Nature. My hubby sat down to a bowl of cereal and let the expletives fly. There was itsy bitsy teeny weeny ants crawling on his cereal. Oh great, that only meant one thing for me. Yup I took everything out of the pantry and anything that was opened went in the trash. I threw out 3 (not much left) boxes of cereal, one box of ice cream cones, 2 bags of almost gone chips, and one bag of candy, but not chocolate thank goodness or it would have been my first time to eat a chocolate covered ant!! I'm taking this as a sign that fall is officially here and the ants will be busy trying to swipe any food they can.

Cat
 
#1,545 ·
MH,

Your comment made me finally go look. I dont' have the sound turned on and I didn't watch an entire episode, but I watched a bit of each episode I saw. Sad to say there's things there that remind me of my house, but others don't. I have one cat (although a stray has been petitioning for residency this summer) and way too much stuff, some of it in not so neat piles, like the folks on Hoarders. I wonder if I'm so different?

I use the mess as a safety net, not the stuff, but the actual clutter. Is is better if you understand what you're doing and why? Or if you're fighting it? I don't know.

Box 7 has 83 books in it to go away tomorrow. Box 8 is only 1/2 filled and has 20 in it right now, it'll be filled before I deliver it to the bookstore tomorrow a.m. There's another 23 books in the swap shop (dump) bin, unless one of my neighbors who's a trekkie decides he wants the 22 st books, that's where they're going. So today I've decided to purge another 126 books. I hate to say this, but you won't be able to tell, as most of these came from the 3 boxes we brought in this weekend. I plan to take the 1 box that's packed of stuff I need to research/keep back to the storage, but that just puts us at a breakeven point, not a gain for the house, sigh.

I also have a box of 4 notebooks and 2 aprons that need to get shipped out to my SIL for my neices. I can get that in the mail tomorrow, that would actually get 6 things out of here.

Oh yeah, there's 1 or 2? more notebooks in the swap shop bin too.

In some ways the part that disturbed me the most was the average age of the folks, 50, right around my age when I closed the store and the messiness became the horror it is now.

i was always messy, well nearly always, but when i closed the store and the last 50-100(?) boxes of books wound up in the house, it became a habitrail, like the houses in Hoarders. Most of those boxes had paperbacks in them, around 55 each (same size boxes I've been selling.) so you have to figure that when I closed the store, that was say 75 boxes @ 55 books per box or something over 3,500 books that moved in here and overwhelmed the place.

This year and the end of last year I've given a box this size to a library, a friend in CA, another friend whose husband will donate it to a vet center, sold 2 to another friend, for another 330 out, and that's not including any of the books that were in the 6 boxes I've delivered.

Sigh. I still have about 1/2 a med. storage unit left and most of a large unit packed full of books.

Maybe I should make that 2009 challenge three times or five? Although i doubt I have time before the end of the year.

Judi
 
#1,546 ·
Judi, you can always make it a "fling as many things as possible by the end of 2009" challenge. :)

I think every messy person probably sees a bit of themselves in the "hoarder" episodes. I don't know if I resemble some of the mindsets because I have a bit of hoarder in me or because hoarders just take normal human considerations and exaggerate them. The guy last night who didn't want to toss any of his magazines because he was worried there might be something in one of them that would be useful to him reminded me of myself. The show is far more interesting with the volume on, because then you hear their rationalizations, rather than just see the mess, and you can hear your own mind agreeing with a lot that they say, but then see the consequences of taking such reasoning to an extreme.

I have always operated on the premise that knowledge is power. The reasons these people use for their messes are reasons I can totally relate to, but I can also see how it can be taken to an extreme, and it has made me stop an re-evaluate what is really valuable to me. One episode in particular was about a guy who wanted to write a book, but didn't have a quiet space in which to sit and be creative, because the mess was so bad, it consumed him emotionally. It made me think about how the mess, in my peripheral vision, can be a constant drain on me emotionally and physically. My house doesn't look like those houses, but I do have piles in areas, like you, and I don't like them!! Last night's show, in particular, with the guy who wouldn't give up his stuff even though his girlfriend had tripped on it and broken her arm falling down a flight of stairs, made me really evaluate what is important and what is just "stuff." :)
 
#1,547 ·
Judi- do what you need to do,call it what you need to call it but keep on going, your going strong. I know for me physical clutter does equal mental unhapiness. And lack of energy from it. The single thread running threw this is an event that the people found too much to bare or deal w/. They became overwhelmed.
Then the shame reverberated. If anyone knew. Then the isolation, which leads to more unhappines. (Dog chases tail)
Every time I lose motivation I watch a clip. Does it every time.
I hadn't noticed they were our age. That chills. Maybe midlife motivates.

Today I sorted all sauces and flavorings. So sad a whole storage tub of stuff must be dumped. And more to come.Not feeling too healthy today so progress is SLOW.

SKW6559- Don't feel bad. I threw out 6 medicine spoons the other day.?? (kid are 16 and 18) and even if they were from when my DH was in an accident that was 4.5 years ago too. Things just hide. Esp. sheets,they cower if the back of the linen closet.

Sassyclass- make sure you clean all around or they will follow the scent trail and be back. After this summer I am an ant behaiorists.LOL

Madhen-that show is my new shock therapy!!
 
#1,550 ·
Judi- do what you need to do,call it what you need to call it but keep on going, your going strong. I know for me physical clutter does equal mental unhapiness. And lack of energy from it. The single thread running threw this is an event that the people found too much to bare or deal w/. They became overwhelmed.
Then the shame reverberated. If anyone knew. Then the isolation, which leads to more unhappines. (Dog chases tail)
Every time I lose motivation I watch a clip. Does it every time.
I hadn't noticed they were our age. That chills. Maybe midlife motivates.
FW, I don't know, this reminds me of being caled "crazy." I got called crazy the first time around 1st grade, about the time I was first put in therapy. I don't ever remember NOT having the stigma that I wasn't "quite right" as I was something < 6 or so.

I remember vividly having things disappear while I was in boarding school, things being stolen when I lived at home, arguing about what to watch on MY TV, etc. ad naseum. I had no privacy, no sacred spaces emotionally OR physically...everyone else was entitled to nice things and privacy and to know anything about me or my stuff, but I wasn't as good, so I wasn't... was the way the mantra went.This continued at least up through my 1st husband and my divorce at 20. (He gave away everything of mine that arrived in Germany after I left, if I wasn't there, why should he care?)

By that time, I'd integrated all of this and "learned" (been programmed?) that if I kept things nice or cared about them, people would break them, ridicule them, or steal them. The safest course was to act as if nothing mattered. The extra bonus benefit was that no one visited, and that wasn't bad at all.

So, here I am trying to break this programming. I panic if I start to have a nice place or a routine that will make it so, I'll be "attacked" again or so my gut believes. It's frustrating and irritating and damnedly slow to whittle away at myself and try and whittle away at the stuff in a way that doesn't bring on the panic.

I thought PTSD was a bitch and a 1/2 to beat as my flashback event (being a 3 yo grieving for their mother, completely helpless and overwhelmed with pain) was devastating. I've lived with going back to that (flashing back) as long as I can remember, I thought I WAS crazy and emotionally defective/immature as I just couldn't "get over" it.

But this is actually harder. The "scared" person there is a 3 yo, not my 50+ yo self. This is ME, NOW, and I just f'n panic inside at the idea of living without all the crud. I can make myself do things like cull the books down, and clean, but I can't contemplate a "clean" house, or I freak out. Makes decorating a bit of a challenge as you might imagine!

Ah well, I'm working on it, and I'm trying my best, and that's all I can do. If that's not good enough, tough.

Judi
 
#1,553 ·
Well I was going to say I hadn't flung anything but the cat just smashed my kitty teapot I was considering donating so 1 thing today. Organized a bunch in the pantry.
chipping away.

Judi--pm'd ya
Also turned out to be the coil on the dryer $30. Good thing too.Apparently the van has 3 brake lights out. Now my DH says he can fix the washer for $80. It doesn't empty on second rinse. No tax credit for me w/ DH around LOL. So glad he could do it. Now just need to fix the printer, figure out why my computer keeps dropping sites, fix the faucet out front, fix DH laptop,get new phones,get a new dishwasher, Blah Blah, Blah. Sounds like life to me...
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top