Pt 2: Junk and Stuff
We all have that one drawer in our bedroom or office that is just… junk. We leave papers, notes, accessories, random bits and bobs that we don’t really want lying out. They get thrown in there so as to avoid feeling messy. Well, on the outside at least. I’ve found over the years that I tend to hoard things I think I will need later, but then keep them for YEARS before finding them and wondering if I’ll need them again.
Now that I have this newly painted space, I wanted to rearrange and go through everything with a fresh and clear mind. In my last post I talked about how I packed everything in boxes according to categories and put them to the attic while I painted. Well, now it’s time to bring all that stuff back downstairs and go through it. Here are the categories I labeled my boxes with:
- Notebooks
- Textbooks
- Books
- Music
- Important papers
- Possible junk
- Sentimental items
- Makeup/hair/face products
- Jewelry
- Tech
- Misc.
As you can see… I had a lot of things in my room. So much so that I had about ten categories I needed to sort through. I am also very attached to different things in my room, so some of these were hard to categorize and I just ended up labeling a new box with a new category. I try to go through everything every year, but with being away at school and then collecting more things in my time there, the pile became a bit insane.
Now that everything is back in my room and ready to sort through. I needed a method of how I would decide between Keep, Store, Give Away, or Trash. Usually when I got to this point I was either in an “Awww, look at this! Maybe I should keep it “ mood ” or a “ DUMP IT ALL!” kind of mood.I aspire to be at a point in my life where if I had to pack up everything and move, I would know exactly what to take and wouldn’t have too much to decide between. Ultimately, I aspire to have as minimalist a life as possible for myself.
Let’s start with the easy stuff. For me, it was my makeup and beauty products. These are the easiest to me because they have an expiration date. Ok, so not everyone follows those rules (I haven’t for 23 years and I feel fine) but, I’ve had some Bare Minerals powder in there since 2014 when I used it for prom. It was definitely time to trash it. I ended up throwing out about a quarter of my makeup just because of how long I’ve had it, and then another handful of things that ended up making a mess in the back of the drawer. The rest I went through and tested. A lot of the foundations and BB creams I had were really old and you could tell. As I went to put some on the back of my hand, I watched the oil drip out first, followed by foundation that seemed just a bit too thick. I’m trying to clear up my skin, not overwhelm it with old products.
Lipsticks definitely took a hot minute to go through. By the end of testing them, throwing out ones that were similar to ones I liked more, and finding out there were more in a purse in the back of my closet; I had awkward lip color smears on the back of my hands and an extremely discolored towel next to me. I have an old organizer in this drawer to keep everything in its place and decided to put everything back, splitting it up by product.
The next thing I decided to go through was any technology and books I kept in my room. The technology was pretty easy and straightforward. I found a bunch of old USB drives with old pictures, papers from highschool that I put onto my new Passport hard drive, and I coiled up all my charging cables. They all went into a drawer in my desk with my smaller game stations, wall plugs, headphones, and other important tech I use quite often.
The books were where things got hard. I was an avid reader of fiction books when I was younger. I have yet to lose that love, but I wasn’t sure which books I wanted to keep out for the world to see. I tend to put all my favorites from my past in the attic, but my room had been harboring too many that decided to find their way back down to my room. I decided to make piles of books starting with keep and donate. Then sectioned off the keep pile into types of books. I have a lot of music books and history books that grow more and more as a professor, or the music library, has a “free” sign taped on a basket of miscellaneous books.
Once I did all this, I decided which books out of each pile I wanted to keep in my room. I kept books I wanted to revisit when studying or learning new music, as well as some old favorites that I just had to have within a close distance. While I did donate a lot of books by the end, my shelves were still giving the donate pile a run for their money.
Jewelry and sentimental items are on the “hard to get rid of but also hard to keep” list. I have small nick nacks from trips with family, jewelry I don’t wear but my grandmother had given me, and so on. It was almost never ending. Did I mention I also had an obsession with stuffed animals? There was about a box and a half of furry friends I had to say goodbye to, among other things.
If you are deciding to go through this room cleanse, take your time. Try to organize your things in categories, starting with ones that might seem easiest. It can get easy to become overwhelmed with everything, so moving slowly and building up the confidence to continue pushing through is the way to go. It also helps to do this a few times a year. I try to sort through my clothes, bags and shoes, about every season just to filter through things I might have hidden in boxes and have forgotten about. My desk and shelves get reorganized almost every month.
Don’t forget you can always ask for help if you need it. Never hurts to have a friend or a family member keep you in check, and it’ll make for lighter work. You can even play some energizing music to get you moving and make it a party. (I always choose early 2000’s pop or hip hop!!).
Let us know how you feel about trying a room cleanse. Or if you’ve already done it, how did it go? This is a difficult and unclear time in our lives that might leave you bored or feeling drained. Let’s be productive and start making some positive changes, starting in the place we wake up to every day.