Haha - I just watched the first episode of Marie Kondo - and came here to mention it!
I think the first episode was about 40 minutes.
I was pleased to see she was a delightful woman - I had more of a harsh image of her after hearing other comments from her book. Not true!
I do like the idea of feeling joy for the things you keep. If an item doesn’t bring you joy - especially with clothes - dump it!
@swimcatsmom, just want to say my heart sort of broke when you wrote something to the effect of “I can’t believe I let things get this bad” some number of posts back. I believe I’ve mentioned before that I grew up with a hoarder. I really doubt you “let” anything happen.
Best of luck to you, one step at a time. When we cleaned out my dad’s place after he died, just as an example, he had several garbage bags of empty tubes of toothpaste. It took days and days to clean everything out. Since we kept finding money and valuables in odd places, we couldn’t just chuck everything which, even without looking through everything would have taken a huge amount of time.
Maybe this has been mentioned but, as soon as I have a bag to go out (I’m kind of the anti-hoarder now), unless it goes in the garbage can, it goes in my trunk for drop off at my first opportunity to whatever the appropriate destination is. And, even though I’m not one for filling the landfills, I think you get an exemption if needed!
@VeryHappy maybe watch 1/2 of the show one night and 1/2 the second night…with wine!
I decided to have a Meet &Greet party for my son and fiancée at the end of March. I need to have clutter removed by then. So today, I happily had no appointments and planned to work on garage. But I ended up,spending 8 hours on taxes. Still, I have a goal.
Today, I dropped off three bags of clothing at Goodwill and returned a big stack of magazines to my library’s free-magazines area. (I don’t subscribe to any magazines now and try to not keep any that I borrow from the free rack.)
I Marie Kondo’d my clothes today…sort of! Did a dump the drawers on my bed for my tshirts, exercise clothing and socks/undies. One stuffed bag out the door and a handful of items to try and sell on eBay. I work on posting them tonight and this week - not posting them is the same as not getting rid of them!
A few pages back, we were talking about whether returns counted. Obviously, yes! because it’s hard! I have been struggling to return a few Christmas items and also MOB dresses. Seems like it should be easy, but I have had return labels that refuse to print and kept crashing my browser, things that required phone calls to the stores because the online process didn’t work, and other nonsense…all resolved now but bizarrely time-consuming.
@orangepurple Yes! And if it’s not your own printer or system, it’s the one at the UPS store! Ours charges by the minute when you print using their computer, and they had to discount the charge for my labels because their system tried to sell me a software product, logged off when the employee closed out of the ad, and wouldn’t recognize the employee’s login. Took forever when it should have been a ninety-second job. To top it off, I was back again the next day. I was afraid they’d fling holy water at me.
Not exactly a “bag,” but I’ve deleted about 150 shows from the DVR this weekend.
This cracked me up scrolling through instagram.
From NYTCooking showing a photo of some slow cooker soup:
"#WhatToCook (or, what to let cook) while you decide which of the 487 t-shirts in your closet spark joy. " 
^^^Haha - i got rid of probably 20% of my tshirts today! Still have a lot!
I have a pretty big basket of mostly travel size toiletries, make up, etc. under my sink for…well, not sure what. We’re leaving on a big trip soon and I decided that, if I didn’t need it for this trip, I must not need it. Culled through and pulled out what I WILL use, tossed a bunch of things but, a bit sadly, kept more things than I should have like travel size toothpastes, small size floss’ from the dentist office, pill containers, etc. So, I’m considering this a partial success.
My kids stopped taking tae kwon do in about 2008. I finally dumped their bags, plus another I had for some reason today. Plus, I filled another garbage bag with stuff from around the house. That’s four bags out today.
re: which of the 487 t-shirts in your closet spark joy, I just found a large carton of t-shirts belonging to my daughter. I got her to go through quite a bit of stuff when she was home for Christmas but I didn’t find this box in the attic until too late. This is my sentimental child. I made her a t-shirt quilt when she went off to college so I could get rid of a bunch of them. Where did this batch even come from?
2 big black trash bags of stuff in the big for pick up tomorrow. Another bag started after my reminder to throw one item a day away. I think I have been focussing on one room which may be a good thing. hasn’t really planned it but the alarm gives me a reminder just when I’m going to bed so the bedroom is where I am looking for stuff.
Aah, t-shirts. I have so many that I never wear (& have not for years) that I only ever see when I am trying to declutter and yet I find them hard to part with. Like my “I love the smell of chlorine in the morning” shirt from back in the swim team parent days (last time I had a kiddo on swim team was 2005 - she went to a residential math/science school her junior year and ? came to an abrupt end 2 years earlier than expected.) Time to take some photos and let those things go. It shouldn’t be so hard! Yet somehow it is.
Sounds like you need to make some of them into one of those t-shirt quilts, @swimcatsmom.
That had kind of been the plan. Not sure it will ever become a reality and how long I want to hold onto them "just in case "
@collage1 your local homeless shelter or domestic violence shelter may take those travel size toiletries. If not, I have a place you could mail them to, just pm me for the address if you are interested.
@swimcatsmom: You can always get the wonderful smell of chlorine from a bottle of Clorox.
Marie Kondo is on the Today Show on NBC this morning (coming on probably this hour).