40 BAGS in 40 DAYS 2016!

For the past 3 years, we have taken part in the 40 Bags in 40 Days challenge.

It doesn’t cure cancer, it doesn’t make us skinny, it doesn’t feed little children with distended bellies in foreign lands and it doesn’t give money to Sarah McClachlan to rescue puppies.

But it does make my house a safer, cleaner place to live, which in turn makes me a happier person, therefor making me less likely to physically assault people. SO consider it a public service!

And it’s 100% free. Hell, you might even MAKE money doing it!

It is a challenge spanning a forty day period in the spring (coinciding with the 40 days of Lent) where you focus on cleaning one area per day. In this one area, you challenge yourself to declutter, simplify, decrapify, and get rid of things you don’t need. The goal is one bag (or box, any size!) a day… but you can have more or less!

The challenge begins February 10th, so grab a fish sandwich and get on it!

I’ve been through the rundown before, so I invite you to skim through the real nitty gritty of the challenge in my previous post about the challenge: Our first 40 Bags challenge!.

2014, our first year was our most “successful.” We managed to purge:

1. A Desk
2. A Treadmill
3. A Drum set
4. 1 King size mattress, box springs and frame
5. A CAR!
6. A Lawn mower
7. A Weed whacker
8. An older programmable thermostat
9. An Xbox Kinect (we used it a grand total of one time in the year+ we had it. And the weird shadows creeped me out!)
10. 13 JUMBO contractor sized bags of clothing and shoes & coats (donated to Goodwill)
11. 2 large boxes of misc stuff
12. 3 pieces of “house ware” (I forget what they were, that’s all that’s marked on my Goodwill receipt)
13. And this HUGE pile of crap that came out of the shed that went to bulk pickup. Coolers, a recliner, vanity mirrors, broken tvs, vacuum, carpet cleaner… etc.

While we were in no way out to make a profit, we still banked over $1,500.00 on our purging of gently used items, which prevented them from going to the landfill! We do the best we can to recycle and give away what we can, but we have lots of second-hand or hand-me-down items that have seen their better days and those items ended up on the curb. Which still ended up getting picked through by dumpster divers.

In 2015, we got rid of mostly clothing. We have 10+ donation slips from our local thrift store! It wasn’t nearly as impressive as 2014, but it still made a huge difference in our closets.

We had made a huge dent in our basement, however once the holidays rolled around this year, it turned into a booger den again. (That was my mother’s favorite word for the state of my bedroom as a child.) Then we moved a lot of stuff from the finished side of the basement into the utility side so Travis could set his office up down there, and now, well… it’s just never been the same since. So the utility/laundray side of the basement is BACK on the damn Decrapifying List.

And surprise, surprise… the master bedroom is still on the list. Ugggghhhhh!

I really hate cleaning, guys. But last year my motorcycle sort of took over my life, Travis started his own business, we revamped our spare bedroom, gutted a camper, built a mausoleum, built a homemade stand up paddle board (The Pink Death) for our family’s whacky boat races, planned a bachelor party, and there have been some freaking awesome video games in my life lately. (We just got a XBOX One in November)

I know, excuses, excuses… But at least there’s no longer a lawnmower in there, right?

I feel that since we only have 980 square feet of home to work with, we just keep moving stuff from one place to another. I think this year we’re going to look into attic access.

But in the meantime, I can’t WAIT to get started giving things the ol’ heave-ho for the 40 Bags challenge. And I invite you to join in on this exciting journey!

Clean out the fridge, the garage, a filing cabinet, your pantry, your tupperware drawer! Dig through those boxes of crap from high school in the back of your closet! Maybe you’ll find your retainer from 8th grade?!

Last year we found my  Furby… Those things are terrifying. And approximately one million notes from friends over the years. With the invention of cell phones, do kids even pass notes anymore?!

Decrapifying Finale!

The 40 bag challenge has finally drawn to an end. It has been a whirlwind month+!

Even though we have sort of slowed down the progress at the humble abode, we hit the ground running at the beginning of this challenge and worked really, really hard to get some clutter cleaned up and out of our lives for forever!

We are by no means done “decrapifying” our house. There is still a master bedroom to contend with and a basement that is slowly creeping towards the crappy side, but if you’ll look at all the stuff we got rid of, I think we did pretty damn good myself!

Here’s the grand total of crap removal:

1. Desk
2. Treadmill
3. Drum set
4. King size mattress, box springs and frame
5. A CAR!
6. Lawn mower
7. Weed whacker
8. An older programmable thermostat
9. Xbox Kinect (we used it a grand total of one time in the year+ we had it. And the weird shadows creeped me out!)
10. 13 JUMBO contractor sized bags of clothing and shoes & coats (donated to Goodwill)
11. 2 large boxes of misc stuff
12. 3 pieces of “house ware” (I forget what they were, that’s all that’s marked on my Goodwill receipt)
13. And this HUGE pile of crap that came out of the shed that went to bulk pickup. Coolers, a recliner, vanity mirrors, broke tvs, vacuum, carpet cleaner… etc.

 

I think this was a success and will for sure be doing this again! Mad props to Ann Marie over at White House Black Shutters who inspired me to jump on the band wagon this year. Can’t wait til 2015’s 40 bags!

Until next year, remember!

• You don’t need all of this stuff!
• It won’t make you happier!
• Your home should not make you feel overwhelmed or stressed!

40 Bags Challenge Update

Over the weekend we went, pardon the expression, balls to the walls, and got rid of some big items that had been lurking around the house for years and never really had purpose or a home. In the purging we managed to make a little cash too!

We managed to purge:

• My corner desk from college that hadn’t been used as a desk for 5+ years. It was actually being used as an over-sized night stand. A little overkill, I know. That’s why it’s done-zo! Sold that monstrosity for $20.
• A manual treadmill I bought a few years ago that I immediately decided I hated. Walking on it was like pushing 50 shopping carts full of cement uphill. I tried to recoup the $75 I spent on it on Craigslist by reposting it at the same price a few years ago. After the listing expired twice, I decided to drop the listing to $40. It walked out the door Saturday!
• Travis’ drum set! Thank heavens! That damn thing has lived in our basement living area, in our crawl space, at a friend’s house… it was time for those things to go. We both posted listings and raced to see who could get rid of them faster… some sucker fell for his story of  “My wife, the ruiner of my dreams to one day be Tommy Lee is forcing me to get rid of my set…” We got $125.00 for them!
• Our king size mattress set. The one in our master bedroom, it’s only a few years old. But we got it at some bargain outlet crap-hole and after a few months of sleeping on it we both were waking up in the morning feeling like we were 75 years old. The pillow top just isn’t supportive enough for us apparently. So we’ve been sleeping in our guest bedroom on and off for several years now. So since we’re not using the king set, we decided to donate it to the Columbus Furniture Bank. They will come pick it up for free and it will go to a family or person who is on hard times and can’t afford a bed! Which is pretty awesome for us and for them!
• My car… Yes… I would assume not many people oust a vehicle during the 40 Day challenge. Travis hit a deer in it in November 2012. Since then we’ve been slowly replacing the damaged parts with used parts from Pick N Pull, our local car parts scrap yard… Well two weeks ago, I got a letter from the state requiring proof of insurance on it. Luckily it was still considered inoperable so I wasn’t required to cover insurance on it. But I still had to jump through a LOT of hoops to acquire proof of it’s inoperability. In the end they accepted and did not require insurance, but it was just the final straw for me with that car. It had been wrecked 3 times and stolen from me at gun-point (yes, true story!)… this car was kind of bad ju-ju for me. I had a lot of great memories attached to it as well, with some amazing road trips etc. But Travis and I both have another car now so it was just sitting in the driveway. We put an ad up for it as well and it was gone by Saturday!

So there are a few more odds and ends laying around that we think we can probably sell or donate, but this was a pretty big start. Plus all the proceeds we made from selling our junk we plan to use to buy a new NOT CRAP-TASTIC bed and possibly that new laminate flooring I’ve been dreaming about for so long now!

So we counted a few more bags for all our hard work over the weekend. We still have a few more areas of the house we’re going to address, so I didn’t want to finish the challenge yet. This 40 Bags in 40 Days thing has been a pretty awesome challenge. I don’t know why we didn’t just do it ourselves before! Better late than never.

My Trash is Another Man’s Treasure…

It really doesn’t look like a lot from this angle, but you can’t see the other half of the crap on the back side! Also note part of Travis’ recliner on the right – I can’t believe I talked him into getting rid of that piece of crap! Men really are attached to their recliners. I always thought that was just a thing people said…

Ok, so over the last week we kind of slacked off on the whole 40 bag challenge thing… BUT ONLY because I knew we were going to do some major damage from cleaning out the shed, which we started on Saturday. And if I would have bagged that stuff up, I would say that we were for sure wayyy past the 40 bag mark!

We put everything on our curb last night for bulk pick-up. I will admit I was a little creeped out by the fact that multiple people pulled up throughout the night and started rummaging through the piles of crap in the dark. I realize “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, but I promise there was no treasure in that pile. It was a lot of broken glass and heaps of cardboard that we were in an epic battle with trying to break it down and shove as much as we could into the already overflowing recycle bin each week. (I couldn’t just put it in the trash! It’s recyclable!) Cardboard at my house was like a miserable disease that would never go away!

Well, we got the upper hand last night. We deep sixed that cardboard…

And I’m giving Travis all the credit for the shed (I just helped chop up boxes and carry crap to the curb). That little feller worked his ass off for nearly 5 days straight to get the shed in tip-top shape. He’s gotten a lot of new man-gear lately that he’s chomping at the bit to get organized. We’ll put it to good use in a few weeks to make some pallet furniture and a couple of raised garden boxes for a salsa garden we started seed for this weekend!

I also recently became a member of Columbus’ Tool Library! I am super stoked to give that a shot sometime soon. It is exactly what it sounds like! A place to rent tools and equipment for free! All you have to do is call in or visit and put in a request for whatever item you’d like to borrow. Then you just use it and return it the next day. So whatever stuff Travis hasn’t already wrangled up, we can borrow. Boom!

So to wrap it all up, I guess I’m going to say we’re at the 25 bags of crap mark. I think technically we could call it quits at this point because we really have done more than 40 bags, but I think it’s fun and I wanted to keep it going. I still have to go through a couple more rooms and I want to keep up the momentum.

Oh and Happy (early) First Day of Spring! Tomorrow is the first day of SPRING! I am not sure how you could not be excited about that! My sisters both texted me last night and told me they could hear spring peepers! It has been a loooong and miserable winter and that is a glorious sound to hear this time of year!

Conversations I never thought I’d have

“This week for the 40 bags thing, we can can go in the master bedroom and clean up some of the clutter and I’ll get the lawnmower out of there.”

This statement was made in a real conversation I had with my husband this weekend. I promise, we’re not hoarders. We’re just organizationally and storage space challenged.

You see…

• We don’t have a garage.
• Our attic is inaccessible (the opening is 9 inch square hole inside a closet 8 inches from the top shelf of the closet… so unless you’re a flexible Ethiopian child storing shoe boxes, the attic is pretty useless).
• Our crawl space is gravel bottomed and is sometimes damp in the summer. (It is also scary, like Kevin Bacon digging up people in Stir of Echoes scary.) But we do store some stuff in plastic bins on top of wood pallets. Travis does all of that… because I don’t think he’s ever seen that movie.
• Our shed is like 10 ft square and is currently filled to the ceiling with power tools, lawn care stuff, lawn furniture, our two bicycles, a wheelbarrow, and sometimes our motorcycle.
• Our master bedroom doesn’t have a closet.

So unfortunately, our master bedroom has turned into a storage area over the last year, specifically for things that can’t go/fit in the crawl space or the shed, as we’ve started purging (last summer we took 18 bags of crap to the thrift store!) We don’t sleep in the MBR anyway because we hate the mattress. We sleep in our spare bedroom. I like that room better anyway because it’s been repainted and is brighter and doesn’t have cheetah print border leftover from THE OTHERS. Blech. It did however, have ballerinas which we painted over. They always made me want to sing “Hold me closer Tiny Dancer/Tony Danza!”

When I bought my husband a much-needed new lawnmower for Christmas, I didn’t think about where it would have to live until we got out to the shed and did some rearranging and got the old one out of there. So this week we’re going to take advantage of the nice weather (62 today and 65 tomorrow!) and take a couple of days to get out of the house and escape the paint fumes and work in the shed and get that situation addressed so we don’t have a lawnmower living in my master bedroom!

Jordan seems to feel rather heartfelt about HIS brown corduroy jacket too. I also still have several of my Angela Chase flannels that I will NEVER part with! They’re my camping/fishing flannels now!

ON ANOTHER NOTE:
For the 40 Bags in 40 Days challenge, we didn’t participate Friday or Saturday. I felt that since we got rid of 5 huge trash bags on Thursday, that would cover Friday’s bag/s. Then since you’re “allowed to rest” on Sunday, we went last night and cleaned out our living room coat closet to make up for Saturday. Got 2 bags out of that! So our grand total is 7 bags in 5 days! That’s pretty awesome, I think! However I did feel slightly sentimental about parting with my My So Called Life Jordan Catalano corduroy jacket. Which was traumatizing, but made possible by some weird wax stuff on the collar that I was pretty sure I couldn’t remove. 😦

So farewell to one of the last items of my 90’s youth! I don’t need it! Chucking out crap from the 90’s is going to give me fewer headaches in the 10’s… wait, how do you say that? Did they say the 10’s in the 1910’s? I will have to Google that. REGARDLESS, progress is being made!

40 Bags in 40 Days!

Decrapify your life!

Ok, so we’ve decided that in our house, we are super competitive. Any time we can make something into a race or a challenge, POOF! It magically gets done some way or another! Not only that, our 2014 New Years resolution was to seriously organize and purge our tiny little house of all the ish that we are constantly trying to cram under a bed, into a already stuffed closet or into the scary crawl-space. Sooo… when I discovered something that was posted on a couple blogs I follow called the “40 Bags in 40 Days Challenge” – I was intrigued!

It is a challenge spanning a forty day period in the spring (coinciding with the 40 days of Lent) where you focus on cleaning one area per day. In this one area you challenge yourself to declutter, simplify, decrapify, and get rid of things you don’t need. The goal is one bag a day but you can have more or less.

I love that Ann Marie from White House Black Shutters uses the word “decrapify.” I encourage you to use it today in a sentence!

She has been doing this for a few years now and it seems that it’s been a huge success. She has a Facebook page for it and it seems there is a pretty big following. I even saw it posted on Pinterest a few times! While it technically started yesterday, I think I can manage to make up for that one day. This is going to be huge for us since somehow our master bedroom has managed to turned into the “junk room” while we’ve been updating the house and sleeping in our spare bedroom because our mattress is nicer in there!

She even has a FREE Printable to help you map out what areas you want to tackle and keep track of your bags! There is also one with blank dates if you decide to pick up on this after March 5th and want to write in your own dates!

You can check out the full details and post here at her blog, White House Black Shutters!

And remember!

1. You don’t need all of this stuff.
2. It won’t make you happier.
3. Your home should not make you feel overwhelmed or stressed.
4. You do not need to be embarrassed.
5. You can do this. (repeat that)
6. You are not alone in feeling this way.

And GOOD LUCK!!