Decluttering - it takes a long time to get stuff shifted!

When I was packing up my stuff to move house in the summer, I atually got out and touched everything I owned, and had to decide whether it should go in the bin or for recycling or to the charity shop, or be kept for sale on eBay or actually packed to go into storage.  It took 8 weeks, partly because I'm a bit slow, but mostly because I've got a lot of stuff.  An embarrassingly large amount of stuff - considering there's just me & the cat and it was quite a small 2 bed flat.  Most of it is crafting supplies, but that's no excuse as really if I'd been as productive as I'd intended when I bought the supplies, they should have already been turned into things of beauty to be a joy forever and all that.  Or at least things of beauty I could have sold...


About half way through a friend worked out how many boxes I was likely to have, against the storage cost, to give an average price per box.  Strangely enough less stuff made it into the later boxes!  Tho I resisted the temptation to unpack and review what I'd already packed.

After everything went into storage and started costing me an arm & a leg - in truth that stuff was costing me all the time by filling up my flat - rather like a form of insulation making the floor space 2 feet smaller on every wall, I was ambling around the net and found a blog post (I don't remember where, it has a buddhist type theme to the blog, and I would credit them if I knew where I'd found it) that looked at decluttering in a different way.  When I finally get my stuff out of storage and unpack, I'll be doing another 'do I want this in my house', but in the light of that blog posts' thoughts which were:

1. Does it work?
2. Would I replace it if it didn't work?
3. Is is 'potentially' useful, but doesn't actually get used?
4. Was I 'saving' it and not using it?
5. Do I have a 'better' model of this?
6. Does it serve it's purpose well?
7. Is it tidily put away but not used?
8. Does the momento actually prompt any memories?
9. Have I ever used it?

Then, when I've finished I'll be in the lovely position that Boo's in now - she's just done her decluttering - read about it here

It would be nice to know what questions you ask yourself when you're clearing out - I need all the help I can get!

Pics are of my prototype valentines & spring flower cards I'm developing for sale, the original card was done for the original 365 Cards challenge - Day 49 Accordian Challenge in April 2009.  Even though most of my stuff is in storage, I kept out some of my stash so I could crack on with using it up.  I've not done much recently but I'm posting about my progress - hopefully the lack of progress being made public will spur me on to get moving!