Meg Evans

It’s probably hard to tell what the photo shown below is supposed to be. Back in 1980 or thereabouts, it was a music box with a dancing bird in a cage. A friend gave it to me, and I kept it all these years just because it was a nice cheerful gift. When I moved to my current home, I put the music box on a shelf and forgot all about it until I tidied the shelf this week. The plastic cage fell apart as soon as I picked it up.
 

Just out of curiosity, I tried winding it to see if it would still play the music, but nothing. I’m sure the workings got so clogged with dust that there was no way anything could move. Maybe it could have been fixed, but there didn’t seem to be much reason to try, so I pitched it.  Some old gifts might be worth keeping; but when something gets totally forgotten about and falls apart on a shelf, I’d say it has reached its sentimental-value expiration date.

About Clutter Comedy: Every Sunday (which I envision as a day of rest after a productive week of de-cluttering) I post a Clutter Comedy article describing my most memorable clutter discovery of the week. Other bloggers who wish to join in are welcome—just post a link in the comments! There’s no need to publish any “before” photos of your clutter, if they are too embarrassing. The idea is simply to get motivated to clean it up, while having a bit of fun too!

When we furnished our house 12 years ago, my husband and I bought an outdoor table and chair set for the deck. So that there would be enough chairs when we had more company, we also got a stack of white plastic chairs from a discount store. The plastic chairs were left in a corner of the deck when not in use. They didn’t take up much space, and we paid very little attention to them. Not surprisingly, after being left outside for years, they got so icky that nobody wanted to sit in them anymore. Wasps built a nest under them one year, as I found out the hard way. Hosing them off didn’t do much to remove the crud. They needed some major scrubbing, but we never got around to it.
 

Then we thought we’d get some nice new chairs to replace them, but we never got around to that either. So they were still just sitting out on the deck this spring, looking yuckier than ever. I finally put on some old clothes and carried them out to the curb, after which I left my grimy clothes on the laundry room floor and promptly took a shower. I was wondering if a scavenger might come around in a pickup truck and take the chairs, as they looked like they’d be salvageable with enough time and effort. But as it turned out, the neighbors promptly noticed the chairs and asked if they could have them for a graduation party. Of course, we were happy to oblige. After the chairs had been cluttering our deck for years, such that we never wanted to see them again, we were glad they would be put to good use!

About Clutter Comedy: Every Sunday (which I envision as a day of rest after a productive week of de-cluttering) I post a Clutter Comedy article describing my most memorable clutter discovery of the week. Other bloggers who wish to join in are welcome—just post a link in the comments! There’s no need to publish any “before” photos of your clutter, if they are too embarrassing. The idea is simply to get motivated to clean it up, while having a bit of fun too!

To give me extra motivation to rid my house of clutter regularly, I’ve decided to start a new blog feature, “Clutter Comedy,” in which I describe my most memorable weekly clutter discovery every Sunday (which I envision as a day of rest after a productive week of de-cluttering). Other bloggers who wish to join in are welcome—just post a link in the comments! There’s no need to publish any “before” photos of your clutter, if they are too embarrassing. The idea is simply to get motivated to clean it up, while having a bit of fun too!
 

This is my husband’s bookcase in our study. On Friday, I dusted it and removed papers and other clutter that had been sitting on top. I also wiped the cobwebs off his ancient engineering textbooks on the bottom shelf. On the second shelf, there are two stacks of accumulated stuff: old photos on the left, and catalogs and magazines on the right. We thought we’d been doing a good job of keeping the catalog and magazine stack up to date because we kept only the most recent ones.

But although we dutifully disposed of old catalogs and magazines when new ones arrived to replace them, we neglected to go through the whole stack and look at what was under them. The result—Clutter Comedy! My husband took the stack off the shelf on Friday and noticed that we had several outdated maps at the bottom. To call them outdated is an understatement. Evidently we had brought them with us from our previous house when we moved 12 years ago, put them neatly on the shelf, and never looked at them again.

We haven’t carried print maps in our cars for many years, now that it is so much easier to get directions from OnStar or, if that service is temporarily down, from the GPS navigation app on our mobile phones. So the maps would have been useless even if they had been more recent. But the funniest thing was that the maps were so out of date, the street where we now live wasn’t even shown because that part of the subdivision had not yet been built! We both got a good laugh out of that.