Meg Evans

One of my kitchen cabinets has three shelves behind glass doors, where I displayed my kids’ craft items when they were younger. After they went off to college, I decided it was time to retire those cute handmade items, but I wasn’t sure what to put in their place. My mom just happened to be moving at that time and giving away things she didn’t need, which included some mugs with bright and cheerful designs, so I put them on the shelves instead.
 

But that arrangement never looked right to me. The mugs on the bottom shelf are not quite the same size as the mugs on the middle shelf; they’re actually two different sets. And although the candle-wax animal figurines on the top shelf are pretty, I’ve had them since I was in college. Overall, when I look at the display cabinet, it gives the impression of old mismatched random stuff, which is certainly not what I want.

I know what I need to do—find new and meaningful items to put on the display shelves, so that looking at them will give me joyful positive energy. Maybe angel figurines so that I’ll feel safe and protected when I see them? Although I haven’t yet made up my mind, I decided to go ahead and write this post anyway, to give myself a bit of motivation!

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!

A few years ago, when my husband and I went on a lot of road trips to watch our daughter’s college soccer games, we often had to leave early in the morning. Not surprisingly, we started drinking more coffee. That gave me the idea of buying my husband an espresso and cappuccino maker for a Christmas gift, since he likes gadgets generally.
 

Although it got some use over the winter, we decided to buy a Keurig coffee maker before the next soccer season began. Not only are K-cups quick to brew, they also make it possible to keep many different kinds of coffee in the house because they stay fresh for a long time, unlike bagged coffee that must be used soon after opening the bag. So the espresso and cappuccino maker became just another obsolete gadget taking up space in a kitchen cabinet—a gadget gone cold!

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!

My daughter trained her dog to ring bells as a signal that the dog needed to go outside. The bells hung from the handle of the sliding glass door in the kitchen. The dog learned how to go to the door and push the bells with her snout to ring them, but there was one small problem: We always had to leave the vertical blinds open, at least enough that the bells were not covered up. And on cold winter nights, that made the kitchen drafty. So my husband moved the bells to the wall next to the door.
 

To us, the bells looked close enough that they were almost in the same place. But a dog’s brain evidently has a harder time processing what to do with objects that have been moved, and the dog never rang the bells again. Now she just barks at us when she wants to go out. So the bells have been hanging on the wall since the winter, completely useless. We finally decided it’s time to bid them farewell!

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!

Back when my family lived in our starter house, with an economy refrigerator that did not have an icemaker, my husband bought a pair of Frosty Mugs. Then we always had something cold in the freezer for drinking soda pop, even if we ran out of ice cubes from the trays. Although the refrigerator in our current house has an ice dispenser in the freezer door, we still used the Frosty Mugs for a few years after moving.
 

Then I gave up sugary drinks to stay healthy, while my husband switched to Coke Zero and bought a set of old-fashioned Coke glasses to put it in. The Frosty Mugs sat in the freezer door for years afterward, totally forgotten. I just happened to notice them a few days ago and think, “Hmmm, has it been five years since we last used these things, or closer to ten?” Whichever it is, they’re definitely clutter!

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!

I’ve had a set of metal canisters on my kitchen countertop for many years, marked Coffee, Tea, Sugar and Flour. They gave the kitchen a cheery old-fashioned look, although I never really used them for coffee or tea. I leave teabags in the box they came in, and K-cups go on a carousel. The coffee and tea canisters have white rice and brown rice in them, respectively. I do have sugar and flour, but I haven’t done any baking in a long time because I’ve been cutting down on sugar to stay healthy.
 

So I asked myself, why do I still have them? I really just need containers for rice. New boxes or jars for rice would make a lot more sense, while fitting easily into a cabinet too. The canisters are not much use for decoration anymore, now that they are full of dings and the lids are turning green. It’s definitely time to let them go, and reclaim my counter space!

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!

Sorry about the title, but this week’s topic left me wanting to make silly frog noises! When my son was in high school, he made a ceramic frog for me to put in the garden. I must confess, I didn’t take proper care of it but left it outside when the weather turned cold, and it froze and cracked apart in all the places where it had been glued. Then I gathered up the pieces and put them in a shoebox, as I didn’t want to throw away a nice handmade gift. My son said that he would put it back together, but then he went off to college, and the shoebox sat in the basement for years.
 

While cleaning things up, I asked my son if he still wanted to glue the frog back together. He said yes, he’d get around to it sometime. So I gave him the shoebox. If he does indeed reassemble the frog, I’ll be more careful and find a good safe place for it indoors! And if not, well, at least I won’t have a dusty old shoebox taking up space in the basement anymore.

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!

Going into the warm weather, I had to admit that although a light blue summer outfit in my closet had been pretty when new (too long ago!), it had seen better days. But I thought it might get through another season, and I hadn’t yet done any shopping for new summer clothes this year, so I kept it anyway.
 

I wore it a couple of times, getting mildly annoyed each time when I saw the frayed spots and the broken threads—and then I asked myself, what the heck was I doing? Clothes are not precious gems, they’re just ordinary consumable items! Wearing worn-out old clothes because they haven’t yet been replaced is like eating spoiled food because the grocery shopping hasn’t been done. As excuses go, that one ranks somewhere between pitiful and woeful!

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!

Many years ago, I got a black dress with a shiny loop at the neckline, which was made of silver sequins. I have fond memories of events to which I wore the dress; but as time went by, the stitches in the loop drew up unevenly, so that with each washing it looked a bit less symmetrical. As much as I fussed with it and tugged it into place, it never looked or felt quite right anymore.
 

Then I realized that because the dress no longer made me happy, the time had come to send it on its way, even if it was still wearable. We have so many choices and possibilities open to us in the modern world, but only a few of them can fit into our available space and time—so we have to choose wisely and make changes that give us more joy!

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!

My daughter’s dog (a.k.a. our household’s resident diva) has been living here almost a year, and never would sleep in the first dog bed we bought. When she was a puppy, she took the cushion off the rocking chair (shown in this post) and decided it would be her bed. That worked out all right because we already had two of those cushions; but then she discovered that she could chew a hole in it and pull out the stuffing—way too much fun for a little puppy to resist! After the shreds of the cushion went bye-bye, she still wouldn’t sleep in her bed, as she much preferred to lie down outside my daughter’s bedroom door at night and make sad noises to try and get herself let in.

My daughter soon had enough of that (as did we all!) and bought another dog bed in the style of a large rectangular cushion to put outside her bedroom door. The new bed was sturdy enough that it didn’t suffer the same fate as the original cushion, and Diva Dog was happy enough with it that she stopped the nightly tragic-opera performances. But that left the old bed, as always, just sitting empty.
 

Diva Dog uses it occasionally as a hiding place for her rawhide bones and other prized possessions; but really it’s just clutter, and needs to be given away. I expect my daughter will move into her own place in a few months, once she finds a good rental house or apartment, taking both the dog and the preferred bed along. Even though we’ll probably end up doing some amount of dog-sitting here, there’s no sense keeping a bed that the dog refuses to sleep in!

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!

How do you know when something is clutter? Well, a pretty reliable indicator is that whenever you see it, you start thinking, “Why is this still here?” If that question has no good answer, then it’s clutter for sure!

I have a stack of old towels that I occasionally use; and somehow, a child’s beach towel with Barney the purple dinosaur ended up at the bottom of the stack. Every time I used enough towels to get down to that one, I wondered why I hadn’t gotten rid of it many years ago! But it always just got washed and put away with the others, out of simple inertia.
 

This year I thought I’d done a pretty good job of disposing of the “Why is this still here?” stuff. But then I saw the Barney towel again! It went straight in a bag for the thrift store. Barney and his toddler audience may be a happy family, but I’m sure my own (grown-up) family would be much happier with something else!

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!