Meg Evans

My kitchen counter has a small desk area with a drawer, which I always kept reasonably tidy, not letting it degenerate into junk-drawer infamy. I kept a road atlas at the back and a few small notepads and pens at the front. The road atlas has been obsolete for a long time because we get directions from OnStar when we go on road trips, instead of using paper maps. I was wondering just how old it was; and when I opened the drawer to check, I discovered that a lot of other stuff had been put in there when I wasn’t looking.
 

Among other random things, the drawer now contains a set of paintbrushes, some paper-edging shears, a Bible, and a book of crossword puzzles. While it’s good that my daughter has been exercising her creativity and reading Scripture, and there doesn’t appear to be much in the drawer that would qualify as actual junk, I have to say more careful attention to organization would be appreciated!

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 my daughter was younger, she had an Easy-Bake toy oven. It ended up on a top shelf of a cabinet after she stopped using it, and then it just stayed there for years…
 

Of course, there’s no reason for it sitting around so long. A toy oven belonging to a 22-year-old college graduate is about as obvious as clutter gets! I’m not even going to venture an explanation for how I let that happen. Anything I could say would be, well, half-baked.

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 fire safe is useful both for ensuring that important documents are not destroyed in the event of a calamity and for keeping them in one centralized location so they don’t get lost. Electronic models with keypads are easy to use, but they do wear out after a while. Most home improvement stores sell them, so it’s not hard to get another. The problem is disposing of the old one, as they’re too big and heavy to put out with the trash.
 

We bought a new safe earlier this year. My husband boxed up the old one and put it in the garage, thinking that he’d check into whether there was any place to take it for recycling; and if not, he could take it to the county dump. He got busy at work, though, and it has just been sitting in the garage gathering cobwebs all spring. That old safe has definitely overstayed its welcome!

Edit, May 27: My husband called around, but couldn’t find any recycling shops that would take it. The issue is that the time spent removing the material in the walls of the safe is not worth the cost of the scrap. So he took it to the dump this morning.

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!

One of my gifts at Christmas was a toaster, as shown in my New Year’s post. I decided to keep it on the countertop because it was new and pretty, instead of putting it away in a cabinet after every use as I had done with the toaster it replaced. You can probably tell where this post is going. The old toaster stayed on its usual cabinet shelf, just because we’d gotten used to seeing it there and did not notice it was clutter.
 

Taking it out made more space in the cabinet, as well as making me feel that the kitchen has more new and modern stuff in it. I also bought a new electric skillet recently, which I keep in the same cabinet where the old toaster was. The new skillet’s ceramic coating doesn’t have the unhealthy chemicals of older nonstick coatings, and seems like it cooks more evenly too. So my kitchen got a low-cost upgrade this year, yay. I still have an ancient wafflemaker in that cabinet, though…

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 keep holiday decorations in the basement when they are out of season. That’s fine for the Christmas stuff, which is neatly boxed up every January and put in the closet under the stairs. Not so good, though, for random Halloween decorations that went to their final resting place long ago in that dim dark crypt…
 

The light bulb in the plastic jack-o-lantern burned out, and then it just sat in the basement for years because nobody ever got around to replacing the bulb. That in turn left us feeling less interested in doing anything with other Halloween decorations. Now, after they’ve been cluttering my basement all this time, I just want them gone. Next time I put a jack-o-lantern on my porch, I’ll get a real pumpkin and a candle, and do it the old-fashioned way. That’s more fun anyhow!

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!

You know how great it feels when you’re shopping for clothes, and all of a sudden you see something beautiful on the rack next to a bunch of ordinary stuff, and there’s only one and you think “Please, please let it be my size,” and YAY, it is!

I had a memorable shopping trip like that in 1988 when I found a pretty white and gray blouse full of sparkly silver and gold threads, which was love at first sight and the perfect size for me.
 

The only thing I had to wear with the blouse was a cheap gray suit from Value City, which my mom had bought for me when I was still in school, but I expected that I’d buy a better suit to go with it. That never happened, though, because I spent a few years staying home with my kids when they were little and then got a job where I didn’t need to wear suits. I gave the cheap gray suit to a charity that was helping women on welfare to transition into the workforce, but I kept the blouse just because I remembered how happy I felt when I bought it.

Obviously, I’m never going to wear it again. Even if the material hadn’t gotten yellowed from almost three decades of hanging in my closet, it has 1980s-style shoulder pads, for heaven’s sake, and would look absolutely ridiculous with any of today’s fashions. Also, one thing I’ve learned over the past year while cleaning up my clutter is that holding onto useless stuff just because it has good memories is counterproductive. That causes unhealthy feelings of stagnation and takes up space, both mental and physical, which could be put to much better use! So I’m letting the blouse go, while reminding myself that whatever may come my way in the future, it’s all good.

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!

Earlier today I found a bunch of fake flowers in a dark corner of my basement, literally, and carried them upstairs while trying to remember how the heck they got there. While pondering that question, and wondering what reason I might have had for keeping them, I put them in the sink to rinse off the dust. Next thing I knew, the fake color was coming off, and my sink was full of icky little spots of purple goo.
 

I still have no clue as to where those flowers came from, and suspect that I probably moved them from our previous house and put them in the basement without paying any attention whatsoever. But there’s one thing I am sure about—I’ll know better than to do this again! Next time I discover ancient clutter around the house, it’s going straight in the trash without stopping to think about it!

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!

Here’s one of the reasons why there was such a mess in the closet where my kids used to keep their school supplies—that big heap of stuff on the floor was full of old backpacks and sports bags. Rather than throwing the well-worn ones away at the end of the school year, the kids just tossed them back into the closet. Then they sank to the bottom of the heap, never to be seen again.
 

Of course, as the responsible adult I should have made sure the old stuff was gone when I bought new school supplies every year. Learned my lesson there: Not paying attention to what goes out (or doesn’t) when new stuff comes into the house equals clutter! But all’s well that ends well—the closet is back to life. No more Bermuda Triangle for backpacks here!

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!

On Saturday morning, which was sunny and bright, almost everybody in my subdivision mowed their lawn for the first time this season. While my husband was busy mowing, I dug out some weeds in the flowerbeds. There wasn’t as much spring cleaning to do in the garage this year because we cleaned out a lot of clutter last spring (yay). Still, my husband noticed and got rid of an old extension cord that we never used anymore; and I made the unwelcome discovery that I had not one, but two pairs of gardening gloves in the garage, and that the older pair was totally gross and grimy. I had used them for weeding on a muddy day in 2013, and obviously they never got washed.
 

I like to buy new gardening gloves every spring because that gives me a cheerful feeling that a fresh new season is underway, so I shouldn’t even have thought about keeping the old gloves. They only cost a few dollars, after all, and they’re easy to find in the stores. What I probably had in mind was that I might want to use them early in the next season before I got around to buying a new pair, or that if I had a particularly messy gardening task I wouldn’t want the new pair to look old and muddy right away. But all I really accomplished was to make my basket of gardening stuff look weedy!

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!

This week’s clutter blog comes to you from the depths of the toy and school supplies closet in the room that used to be my kids’ study. Next to a pair of portable intercom devices, which are old enough that the white plastic is turning yellow, I found a tiny phone. Although it plugs into a jack and is usable, I would call it a toy, and a very antiquated one at that.
 

I don’t quite remember when my daughter got the tiny blue phone, but it must have been before she had a mobile phone—she certainly wouldn’t have had any interest in it after that! So I’m guessing it sat on the closet shelf without anyone using it ever since we moved into this house. And I’m pretty sure the kids never talked to each other on the intercoms after getting their own phones, either. Time marches on, like it always does; and it certainly marched past this stuff long ago!

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!