Meg Evans

I found something on a shelf in my house last week that looked like a cloth envelope. I have no clue how it got there or what its purpose might have been. Maybe it was meant to hold a small pillow? I can imagine something like that being used to protect a small pillow from dust and dirt in the long-ago days before washing machines were invented. I did not make it myself and can’t think of any reason why I would have bought it, so I’m baffled.
 

Maybe it was included in the package with a sheet set or quilt I bought many years ago, and I put it on the shelf and forgot about it? That’s the only explanation that comes to mind. Anyway, whatever it might have been, one thing is abundantly clear: I have no need to keep it. Clutter, begone!

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 aunt gave me a nice stylish leather briefcase when I was a student 30 years ago. I thought it was a lovely gift, and I imagined myself carrying it into high-powered business meetings, courtrooms, etc., full of very important documents. I associated it with ambition and success.
 

Because it brought good memories to mind, I made the mistake of letting it sit around and turn into clutter. That style hasn’t been in fashion for a very long time, the leather is creased, the edges are frayed, and it just looks like (and totally is) junk! As for ambition, all the thoughts I once associated with the briefcase are outdated too. Like most people nowadays, I don’t have a job that involves carrying important papers. Documents get attached to emails, meetings take place by way of teleconferencing software, and so forth. I’ll probably buy a new modern briefcase at some point, when I see one that I like really well, but there’s certainly no hurry!

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!

Last week I wrote about giving up an old coat I’d had since the 1980s. This week I decided that I really didn’t need the accessories I had worn with it either—a matched hat, scarf, and gloves in bright, cheerful colors. I can’t remember when I got this set, but it probably was at least two decades ago.
 

Winter accessories generally don’t go out of style, and they were still in good condition, so at first I didn’t see them as clutter. But my mom gave me two very pretty hat and scarf sets that she knitted not long ago, in lovely shades of purple. I’d like to buy new purple gloves to go with them. Why keep the old set when I had very little interest in wearing it? This time of year, someone else surely will enjoy finding it at the thrift store, and letting it go frees up space on my closet shelf.

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 have a green coat that became a favorite when I got it—26 or 27 years ago. Even after it went out of style and I bought other coats, I still wore it sometimes because it was comfy and warm. Last winter my husband bought me a new coat made of modern synthetic fabric that keeps me just as toasty, even though it’s not as thick or heavy. That was very welcome in last winter’s long string of freezing cold days!  So I have no good reason to keep the old coat. It might once have been useful, but it is just taking up space in the closet now, and there’s no getting around the fact that I’ve got to give it up.
 

In honor of the occasion, I’ve added a classic old-school music video to this post. Yes, I know that getting down and dancing was what Marvin Gaye meant by “Got to Give It Up,” rather than getting rid of stuff, but I think the song fits anyway! After all, having a comfortable, clutter-free home can go a long way toward feeling in the mood to dance and celebrate! So let’s all give it up for conquering clutter, yay!
 

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!

Keeping a few of those little plastic dose cups that come in a cough syrup package can be useful. If more than one person in the house catches a cold at the same time, there are enough clean cups to go around, and nobody has to wash the cups immediately while feeling tired and sick. But on the other hand, it’s not necessary to keep every cup from every package of cold medication bought over the past ten years!
 

As with any other clutter, they just take up space and get in the way when they’re not purged regularly. The stacks get so tall that when someone reaches into the cabinet, the cups are likely to tip over, making an annoying mess. And I had some particularly useless cups because the manufacturer recently changed the markings and dose instructions from teaspoons to milliliters. So I threw away all the old cups marked only in teaspoons, while keeping the new ones with metric markings and a few transitional cups marked with both.

In general, it’s important to check the contents of a medicine shelf or drawer regularly. Otherwise it gets cluttered not only with old dose cups, but also with old expired medicines, which can be dangerous. To prevent environmental contamination, old medicines should not be poured down the sink; they need to be disposed of properly.

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, when my kids were little, I bought a piece of fabric with a design of roads and brightly colored buildings, so that they could roll their toy cars around on it. They spread it out over the driveway and often expanded the map by drawing more roads and scenery with sidewalk chalk.
 

As they grew older and lost interest in playing with toys, this all ended up at the bottom of a plastic basket in my garage, along with other clutter such as lids from empty sidewalk chalk buckets and worn-out soccer balls. Then other stuff got put on top of it, and we didn’t notice how much old junk had built up in the basket. The memories are good ones, but there’s certainly no need to keep the actual stuff forever!

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!

Even though I’ve never devoted a lot of time and energy to holiday decorating, I somehow ended up with random Christmas items scattered around my house anyway. They took up residence at the back of cabinets, on the top shelf of the pantry, and other places where I hadn’t looked in a while. How that happened, I really don’t know… maybe I can blame it on mischievous elves?
 

My usual Christmas decorations, when out of season, are kept neatly boxed up in the basement closet under the stairs. They’re not a problem. But the random stuff hadn’t been used in ages and was just taking up space in my house, pointlessly, and gathering dust. No sense in keeping that!

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!

Autumn is, among other things, the season when holiday food gift catalogs show up in the mail. The cookies and cakes are so creatively decorated, looking at them can be as much fun as eating them! My sister bought Christmas cookies for my family one year, which were shipped in a holiday tin decorated like a delivery truck.
 

The cookies were yummy, and the tin was just too cute to throw away—well, you know how that goes. For more than a decade, the empty cookie tin sat on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. It never got in the way because the shelf is too high to reach without standing on a stepstool, and there wasn’t anything else we wanted to put there; so, at the time, it just seemed like a cheerful decoration.

But in the past few years, my husband and I have been eating better, cutting out the unhealthy sugary stuff. So it’s probably not the best idea to keep an old holiday tin in the kitchen that makes us think about cookies! Someone else might like it, though; so maybe what I’ll do is fill it with something tasty and take it to a picnic or bonfire or other potluck event, along with a sign, “Tin free to good home.”

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!

We all know how this story goes—exercise equipment is bought with the best of intentions, only to end up in the back of a closet gathering dust. Then we tell ourselves a fairy tale about how it’s still worth keeping because we’re going to use it again someday.
 

Maybe the last time I used these weights was in 2006; I honestly can’t remember, it was so many years ago. And I have no need to keep them because I took up rowing last year, which does a good job of keeping my arms toned. I like getting out on the river and seeing the wildlife—there are herons, ducks, and beavers all along the course.

So I’m getting rid of the weights. And I would say there’s a more general lesson here: Why keep old exercise stuff that just gets in the way and gives us bad feelings about not having used it, when the world is so full of other fitness activities we might enjoy a lot more?

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 husband had to get something out of the attic a few days ago, he took the opportunity to get rid of the clutter too. It wasn’t that bad, but he found two random things we had totally forgotten were up there—an old green hose and a folded-up air mattress.
 

The mattress might have been left over from a Cub Scout camping trip; but it was so long ago, we really can’t remember. All I can say for sure is that we haven’t done any camping in at least the past 15 years. And we wouldn’t have any use for the hose either because we just bought three new hoses of different lengths this spring. So—hasta la vista, 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!