This month's focus: Spring Cleaning
 

Tip of the Month: Decluttering the Owner's Manuals

All those owner's manuals and instruction sheets we get can provide a storage challenge. Here are some questions I ask to help reduce the manual madness.

• Do you still own the product?
   
• Do you need the manual in English, French, Spanish, German, and Chinese? Many manuals are printed in multiple languages. I tear out all but the English version, saving LOTS of space.
   
• Do you need the manual on paper? Many manuals can be found on-line, so you don't need to keep the paper version. I just tossed the manual from my HP-12C calculator; I've never used that manual in the many many years I've owned the calculator, and I found the manual on-line just in case I ever do have a reason to use it.

Quote of the Month

I had just divorced . . . I wanted to free myself from the things that represented my past to make space for the person I wanted to become. So I resolved to go through every single thing I owned and ask one question: Does this look like it belongs to the person I want to be?

Jane, quoted by M. J Ryan in This Yeat I Will . . .
 

Product of the Month
 

This set of three recycling bags comes from Heal's in the UK. Other options include:

• A less elegant but also less expensive set of bags from homerecycling.co.uk
• A set of bags from Design Within Reach in the USA

October 2007 update: Replaced bags from Signals (no longer showing on their web site) with bags from Design Within Reach

Organizing Event of the Month

April 15-21 is National Library Week. This would be a great time to donate books you no longer need to your local Friends of the Library, for use in the library or for part of a fund-raising book sale. You know, the books that:

• You bought eight years ago, and now you can't remember why
• You started to read, but couldn't really get into and set aside for some other time
• You read once but would never read again since they were just OK
• You bought because you were interested in that subject once upon a time, but you no longer are
• Someone gave you as a gift, but that someone obviously didn't know your taste in books

Top Ten List of the Month

UK magazine Ideal Home quotes a study by Hammonds Furniture which lists these as the Top 10 Items We Hate to Throw Away:

1. Clothes we don't wear
2. Books we've read
3. Clothes that don't fit
4. Odds and ends
5. Shoes we don't wear
6. Clothes that have gone out of fashion
7. New clothes we've never worn
8. Old mobile phones
9. Sports equipment we no longer use
10. Out-of-date computers

Donation/Recycling Idea of the Month

While most women want to keep their wedding gowns, here are two alterntives if you don't want to keep yours:

• Donate it to Brides Against Breast Cancer
• Sell it on Indiebride

Highlights From the Blog in March

There were 45 entries in my organizing and de-cluttering blog in March. Some of the entries were:

• How to Be a Green Shopper, by guest author Shannon Del Vecchio
• French Storage Tins
• 11 Ways to Swap Your Stuff
• Safe Key-Ping
• Free Promotional Products: Just Say No
• Zid Zid Kids - Wall Panels

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