When I first started learning about simple living and decluttering my home I loved to read stories from people who were at the same place as me. It made me feel more confident that I could do this too.
I would often pore over the archives of more established bloggers to read about the start of their journey. These stories resonated with me during the early stages of my own simplicity journey.
I want to share some of my own before and after photos of our decluttering progress. Not to toot my own horn, but to share some of our ups and downs and be real about the effort it takes to simplify our home.
First up is media, including books, magazines and movies/DVDs/VHSs. This is an area that can quickly get out of hand if you are a reader or have old DVDs and VHS tapes around your home. But it’s also fairly quick to declutter and once you are done you have a great decluttering win under your belt. This strengthens your decluttering muscle to be able to tackle more difficult areas like sentimental items later on.
I came across a quote by William Morris that is my new mantra for simplifying my home:
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
I used this phrase and asked myself these two questions as I decluttered our media collection:
- Is the item useful?
- Is the item beautiful?
Books
I walked around my house and found all the places books tend to live. I was surprised at how many places we keep books! Once the books are decluttered maybe my next goal will be to simplify where we store books. 😃
I did not touch my husband’s work book since these would fall under the category of “useful.” I trust he will pass the book on if it’s no longer useful for him.
The rest of the books were pulled into one area and I went through each book asking the above two questions. I was able to fill up THREE grocery bags full of books that I have had forever and either have read or will not read in the next 6-12 months. If I end up wanting to read one of the books I am donating then I can either go to the library or borrow from a friend.
I did notice that some of the books I decluttered were classics that I do want to read someday, but the version I had was extremely small print and difficult for me to read. I think I would do better with a kindle version or a hardback version from the library!
Examples of books I consider useful: textbooks, cook books I cook from, books I plan to read this year.
Examples of books I consider beautiful: coffee table books with beautiful pictures, books I made on Shutterfly, books we read over and over.
Your list will be different but hopefully this helps get you started!
For more help on the steps to declutter see this post.
Magazines
We do a pretty good job at keeping magazine clutter to a minimum. A few years ago this would have been a different story but I have spent time getting our magazine collection to a manageable amount.
These are some of the things that have helped us:
- Cancel any subscriptions we don’t currently want and/or don’t currently read.
- Do not have a magazine rack in our home. I once had 2 years worth of Real Simple Magazines sitting in the rack collecting dust!
- Take pictures of pages I want to refer back to and store digitally in Evernote. 99 times out of 100 I will not refer to the note, but just knowing that I can access the page later makes me feel better about recycling the magazine.
- Only keep the current month’s issue around. If I didn’t read last month’s issue then I really consider canceling the subscription.
- Highlights Magazine – this can easily get out of control since kids don’t have a grasp of timing and when the next issue will come. So it’s up to me to make sure my kiddo is reading the magazines and getting value out of them.
During this decluttering session I did get rid of a small stack of magazines that had accumulated. Not bad!
Movies
We don’t have any DVD’s or VHS’s sitting on shelves or in cupboards. We have embraced the digital trend in watching movies via online tools like Netflix and Amazon. This has really cut down on the clutter from this category! We do have a box in the basement with a few old CDs and DVDs that we want to keep for now.
For those of you that DO have and use DVDs or CDs, answer the above two questions while going through your collection. For any movies or music that you want to keep consider digitizing them so they don’t take up any physical space.
To minimize CD’s you can import the songs into iTunes and the music will be available for you to listen to from your mobile device. For more help on how to do this see this post from Apple support.
For DVD’s I learned about a couple of tools from the free e-course from Simplify Days. She goes through several different topics on digitizing your life, including how to digitize your DVD collection. There is a paid tool (iSkySoft iMedia Converter Deluxe) that will make an exact copy of your DVD. There is also a free online tool (HandBreak) that allows you to make a compressed version of the DVD to be used on your mobile device. I have not used either of these tools but Barbara from Simplify Days highly recommends using them to minimize DVD clutter.
What to do with decluttered media
Here are a few examples of places to take your media that no longer serve you:
- Books – library, nursing home, schools if children’s books, online
- Magazines – recycle, some libraries, use for crafts
- Movies – library, goodwill, nursing homes
What about you?
Have you decluttered your media collection? What worked for you? Tell me about it in the comments below!