Seasonal Cleaning

Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking around my apartment and realizing just how much stuff I have. Don’t get me wrong, I love decorations and books and clothes and souvenirs, but I looked around and realized that instead of only keeping the things I love, I have kind of lapsed into just keeping things I have. Once I started to think about it I realized that it’s because I haven’t actually gone through my apartment since I moved in almost three years ago!

I used to go through my belongings fairly regularly because every time I moved I would go through as I packed and either throw out or donate everything that I no longer wanted or needed. But since I have lived in the same apartment since moving to DC, I haven’t had the occasion to go through everything. At first this realization was extremely daunting–I mean, who wants to go through literally everything they own to see what they actually want? But now I’m trying to approach it as an opportunity.

You may remember (or maybe not, it was a long time ago) that I wrote this post about micro-organizing. The basic idea is to break up the larger task into more manageable sections so that it’s easier and thus more likely to get done. Back when I wrote that post I did go through a few different spaces in my apartment and clean them up and organize them, but it wasn’t the deep cleaning or purging is really necessary. So now I have a new plan (one that I started this weekend).

I’m going to go through my apartment in sections–as recommended by whoever invented micro-organizing–but in addition to organizing these areas I’m going to do a deep clean and really consider what I want to keep and what I no longer need. Before the last wine club I did a brief purge of my bookshelves so that I could make a stack of books to offer to my friends and it was a huge hit! Now I’m going to drop off the rest of the books in Little Free Libraries around my neighborhood. And I attacked my bathroom over the weekend and threw out a bunch of expired makeup and medicine (yikes!) and I plan on tackling the rest of my apartment over the course of the month.

My plan to move forward is to break this task up into the following parts (I’m writing them down and sharing them here to hold myself accountable):

• Bookcases
• Dresser
• Closets
• TV stand and hutch
• Kitchen cupboards