by Julia Q | Jun 11, 2014 | De-Cluttering 101, Executing Grace, Home Organization
Last week I strongly encouraged you to make use of the trash can when de-cluttering — which is something we should do a lot more often than we think! 🙂
I hope you didn’t go out and trash everything you could find, because there is another option for SOME of the things you might consider discarding if you bring a little creativity and initiative to the equation.
Are you familiar with the biblical concept of gleaning? Gleaning was a method of providing for the poor among the Israelites – whether they were of Jewish or foreign descent.
Gleaning isn’t mentioned a whole lot, but verses like Leviticus 23:22 and Deuteronomy 24:19-22 along with Leviticus 19:9-10 give the command:
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.
Leviticus 19:9-10
We see this in practice in ancient times when we read the story of Ruth:
And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain after him in whose sight I shall find favor.” And she said to her, “Go, my daughter.” So she set out and went and gleaned in the field after the reapers,
Ruth 2:2-3
When she rose to glean, Boaz instructed his young men, saying, “Let her glean even among the sheaves, and do not reproach her. And also pull out some from the bundles for her and leave it for her to glean, and do not rebuke her.” So she gleaned in the field until evening.
Ruth 2:15-17
The modern term for gleaning – where food is concerned – is Food Recovery. And, while we don’t have laws insisting we all participate in gleaning, there are all sorts of regulations and guidelines for Food Recovery.
I have been the beneficiary of gleanings – in seminary a local bakery donated their day-old breads to the seminary twice per week. Students volunteered to pick up the bread and deliver it to the community center, where anyone could select from the bags of food.
I read an article once, though of course I cannot find it now, about a Christian business owner who generated a lot of wood waste. Instead of selling the shavings, scraps, and saw dust, he donated it. Think that’s a weird thing to donate? Pet stores, schools, and woodworkers regularly use all three. Alameda County in California put together a whole document on how to inject wood waste back into the economy to keep it out of landfills.
Bringing it a little closer to home, I recently received an e-mail from a reader (a friend of my mother-in-law in Arizona) who blogs here – and yes, I asked and she granted permission to share this story.
She is a quilter, and therefore generates (and uses) a lot of fabric scraps. It turns out, fabric scraps were a major source of clutter for her.
She wrote,
Being a seamstress and quilter, it’s really hard to through those little pieces away. I might be able to put them in a quilt someday. Well, the hands can no longer hand quilt, but I still have the problem.
In God’s providence, a conversation at Bible study led to the discovery that a friend worked for a dog shelter in need of fabric scraps. Apparently,
… she was part of a group of ladies that made dog beds for the animal shelters and they preferred to stuff the dog beds with material scraps. If they used batting, it was expensive and the dogs would just tear the beds apart. So, we have been able to get rid of our scraps to a cause that is great!
So, sometimes there is a place, other than the waste bin, to donate our “gleanings.”
I’m not giving you permission to donate trash to the local GoodWill or Salvation Army. I’m simply suggesting, if you have a lot of some kind of scrap, do a little bit of research to see if there is someone or some organization out there which could use your “gleanings.” If not, I still highly recommend sharing them with Oscar the Grouch. 🙂
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Photo Credit: Alawite Woman Gleaning by Whiting, John D. (John David), 1882-1951, and Matson, G. Eric (Gästgifvar Eric), 1888-1977 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
by Julia Q | Jun 4, 2014 | De-Cluttering 101, Executing Grace, Home Organization
Seminary changed my life in a number of ways.
There are obvious things, like I got to take some amazing classes (for free! Covenant Seminary offers spouses of students free tuition for credit or audit).
Also, my life changed when we graduated from seminary and my husband began full time vocational ministry instead of continuing his awesome job in the secular marketplace.
Our family grew by two while we were at seminary, and certainly that changed my life.
It also changed by running the Free Store on campus. The Free Store was a basement room where people associated with the seminary could drop off their used items. I would sort through the items and put them on display on shelves, tables, and racks by size, category, etc. Seminary students could then come and “shop.” Everything was free – hence the name. 🙂
The seminary actually paid me to do this job. It was awesome. I had the privilege of seeing so many people find, for free, the exact thing they needed to clothe their husband, dress their children, cook in their apartment, or find a special gift.
Donations came in every category. Kitchen goods, clothing, shoes, home decor, books, toys… the list goes on. Space was limited, so I couldn’t accept large items (sofas) but we did get cribs, mattresses, kitchen tables…
So how did this change my life? I learned to recognize trash for what it is. Yes, to a point, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but sometimes trash is just plain trash. And when you start to declutter, it is important to know the difference.
So today, before we get into a few weeks of practical decluttering, I’d like to make a brief plug for recognizing rubbish, the rare beauty of the rubbish bin, the treasure of the trash can, and the glorious gain of leveraging litter.
In short: trash should be trashed not donated.
Goodwill, Salvation Army, ect. don’t employ people to mend clothes, darn socks, fix broken electronics, repair broken toys, find missing parts to appliances, brace chairs with broken legs, etc. If it can be fixed, either fix it before you donate or trash it. If you don’t trash it, they will, but it wastes their time. Trash is trash, not treasure.
Sometimes it in necessary to acknowledge an item has surpassed its useful life, it has been well loved, well used, and well worn.
Retire it.
Without guilt.
Really.
Hatian children don’t need jeans full of holes after a hurricane. Chances are they have jeans with holes.
Girls protected (or rescued) from trafficking, don’t need low cut dresses, evening gowns from the late 80’s, or lace tops and revealing cami’s. They need clothes which are appropriately modest and appropriate for the temperatures of their climate. (See DressAGirlAroundTheWorld.com, if you scroll down on the home page you can read Flo’s request for clothing. This site is about making dresses, but her request for modesty is transferable to anything you would donate – to Uganda or in the United States.)
Children in India don’t need t-shirts with sweat stains in the arm pits, shirts with tattered sleeves, or belts with holes that are worn through.
Women at the homeless shelter in your town don’t need worn bras, yoga pants with stretched elastic, or hose with runs at the toes.
Men seeking employment help and job training don’t need ties with stains or snags, even if they are silk ties. They don’t need pants without buttons, or with a broken zipper, or with cuffs worn from dragging behind the shoes with holes in the soles. They don’t need those shoes, either. Or the blazer/suit jacket with stitches pulled in the back seam…
A family rebuilding a life after a fire doesn’t need a mixer with a broken electrical cord, a vacuum cleaner with no suction, or towels with stains. They have nothing, and will be grateful for help, but they are rebuilding their life, not outfitting a movie set portraying slum life.
Nobody needs used tooth brushes, partially used deodorant, hair brushes or combs with the teeth missing, stretched pony tail holders or barrettes with missing parts.
A couple of quick checks I do (post Free Store experience) when I am sorting through my “get rid of” pile to distinguish between trash and treasure:
Check #1: If a person in need were opening the bag in front of me to see what I was giving them, would I be pleased with my offering or ashamed? I try to picture their face in front of me. If I would want to look away in embarrassment, I trash it.
Check #2: How would I describe the item for sale on eBay? Couldn’t imagine selling it? I don’t give it away either. I trash it. {OK, sometimes I repurpose things – like giving old sheets to my daughter to cut up for sewing practice… But I don’t give away things that could have a new life I am not willing to give it.}
With that in mind, here is a brief list of trash:
- Pants/skirts with a broken zipper
- Shirts with pit-stains, ring around the collar, and other stains/snags/tears
- All used underwear
- Bras that have been worn more than a week (but please wash them first)
- Used stockings, hose, tights (for women)
- Tights, hose, leggings with runs, stains on the knees or feet, tattered knees (for little girls)
- All clothes with holes, missing buttons or other closures, and stains
- Clothes with tattered edges – cuffs, sleeves, etc.
- Dishes with chips, cracks, or irremovable stains
- Non-stick pans where the coating is scratched or peeling
- Rusty kitchen tools – knives, vegetable peelers, graters, etc.
- Melted/misshapen kitchen tools – plastic measuring cups or plastic spoons that touched a hot pan or the heating element in the dishwasher and now have the characteristic melted divot in the side, storage containers where the lid doesn’t fit because it went through the dishwasher on the bottom…
- Used zip-locs
- Broken trash cans
- Broken lamps
- Broken appliances (toasters, toaster ovens, coffee pots without a carafe or that don’t work, griddles, electric skillets, you get the idea. If it doesn’t work, you don’t have the cord, or it burns at one end but works at the other… THROW IT AWAY)
- Mattresses, sofas, chairs stained from body fluids – pet or human variety
- Sheets with no more stretch to the elastic, holes, torn hems, stains, or significantly faded or threadbare
- Blankets or quilts with holes, stains, worn edges
- Books with torn pages, lots of writing/highlighting, stained covers/pages
- Workbooks/Activity books/books with puzzles, word searches, crosswords, sudoku that are *mostly* completed
- Puzzles or games with broken pieces, missing pieces, or torn cards/money/spinners
- Bath toys/baby toys with mold growing inside
- Used pacifiers, bottles with broken, cracked, or disintegrating nipples
- Breast pumps which have not been appropriately cleaned – and don’t include the used-but-not-reusable parts
- Silverware chewed up by the disposal
- Gasses, mugs, teacups/teapots with chips, nicks, or cracks
- The scale that no longer measures accurately
- T-shirts from your college days – especially if you graduated more than ten years ago
- Curtains with tears, stains, or faded from the sun
I hope you are starting to get the idea here.
I know – really, I do – how wasteful it seems to just throw away a pair of jeans or a set of dishes or a comforter from your bed. All I can offer is: get.over.it.
It’s not about you.
Giving to charity should never be about relieving your guilt. Giving to others should be about the recipient – bless
ing someone because you have been blessed. If you have well-used items that still have plenty of life in them, please donate them to a local charity or to a clothing drive for a country ravaged by disaster.
But if you have trash, give it to Oscar. His eyes will sparkle with delight.
Okay. I’m getting down off of my soap box now. 🙂
by Julia Q | May 28, 2014 | De-Cluttering 101, Executing Grace, Home Organization
After college and grad school and before seminary and pastor-hood my husband worked in manufacturing. One of the practices he implemented and utilized was the Japanese workplace organizational methodology called 5S, which helped him to operate a Just In Time business within the company.
Bear with me for a very brief and shallow economics lesson…
Just In Time is a strategy used by businesses to minimize the overhead and storage requirements of items required for manufacturing. It involves setting up triggers which prompt an order of goods to arrive just in time for the next step in the process. Well done, it increases return on investment by reducing inventory and the associated carrying costs. Poorly done, it decreases a company’s reliability and ability to produce products in a systematic and timely manner.
A key element for Just In Time manufacturing is having an efficient and effective work place.
Enter 5S.
5S is a Japanese workplace organizational method which uses a list of five Japanese words, which, when transliterated into English, all begin with S. Synonyms starting with S have been selected for the English translation as well.
Wikipedia summarizes the methodology well. According to Wikimedia:
The list describes how to organize a work space for efficiency and effectiveness by identifying and storing the items used, maintaining the area and items, and sustaining the new order.
In short:
1. Sort (seiri)
- Remove unnecessary items and dispose of them properly
- Make work easier by eliminating obstacles
- Reduce chance of being disturbed with unnecessary items
- Prevent accumulation of unnecessary items
- Evaluate necessary items with regard to dept/cost/other factors.
2. Set in order (seiton)
- Arrange necessary items in order so they can be easily picked for use
- Prevent loss and waste of time
- Make it easy to find and pick up necessary items
- Ensure first-come-first-serve basis
- Make work flow smooth and easy
3. Shine (seiso)
- Clean your workplace completely
- Use cleaning as inspection
- Prevent machinery and equipment deterioration
- Keep workplace safe and easy to work
4. Standardize (seiketsu)
- Maintain high standards of housekeeping and workplace organization at all times
- Maintain cleanliness and orderliness
- Maintain everything in order and according to its standard.
5. Sustain (shitsuke)
- To keep in working order
- Also translates to “Self-Discipline” meaning to do without being told, as in forming a habit.
Okay. Economics class is over. And that’s enough Japanese to be going on with. On to Homemaking…
Can you see, as a wife, mother, household manager, how handy 5S can be for organizing your home/life?
We don’t run a full fledged 5S system in our house, but my husband’s job from a decade ago still shapes how we play house. 🙂
Part of 5S in his workplace included being able to put your hands on what you needed most often within seconds. I’ll be the first to admit that having items on hand quickly improves efficiency. I’m sure you can recognize echoes of it in Handy vs. Hoarding.
I don’t know about you, but I make a much better editor than creator. What do I mean by that? Well, I do a much better job taking something that exists and editing it (modifying, altering it) to my needs than I do starting from scratch and coming up with something on my own.
I am about to spend the next several weeks talking about how we organize a lot of our house. Our life doesn’t work well as a one-size-fits-all solution, but its a great place to start and edit/modify/delete/alter ideas to suit your own life. And the only way you will be able to take our version of organization and modify it to fit your home, family, and lifestyle is to understand the principles behind how I do what I do. 5S plays into a lot of it.
When I start to organize anything – from tools to the kitchen to band-aids – I start by thinking through my version of 5S.
- What do I need to do in this area and what tools do I need to accomplish it?
- Where do I need things to be placed so I can reach them quickly? What is sitting here that is just in the way?
- Where will I put things when they are not in use?
- Who do I need to tell/inform/educate on how/where to put things away?
- How can I keep it the way I want it? When will I replenish consumable items?
- What do I do with things I need sometimes, but not very often?
Band-Aids (A simple example)
I repurposed an old coupon organizer to sort our band-aids. I also made use of a small craft bag for the rest of our First Aid supplies. We keep the First Aid bag in the hall linen closet – which, in our house, is right across from the hall bathroom, near the kitchen and the front door.
Since I often need to wash an “owie” before slapping on a bandage, being near the bathroom is pretty handy.
In our First Aid bag we keep:
- the coupon organizer with band-aids sorted by size (with a couple of slots designated for girly or boyish ones)
- a spray bottle of hydrogen peroxide
- wax earplugs
- alcohol wipes/swabs
- thermometers (ear, oral, rectal – clearly labeled – lol)
- eye droppers
- sterile gauze and gauze pads
- medical tape – paper, water proof
- antibiotic oinment
- benadryl cream
- aloe gel
- bug-bite itch relieving sticks
- tweezers
- an otoscope with pictures of healthy and sick eardrums (most people don’t keep one of these, but our first born had so many ear infections, it was nice to know when to call the doctor and when we could avoid waiting room germs).
- On the shelf behind the First Aid bag, I keep ace bandages, knee braces, slings, etc. from past injuries which we may find need of again.
- In the freezer we have a smiley face ice block (“happy ice”) for quick access when a cold compress is required.
When someone comes in, hurt, I can meet them in the hall bathroom with “the medicine bag” and take care of almost anything.
If someone is hurt in the yard, I can send any kid into the house to grab “the medicine bag” and have pretty much anything I need to handle minor injuries.
When we travel, we add benadryl, tylenol, and motrin (usually the generics of these), along with any daily medications to the bag and we have a little traveling pharmacy.
In the coming weeks, I’ll take a look at several areas of our house, how we organize it with this 5S methodology in mind, and *hopefully* you’ll walk away equipped to set up a system that can work for you because it takes your needs into account.
Before we get too far into organizing though, I want to deal with the excess we will undoubtedly find in our houses. I have a couple of very freeing tools for dealing with excess. You’ll be amazed at the freedom found in these two tools: the waste bin (next week) and gleaning (the week after). Then onward and upward to tools, kitchen, bathrooms, oh – just everywhere!
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Photo Credit (Collage)
Japanese Lanterns by JurriaanH (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Common Sense Economics by Ludwig von Mises Institute ([1]) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Doctor-Themed cupcakes by Clever Cupcakes from Montreal, Canada (Doctor Themed Cupcakes) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Keep on Saving Fuel by Marc Stone [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
by Julia Q | May 21, 2014 | De-Cluttering 101, Executing Grace, Home Organization
If you have been in my home, you may be surprised to hear clutter is a struggle for me. Most people who visit our home notice clean surfaces, neat cabinets, and tidy closets. Our house generally fits the description, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
God has been gracious to me. He has filled our home so full of kids, it is simply not possible to hang on to everything I might otherwise keep.
We are fairly minimalistic in furnishings, clothing, toys, kitchen tools, household cleaners… everything except people, we seem to have an abundance of those! lol.
And yet, I like things to be handy. So, in the name of efficiency, I often keep duplicates of things.
The idea of decluttering leads us to believe less is more. And in many ways it is. The less you keep, the less there is to clean and the more likely you are to be able to put things away.
But living cluttered or decluttered really comes down to a state-of-heart.
Last week I wrote a post addressing the potential sin element of clutter. That sense of clutter tied to holding on to thing “just in case I need them” which implies a state of heart of trusting my own provision over trusting God’s provision. If I don’t trust God to meet my needs, I will hold on to too much in an attempt to provide for myself. You can read more about that here.
But there’s a flip side to the clutter coin. Sometimes it isn’t clutter to have multiples of the same item. See, there is also a state of heart which chooses to be intentional and disciplined. Clutter-free homes have a high incidence of intentionality and discipline.
One way clutter builds up in my house, and I suspect yours as well, is when there are barriers to completing tasks. Say you’ve decided to fix the broken handle on the screen door. The broken piece has to live somewhere until you can fix it, right? Even if you are on your game and buy the needed parts on the next shopping trip, how quickly will you get to this “minor” repair if you have to go to the garage, clear a path to the storage closet, dig out the tool chest, find the WD-40, re-charge the drill battery, locate the tools missing from the tool chest, AND find time to do all of this? Not very quickly, I’d guess. Even a quick job can take a long time to accomplish if you spend a lot of time getting tools together to complete the job. And it takes me even longer to start work that I know will meet with many barriers. I have a mental block to even putting it on any particular list.
Sure, there are efficiencies to grouping like tasks when possible, but usually I’m looking for excuses if I’m waiting until I have several tasks requiring a metric socket wrench…
A while back I made the decision to keep duplicates of some things if it adds to our efficiency or removes barriers to getting things done.
It can be little things like, in our house, every kid has their own tube of toothpaste . This keeps quarrels at high stress times to a minimum, and we don’t share germs when there’s a bug going through the house. This may seem like a lot of duplication (eight tubes of toothpaste in use at any given moment…), which is one of the side effects of clutter, but in our case it enhances efficiency. It was an intentional choice. And really, we’re going to use the same amount of toothpaste eventually, it’s just whether I buy the tubes sequentially or in tandem. I chose tandem.
It also takes the form of bigger things. I have multiple tool bags (more on tools in an upcoming post).
It is important to be careful about duplicates. Sometimes keeping something means something else has to go. I don’t have room in my linen closet for the number of hand towels we keep AND multiple sets of bath towels. I chose to use my space for enough hand towels to change them daily while only washing once per week over keeping two bath towels per person. Other people might prioritize their space differently. The point isn’t really isn’t about how much stuff you have, it’s about being a good steward of the stuff, the space, and the time you have.
This is how I can live with the apparent contradiction “less is more” and “have essentials on hand before I can count to ten.”
So when is duplication handy and when is it hoarding?
I think it comes back to the discussion last week – it all depends upon what is going on in my heart. I may keep dozens of hand towels, but we actually use all of them, I have space for them, and it would be easy for me to pick the best ones to give to a friend if they had a house fire and had to replace everything. The hand towels don’t hold my heart – they help life with seven kids work for us.
Those dishes on my counter, on the other hand, aren’t getting used, I don’t have space for them, and the only reason I still have them is because I’m afraid I’ll give them away and the recipient will sell them for a lot of money and since I live on a pretty tight budget, that notion is hard to swallow. Perhaps I’m still trying to provide for myself instead of trusting God’s provision. I think perhaps that’s hoarding.
by Julia Q | May 14, 2014 | De-Cluttering 101, Executing Grace, Home Organization
Have you ever watched the show Hoarders? I’ve only seen one episode, but it is a frightening show. At least, for me it is, because I sometimes have trouble letting go of things “in case I need it later.”
One of the families in the episode I watched had at least eighteen inches of debris on th
e floor throughout the house. I was struck by the sheer wastefulness of their lifestyle. Obviously they couldn’t find what they needed, so they frequently went out and bought replacements. The dad had broken fish tanks on the porch, an unattached deck rescued from someone else’s house in the yard, sports equipment in the living room, and all kinds of memorabilia not only from his youth, but also from people he knew only as acquaintances throughout the house. The greatest reason for their desperate situation? They kept everything in case they needed it later. They finally sought help because they were at risk of losing their children if their house was not deemed habitable by a state-mandated deadline. They stood to lose the one thing they really couldn’t replace because they held so tightly to things they could.
There but for the grace of God go I…
My house isn’t anything like the Hoarders show, but sometimes I need to look at the clutter around my own house and see the waste implied.
When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. — Basil the Great
There is this very real sense that my clutter simultaneously distracts me from what I should be doing and steals from those around me.
Sometimes I look at my limited resources and think I cannot help someone else – the homeless person with the cardboard sign at the exit of the interstate near my home, the girl at the crisis pregnancy center who will need clothes for her newborn, the family in my church who needs school clothes for their children, the missionary who has a temporary need beyond what raised support will cover, the high school graduate unable to attend college who is setting up his first apartment on minimum wage income…
And then I look around at my clutter and see the excess. Sure, I could get a lot of money for the set of dishes I replaced with Christmas money this year. And we need some repairs done on the house and the dish money could be the way to finance them. But at what cost? I don’t mean the eBay fees, either. I mean, am I exchanging a little bit of my heart for Christ – an opportunity for compassion, generosity, and faith – by holding onto the dishes for my own material gain?
I really don’t know the answer here. On one hand, something like this stack of dishes could be the way God is providing for my needs. On the other hand, selling the stack of dishes could be me seeking to provide for myself rather than trusting God to be my provider. How do I know the difference?
I do know James 2:15-16 reminds me, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?”
There are very real times when I truly cannot help a brother or sister in need. But there are an awful lot of times when I could, if I were willing to let go of some of my I-might-need-it-laters.
There is a Getty Townend song called Simple Living that cuts right to my heart every time I hear it. The lyrics they wrote say, “it’s not what you give but what you keep is what the King is counting.”
Ouch.
This song directs my view away from what I give generously and stubbornly focuses on what is tightly held in my hand and heart.
They go on to sing:
Oh teach me Lord to walk this road, the road of simple living; to be content with what I own and generous in giving. And when I cling to what I have, please wrest it quickly from my grasp. I’d rather lose all the things of earth to gain the things of heaven.
Have you ever thought about your clutter as giving up the things of heaven to keep the things of earth?
Do you stand to lose the irreplaceable “Well done, good and faithful servant” for the easily replaceable nineteenth pair of shoes?
What peace do we forfeit when we cling to all the I-might-need-it-laters around the house?
I know it is not an easy question. I’m still wrestling with the question of the dishes on my counter…
__________
photo credit:
Hoarders by Adam73 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Closet Collage: two pictures in public domain; closet lower right corner: by David Shankbone (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
The Hand by Alex Proimos from Sydney, Australia (The Hand Uploaded by russavia) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
