July 18, 2008

I'm not going to lie to you... I'm a wee bit stressed out. Ok, so I did lie to you. I'm completely stressed out. Tomorrow is our first House Purge garage sale. There's really so much that can't be done until tomorrow morning, that I feel overwhelmed, and I'm not sure how I'm going to get everything outside and priced in time for the sale.

This past week has also been full of friends' horror stories about garage sale headaches, such as people trying to haggle a 25-cent item down to 15 cents. (Seriously? As that friend put it, "I'd rather give it to charity for free, and therefore to someone who really needs it, then for 15 cents to you.") I'm sure I'll have all kinds of interesting things to write about next week.

I, naturally, don't want you to come to my garage sale so that you can fill your newly purged house with my purged items. But, if you are in market for items that are needs, by all means stop by! The garage sale will be on Saturday, July 19 in Pinewood Springs - just start down the canyon toward Pinewood and follow the signs. The sale starts at 8:00 a.m. - no early birds, please. You'll just stress me out even more. There may be another family joining our sale, and there will be at least one other sale in Pinewood Springs that day, so it will be worth the drive.

Okay, enough plugging my garage sale already. Let's get back to purging. How about a paper purge, shall we?

The first step to purging the house of unnecessary paper is to prevent unnecessary paper from entering the house in the first place. The best way to do this is to start at the mailbox. There are businesses and organizations that can eliminate 90% of the junk mail that comes to your mailbox. The organization I like best for this is www.41pounds.org. 41 Pounds states that the average adult receives 41 pounds of junk mail per year - that's 82 pounds for my family, alone! They are more interested in the environmental reasons to eliminate junk mail, and donate a portion of their fee to the environmental charity of your choosing. There are other Web sites that make a business out of offering this service, but I opt to keep it with a nonprofit organization. The fee is $41.00, and covers all junk mail elimination for five years.

Speaking of junk mail, I used to hoard catalogs, with pages dog-eared of all the stuff I wanted. My husband, Josh, would get mad at my catalogs when we first got married, and say, "But we can't afford that!" He didn't seem to understand that I had no intention of buying any of that stuff, I was just dreaming of buying that stuff. My dreams were taking up a lot of room in our home office. I've decided in recent months to forgo all catalogs. I know what companies I like. I know where they live. I will find them when I'm ready to buy something, and I don't need them finding me anymore. If you enjoy getting catalogs, by all means peruse them, but then recycle it when you're finished if you aren't going to buy something immediately.

Of course, some of the mail that comes in is important. Instead of letting the good mail pile up on any flat surface with an empty space, do something with it immediately. All mail is waiting for an action - to be recycled, read, paid or filed. Make sure that the mail gets to where it needs to be to stay organized and in control of the paper clutter.

Another option is to go digital. Most banks and credit card companies offer to send statements to your e-mail instead of your snail-mail box. Having these files on your computer can save space in the home office. Also, get set up with automatic bill pay on your recurring expenses, and eliminate those monthly paper bills, as well.

Clean out your filing cabinet. There are certain documents that need to be kept for certain amounts of time for tax purposes. (See: http://irs.gov/publications/p552/ for more information.) Not all old files need to be kept directly in your home office, though. Take all of the older files that you are required to keep boxed up and in storage. Bills that have been paid really don't need to be kept longer than a year. Peter Walsh, author of Its All Too Much, recommends filing bills and receipts by month of the year. The next year, when you come to July again, you'll throw out everything that was in the July folder and start fresh. When I cleaned out our filing cabinet, I found that my husband had been hoarding old propane bills since the first year we lived here. What ever for? The bills are gone now... and he won't even notice. (Please note: I am not suggesting purging files behind your spouse's back as an ethical purge technique.)

And what about all the old, sentimental letters, cards and artwork? The advice from Peter Walsh that I've passed along before is that if there's a sentimental item that is special enough for you to keep, you need to honor the item. Special notes should be framed, put in a shadowbox, or put in a scrapbook. Or, perhaps allow yourself one shoebox of your most important cards and letters to accumulate. Another option is to scan them. Having them on disk will allows you to enjoy it on your computer, or print it at a later date if needed.

The other big task of paper purging is magazines. Purging magazines involves keeping out the excess. Peter Walsh points out that there are 22,000 magazine titles being printed in the United States right now, and yet there are really only about six original magazine ideas, they are just rotated by the editors and given a new name and new photos. People keep excess back issues of magazines around for four reasons. The first is that it's part of their identity. "I am an outdoor person, so therefore I have to own three years of Backpacker magazine." (Guilty.) The second is that, as I mentioned with books last week, they think if they throw the magazines away, they lose the knowledge that came with those magazines in the first place. The third is that they think the magazines will be worth a lot on eBay as a collection. (Go ahead and research that on eBay to see that, in most cases, that isn't the case.) And the fourth reason is that people don't have time to read their magazines, but think that someday they will have the time. Limiting it to only three subscriptions, and only keeping the two most recent copies of each, will help eliminate those piles of magazines. If you haven't found time to read the magazine in two months, you really didn't want to read it all that much, did you?

Unlike other clutter in the house, paper is one of the easiest to lose control of because its free and its invading our houses, uninvited, every day. I have been implementing all of these tips over the past few months, and Im already seeing a big difference.

Kristen Owen is a longtime blogger and registered eBay Trading Assistant. More information, topics, and helpful tips about House Purge can be read by going to the projects Web site at www.housepurge.com .