The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #161248   Message #3893550
Posted By: wysiwyg
12-Dec-17 - 12:01 PM
Thread Name: Declutter & Fitness - Clearing Out the House
Subject: Putting-Away Trick: Fly-By
I acidentally discovered that some chores are better done as a fly-by.

It was clean and folded laundry in need of being put away.... for various logistical reasons, this time I couldn't just pick up the basket, take it to the waiting, empty shelves, and unload.

The full basket happened to have landed in a place I have to pass every hour on the way TO the shelves... so I spontaneously grabbed just a few items off the top of the basket, took them with, and stuck them on the shelf.

By the end of the day, not one but two baskets were empty, yet I had never "done" the job (the way my brain had been trained to do the job). Therefore neither the practical barrier to do it was here, nor any dread/hoardy habits/processes either.

I'm going to start doing other things that way as well. A tall, skinny trash receptacle, for instance, can sit in these walkway areas. I'm pretty sure my eye can spot purge-able items to sweep up as I walk around in here. A folding tray table can also be deployed to hold baskets or boxes of items that need to be on their way elsewhere.

I'm going to try this technique with pesky boxes of "sort later" (boring) things, too, several of which are annoying me by still being here. They do have a very small amount of buried stuff I need to pull out, and are in boxes I can use for moving!

....

PA:

Hardi relieved a ton of my accumulating stress this AM by dry-fitting a box in the car, which is the same size as two very heavy, large boxes I'd begun to worry might not even fit thru the car doors for the Jan. 1 trip to Ohio. He not only got the empty one in-- he turned it in way that creates SO MUCH more space than I had envisioned. Now I know that eveything else I want to take can go, and these boxes don't need to sit on the exterior hitch platform (blocking the license plate). But the scooter and my walker can, UNDER the plate!

~S~