Last week we accepted this challenge from Wayne Dixon, an extraordinary Litter Hero Ambassador. He is travelling the UK coastline with his beautiful dog Koda, picking up litter and raising environmental awareness as they go. If you are on twitter, give @waynekoda a follow to see the amazing work they’re doing.

At the end of our challenge, the local streets are less messy & our recycling box is filled to the brim. It didn’t take much effort; we just went about our usual day, but took along an empty bag & picked up rubbish along the way.

Now we’ve completed our week of litter-picking, we’re looking for more people to take up Wayne & Koda’s #7daychallenge. Just go out with a carrier bag in your pocket and collect a few things as you go, recycle what you can and dispose of the rest appropriately.

Let us know how it goes 🙂

The R-word? Surely, having said we wouldn’t get into deep and troubled political waters, we aren’t now going to dive in. Of course not! To do so would be most unwise. While the debate fuels our underlying sense that life is chaotic, the merits or faults of Remain or Referendum is not what we plan to share our thoughts on today.

We also, tempting as it is on these cold winter days, will not be debating how Relaxing (under the duvet) and worrying less might achieve good karma. Truth is that looking back over this declutter’s journey, it was when stuff got Rehomed or Removed  we felt good. When we could see the floor or retrieve a document we needed without it being like a Jenga game.

No, this year we return to our roots. We are determined to tackle the clutter we have and so the R words we will be drawing on include  Recycle, Repurpose and Repair. BUT even as the 3R’s have expanded to 8 while we fight to stem the plastic and other stuff Tsunami we now know those R words are not enough. When we look in this once tranquil study/office we now face a space completely unusable for its purpose.  So today’s R words need to be Resolve and Ruthless. We won’t forget the other R’s but our priority this year has to be (even if some items end up in the Rubbish) to REGAIN OUR SPACE.

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Please come back in six weeks (or is that months) to see what Remains.

Happy New Year, one and all. Yes, I know it’s a bit late for that, but I’m never really sure at what point it stops being the New Year and simply becomes the year.

I’m not going to bore you with my list of resolutions for 2019, but do feel a quick audit would be apt at the start of another (hopefully less cluttered) year.

So, let’s take a quick look back at my new year plans for 2018. A quick summary: ditch the books, stop buying magazines, sort out years of saved paperwork, bake all the family birthday cakes, & pick up 1000 pieces of litter.

Well, I managed to wave goodbye to 327 books (just a drop in the booky ocean.) I did stop buying magazines, don’t miss them & enjoy not having them around. The boxes of paperwork persist. Four delicious cakes were cooked this year, avoiding all that pointless packaging & actually tasting far better than anything the supermarket had on offer. We had three community litter picks last year, so the goal of 1000 pieces was definitely smashed (but thanks to my phone being stolen, I stopped counting each piece on Litterati.)

It’s very easy looking back on a year and thinking little has been achieved… or looking forward and thinking the tasks ahead will never be cleared. But today I’m feeling (uncharacteristically) optimistic.

At the end of my first blog for 2018 I joked: “Right, I’m thinking that’s enough Good Intentions for one year. If I carry on, a New Year’s Resolution might creep up on me unawares. Such as pledging to remove 2018 items from my cluttered house in the coming year. No, that would never do.”

Well, I kept count of the departing clutter & managed to get rid of 810 unwanted/unloved/unused items last year. Nowhere near 2018, but that’s still 810 fewer things in my house.

So there we are, I survived my New Year clutter audit & have one resolution for the coming year:

2019 things have to go

And here are the first 14 books ready for rehoming, so the total’s already down to 2005.