Declutter and reclutter

Today I woke up and decided I didn't want to live in a dumpster any more. We have so much clutter all over that it's impossible to tidy up the whole flat. I decided it would be wise to tackle a small area every few days.

I realised I wanted the balcony cleaned first because I'm going to be spending a lot of time there. It's where I take photographs of my bags.

Despite the small floor area, the cleaning took up so many hours of my day until I ran out of steam. Finally I finished everything and of course I'm totally exhausted.

We use the balcony as a storage space as well. Many years ago when we first moved in, we bought this shelving unit from Ikea. If you're familiar with Ikea, you'll know their furniture has names. If I remember correctly, this one is called Ivar. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I would hate to address my shelving unit by the wrong name.


What you see here is a clean and empty Ivar. No, today's blog post is not a pretentious "keeping it real" kind of post. Which is why I'm not showing you the before pic. You get to see the glamorous pics only!

(Edit: Thanks to Anna, this shelving unit is called Sten. I remember always calling Sten Ivar because we also have a Ivar shelving unit.)

Well, just imagine hoarding horror. Hubs uses the shelves to store his flip flops and some shoes. We also regularly dump our plastic bags, shopping bags, boxes and basically anything we felt like dumping. Speaking of plastic bags and paper bags, we have so much we qualify as hoarders. What? Are we afraid we'll run out of plactic/paper bags? It's impossible to run out!

I threw away bags and bags of unusable stuff. The rest I bagged into 5 recycling bags. If I forget to put out these recycling bags outside my door on the next recycling pick-up date, I'll be one sorry person.
 
Speaking of hoarding, I was quite shocked to discover hubs has 15 pairs of flip flops. I am runner-up with 8 pairs.

Have you ever had furniture regret? This stupid high chair is my furniture regret. We bought it years ago when my son was still a toddler. I had this fairy-tale idea that I would put him on the high chair in the kitchen while I prepare his food. The chair was high enough so he could see what I was doing. That was the idea. Well, I put him on the chair and he would sit there for a few seconds. Then he would ask to come down. And so the high chair became this useless piece of furniture which we kept putting in different locations in our little flat. Finally one day, it became permanently dumped in the balcony. Every time I look at it, I feel sick in my stomach. Sometimes in my dreams, I swing an axe at it.

This is the window grilles at the balcony. We were too cheap to install windows. Outside is this crazy looking tree. Yes, it's one tree but it looks like another tree is growing on top of the bottom tree. I hate this tree. If it weren't there, I would get better lighting. What's the average life span of a tree? Will murderous thoughts help?
 

This is the unglamorous wall I use as background to take all my pics. It is a very small piece of wall but I make it work. It has this stupid electrical cable which I have to hide. Above is a hook for my long bags.

There is some blue tack on the wall above the hook which I had tried to get hubs to remove but it's there year after year. Anyway, thank goodness for photo cropping.

This is another cheap Ikea table which I use to place my objects to photograph. I don't remember if it has a name. I cover the table with a white fabric and then I take the pics.

This is a tea container with tea which hubs gave me recently. Can you make out the table cloth and the wall? White fabric works like magic for photos.

These 2 transparent containers are miniature bath tubs. On Sunday I bought something from Sephora and the cashier asked me to become a member as it was free. So I did and I received the bath tub. I said it was cute and received another one right away! I immediately thought they would be perfect to display my pouches.

But you know what? If I want my decluttering to work, I have to stop collecting every dem container offered to me. Must tell hubs to stop going through the rubbish bin.