De-Clutter My Home -- the Home Stretch!

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We have too much stuff! Here, our kitchen table is covered in clutter. I'm giving myself until the end of this weekend to successfully get rid of 1,000 things -- exactly one month to the day that I issued this personal challenge to de-clutter my home in what feels a bit like de-cluttering boot camp!

So, that leaves me with three and a half more days...

Luckily, last weekend my husband and I went on a cleaning and reorganizing binge in our kitchen and dining room. Kitchen clutter can be the worst -- so we emptied every cupboard, drawer, and shelf and realized pretty quickly that we're one step away from being clinically diagnosed as hoarders.

You wouldn't necessarily think it to look at our relatively tidy space, but we were dismayed at how much we found that we didn't need, didn't want, or probably shouldn't use -- like old spices and other perishable goods that dated back to 2002, an excessive amount of things like cutting boards and cheap bar glasses with various sports teams' insignia, rusting "non-stick" bakeware that probably causes cancer, etc. etc. etc.

In two days, we got rid of more than 300 individual things -- some were throw-aways, but most of it was stuff we could either recycle or donate (or, in a couple of cases, sell). We're not quite finished, so I suspect that tally will grow even higher by the end of the day.

Here's a quick shot of just one of our many give-away piles (the metal tub is merely a temporary container -- we use that puppy pretty regularly, so don't get too excited now):

We have too much stuff! Here is just a small pile of household things that were causing kitchen clutter.

About 600 "things" down, about 400 more to go... Wish us luck this weekend -- and if you don't hear from me next week, assume I'm buried under piles of junk in our garage and please send help...