7 Un-Chic Things You Should Toss
In the realm of home organizing, there are few things more satisfying than tossing the absolute junk that is clogging your beloved home’s arteries. Taste is subjective of course; I’m not here to throw away your Versace rug, but rather to expunge the stuff from your home that is inarguably toss-worthy. It is these items that make all the difference in how neat and tidy your home feels. In other words, it’s not the extra bells and whistles of home organizing products that make your home feel peaceful, it’s what you don’t have lurking around in the dark recesses of your cabinets, closets and drawers.
Lest this become an exercise in blindly throwing stuff into a garbage bag, let me remind you: the whole point of this decluttering business is to create a home environment that you can move through with EASE and DELIGHT. Rummaging through yellowed receipts to get to a pair of scissors is NOT delightful or easy. Sliding open a well-organized junk drawer and reaching for exactly what you need when you need it is the definition of CHIC and SIMPLE. Here are some suggestions for items you might want to toss to get to that happy place:
1. Receipts. The sheer number of yellowed, crumpled up receipts I’ve stumbled upon as an organizer is shocking. I once cleaned out a client’s purse collection and there were fistfuls of receipts littered in every single one of her twenty five purses. Why are we holding onto receipts for everything bagels and scallion cream cheese from 2017? Pas nécessaire, mon ami! Only keep those receipts for items you *might* want to return during the return period (usually 30 days). Then toss! For tax/record-keeping purposes, you can snap photos and keep digital copies of receipts. Expensify is a great app for scanning receipts.
2. Appliance manuals. There are some appliance manuals you can definitely hold onto. Ones for your washing machine, fridge, Dyson vacuum, crib or car seat come to mind. However, the crock pot manual from 2003 can go. So can the one for the hairdryer you no longer own. Most of the time, you can look up this information online or give Cuisinart customer service an old fashioned phone call. Recycle those dinosaur manuals, and you’ll have a whole extra kitchen drawer ready to go.
3. Old running shoes. I’ve noticed there’s a tendency to hold onto old running sneakers as a back-up for your new running shoes. If you bought new running shoes for yourself, chances are you bought them for a reason. Running sneakers lose their steam after 300 to 500 miles of use (4 to 6 months of wear), and negatively impact your joints if you continue to wear them. There are many sneaker stores across the country that will gladly take your old sneaks and recycle them.
4. Expired suntan lotion. Sunscreen lasts three years after its manufacturing date. After that, it becomes a weird science experiment in your hands, not to mention considerably less effective at staving off the sun’s rays! Most of the time, it’s frustratingly difficult to tell if your sunscreen has expired, but if it leaves a yellow cast on your skin, has a weird consistency, or simply smells off, it’s time to toss!
5. Bleached and frayed towels. Those stringy towels with stray puddles of bleach lurking in your linen closet are not doing you any favors. You deserve better! Reaching for a sad, scratchy stringy towel after your luxurious shower is the opposite of chic. You can turn those towels into rags, or donate them to your local animal shelter. When people make cheesy statements about “life being too short to drink cheap wine,” that’s how I feel about sad towels.
6. Very old bridesmaid/prom dresses. If your bridesmaid dress is super chic and you continue to get wear out of it, keep! But if it has been worn exactly zero times after your friend’s wedding from six years ago, it might be time to give it a new home. Becca’s Closet accepts prom/bridesmaid dresses and gives them to high school girls in need. Or just donate.
7. Containers with no lids. The lidless Tupperware containers cluttering up your kitchen are doing more harm than good. How much time do you waste searching for the right container for your lid, only to realize there is no such lid for your sad base? It takes ten minutes tops to quickly cull through that cabinet/drawer, shelf and recycle your containers. Save the rest, and you will have an ABSOLUTE BALL when it’s time to store your leftovers.