I spent the last week at Golden Gate Fiber Institute -- a weeklong fiber arts retreat in the Marin Headlands. I have lots and lots of stuff I need to photograph and talk about, and the retreat was very inspiring, but the big takeaway for me was about stuff.
Even before I left, I decided to do a big purge of my art supplies and craft supplies, because I have a lot of stuff I don't use and it gets in the way of me using the stuff I want to use. But while I was away I realized I'd brought a lot of things with me that I thought I would need but didn't, and that that holds true in my house as well.
Decluttering is a sort of ongoing process for me, but in the next month I'm going to be going a little crazy with it.
My first step was to entirely empty a dresser that takes up a lot of space. To do that I needed to make room for the things we store there that we actually need, which is to say sheets. So I got rid of half my clothes in my dresser, and now the sheets can go in my bottom drawer.
I'm going to be going through storage devices with a heavy hand in the next few weeks. It's took easy for me to look at a thing and assume it's neat and tidy if it's stored, when really the storage device itself is untidy or takes up too much space. I'm definitely going to get two dressers that we use for linen storage out of the living space of the house. Plus our excessive collection of bedside tables, and assorted other furniture that is taking up more space than it is making.
I'm also going to do some blog decluttering. I've split various subjects out of this blog over the years in response to complaints or requests from readers, but I think that's not as manageable as I'd like, so I'm going to recombine them. I can then make custom feeds for various topics rather than whole separate blogs. I'm sure that would have been easier in the first place, but sometimes the software lets you get carried away.
In the meantime, I'm working on a video demonstrating Golden Gate Coffee Spinning. It's a traditional Northern Californian technique that has a lot of interesting benefits.
Best of luck; I admire your resolve. I have a similar problem, although not enough storage space. I feel strongly I need to get rid of a lot of it, but it's taking an excruciatingly long time. I need to be less sentimental and packrattish, and better at acknowledging what I'm never going to use.
See, we don't have a lot of storage space, either. I just buy furniture to fill with stuff. So now I'm getting rid of stuff so I can get rid of the furniture, because the house was starting to feel like more of a place for storing things than a home.
And yeah, getting past the sentimentality about the stuff is critical. I find it easier to get rid of stuff if I tell myself a) I can buy a nicer version if I need to replace it, and b) it's going to somebody who will use it (rather than a landfill or recycling center).