One Less Car, One More Totally Clean Surface for Week 23 (Decluttering and Simplifying 2010)

David and I took a quick 3-day trip down to Austin earlier this week. We bought some books for resale and enjoyed a few tourist attractions, one of which I may tell you more about in a future post. (Hold me to that, won’t you?) Now, we’re settling into several weeks of our usual routines. We hadn’t been out of town in awhile, and we don’t have anything else planned. That’s fine, though, I have some writing and bookselling to do.

We didn’t make any progress toward getting the lawnmower fixed, so the outdoor progress remains halted. We’ll have to deal with that next week.

I’m proud to report that one more challenging surface is totally clean. My “desk” has nothing on it — at the moment, thanks to a decluttering spree this morning. I should clarify that my desk is the 6-foot table that sitteth at the left hand of me while I’m using my desktop computer. There’s still some clutter on the computer table, but that comes and goes I move through projects, so I’m allowing it to remain, at least for now.

The desk can’t stay totally clean, but I don’t plan to put much there anymore. My postal scales will have to go there when I’m not using them, and my CD cleaner will need to return also. I hope I can allow the important things to stay without the desk becoming a catch-all (again) for things I don’t know what to do with. I considered removing the desk/table completely or replacing it with something smaller that I already have, but my bubble mailers for my book business live below this table, and they fit there perfectly. I’m sure I can think of a better way to accommodate them, however, once I put some attention toward the situation.

While I was clearing the desk, David removed the last few items of clutter from the bedroom and vacuumed up the remaining mess. I’m ready to call the decluttering complete in the bedroom.

Our older car, the Ford Focus, is now sold to the repair shop for a salvage price, so we won’t have any more repair expenses related to it. And our car insurance payments will be cut in half since we’ll only be paying on one car instead of two. We will probably eventually need a second car because of our isolated living situation, but we’ve managed with one car before and can do it again.

As the halfway point in my yearlong decluttering and simplifying project approaches, I’m very literally amazed at the progress I’ve made. There will be more next week.