I am reading Organizing Outside the Box by Kellen Buttigeig and Sari Brandes.

The first step in this book is a "learning styles quiz".  I turn out to be a visual learner:

Visual learners prefer keeping everything within sight but in a neat and non-distracting way. You may want to replace your filing cabinet with a literature sorter or desk top file box to store documents you need regular access to. For more organizing tips for the Visual learner, get your copy of Organizing Outside the Box: Conquer Clutter Using Your Natural Learning Style.

I'm tempted to say "I knew that" - but not how it fits in the context of decluttering. Okay, this book is intriguing: I'll read on.

Drove myself yesterday to to the job I'd been dreading: the big bookcase in the front hall by the door. It was full of magazine boxes, which were full of... all sorts of things: stories I'd published, random fannish magazines, cookbooks, history, origami, books too big to fit in other bookcases....  One by one I went through it all and either trashed it or found another place for it. Mostly on top of the shelving in the bedroom.  The bedroom looks a little more crowded now, but still passable.

So then I lugged the emply bookcase down to the basement. It was falling apart as if it had been the books holding it together.

Then I moved my pantry shelves to that space, and put a pretty Japanese print of a sparrow over it, and moved the wicker stool to the place where the pantry had been.

I now have a nice hallway.

Not that the hallway is done, no, not by any means. I have to clear out the closet.  But not, I think, today.  Maybe not even this year.  The kitchen should be the next focus.

- - -

On the bus, on the way home last night, I was reading a book called "The 8-Minute Organizer" by Regina Leeds.   It seems to be a useful and practical book, just as I'd hoped - though I didn't get far, since I learned (again) that reading on my phone on the bus makes me carsick.

Before I bailed, though, I came to mistrust Regina Leeds' sense of time.  She says in her introductory section that it takes about four minutes to empty the trash and the recycling bin. I don't know what her system is - I can, yes, probably empty my trash, put it down the trash shute (which is right by my apartment door) and get a new bag into the bin in four minutes, if I rush it a little.  But the recycling?  Even keeping it more or less together by the door - and I have to find a better system than that, it doesn't look pretty - even keeping it together and in a container already, I have to carry it out to the elevator or the stairs.  Either way, I don't think I can get to the basement in less than four minutes, and then there's sorting the stuff into the containers - a no-brainer, but it takes at least a minute to get a bad of recyclables in the appropriate receptacles.  Then another four minutes to get back to my apartment.

I'd say, ten minutes for the whole job, at least, if I don't linger.

Maybe I should do it with a stopwatch, to find out.

Still worth doing every day.  Or every second day. Maybe if I did the trash one day, recycling the next, on a rotating basis?  Would that work?

- - -

Having cleared a lot of books and furniture out of my living room last week, I looked around and thought: It looks better, but it doesn't look wonderful.  It needs rearrangement.  It needs an artistic eye.

I always used to think I had an artistic eye, but I was stumped.  Maybe not so much.

So I asked my friends throughout the week.  Some said, "You need new curtains."  My curtains - plain white cotton - are plain, and need hemming, but I like them - and I don't want to spend money on this project.  There followed a discussion of curtain colours, and whether people want a warm and cosy, closed-in environment, or something that feels cool and spacious.

The whole point of this project is that I want spacious - or, perhaps, a compromise middle point between the extremes.

Yesterday my friend Pim came down and looked around.  She is an interior decorator par excellence - and artist with the right kind of eye. Her place not only looks comfortable and beautiful, it has character. One would never mistake her place for a page in a magazine, and not just because of the guinea pigs running around.  Her place always looks both lovely and interesting.

So. She looked around my place, and made a few suggestions, and made a few more, and I added some, and we pushed around furniture and moved pictures and bookcases and teapots and suddenly the place looked beautiful, livable, and interesting.

How did she do that?

- - -

And, yes, there's still a lot to do.  The hallway.  The (shudder) kitchen. Work in progress, I tell myself. Work in progress.

Today I'm going to Gananoque to deliver my bags of books to a friend with a bookstore there.  J. Mann books, on Charles Street near King.  A fab place for a browse, and you'll a lot of books there that used to be on my bookcases.

- - -

A pause before resuming...

Last night, I was too tired to do anything but wash dishes and put away laundry  Note how this implies (though I am not admitting anything out loud) that I didn't put away my laundry when I did my laundry two days ago. After I have already promised myself not to do that.

Bad girl.

Well, it's put away now, in all those shiny new places.  Thinking it through: If all goes well, I can finish the bookcase project this weekend, leaving two more weekends in November, one for the kitchen and one for the hallway.  I'm not sure which is more intimidating; but I remind myself that so far each of my projects has looked intimidating, but ended up being not so bad after all - just time consuming.  And needing effort.  But nothing unmanageable.  Nothing discouraging.

Meanwhile, the challenge is to get enough sleep, and go to the gym each day, and to do yoga each day.  I am both surprised and gratified how this gives me the energy to carry on with the decluttering. I would do it anyway; but this makes it easier.

The order to do things:

• Read another book on how to declutter and/or minimize. I got another one out of the library, and don't want to return it unread.  It's called the Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing  Your Home and taking Control of Your Life by Lorie K. Marrero.
• Empty the bookcase by the front door.  Dispose of it. Find or buy paper to cover the magazine boxes as necessary. (Note: go to The Papery after work tomorrow. Find out their hours.)
• Switch the books in the bookcase by the bathroom into the two brown bookcases that were in the bedroom.  Discard books as I go.
• Move the comic book boxes in the bedroom from the north wall to the east wall.
• Move the large bookcase in the living room into the bedroom, either on the west wall or the north wall - whichever fits best.
• Put the small bookcase in the space behind the front door.
• Put the teapot display shelves (formerly a bookcase) in an attractive spot in the living room.

Moved and seconded, and so resolved.

- - -

What's the next step?

I'm keeping the process of decluttering fluid, and one thing tends to lead organically to the next.  But I do love to make lists.  It keeps my brain sharp; keeps me focused.

My list for the next things to do:

• move comic boxes from one side of the bedroom to the other (harder than it sounds!)
• empty the bookcase by the door
• switch the two brown bookcases in the bedroom for the Billi by the bathroom, and put the books from the Billi into the replacements
• move the brown bookcase in the living room into the bedroom

Call it my strategy for the rest of the week, though there are other, smaller things to work on, too, that I might do when I have a few minutes - the shelf in the hall closet, the top of the wardrobe (which is attracting Stuff like flypaper), a kitchen shelf or two.

But the very next thing to do: put away the clean laundry.  It's in a basket on my bedroom floor. It shouldn't be there.  It really shouldn't.
- - -

Confessions of a non-knitter...

I gave away my knitting box.  Everything I had: the needles, the faux wool (because I'm allergic to real wool), even the lovely suitcase-box with a handle and clasp I'd bought at Michael's to put it in. 

I've tried knitting several times in my life.  When young; we learned it in school.  When older: having learned to knit, I found I liked crochet better, set about to make an afghan when I was a post-grad.  I even made a baby-bundler for a friend who was having a baby once.  It was yellow. It was the lumpiest, funniest, badly made baby bundler you ever saw.  I don't remember whose shower it was for; I hope they ultimately forgave me for the gift.  I hope the poor baby never had to wear it.  He'd be the laughingstock of babies.

I had the notion that because I like to sew, I should enjoy knitting.  Then I thought that if I practiced hard enough, and often enough, I might get good at it, and then start to enjoy it.

These things have not happened.

People often knit while watching television.  I do that too.  But then when the show gets interesting, I stop knitting to pay attention.  Or I grimly continue to knit, and feel irritated and edgy about it.  I don't like dividing my attention between two things at once.

So yesterday, in the interests of decluttering, I offered my knitting kit to Sylvie, and she accepted it.  I realized as soon as I mentioned it that I'd been feeling a vague guilt for not knitting, for not being good at knitting, for not finding it relaxing and production and  useful the way so many of my friends do.

No more knitting. No more guilt.  And one step closer to having nothing on top of my dresser.
- - -