October 2013: Tips and Tricks

Quote of the Month
“I can get sentimentally attached to a dustball if it hangs around long enough.”

-New York Times article, “The Trouble with Stuff,” written by Constance Rosenblum, October 13, 2013.

How To Do Your Laundry
(as seen on Facebook this week)

1. Wash and dry laundry
2. Place in basket
3. Avoid folding
4. Dig through basket all week until run out of clean clothing
5. Repeat

If this sounds familiar, see below to learn another way to do your laundry.

Efficiency in the Laundry Room

If your clean laundry never makes it out of the laundry room, consider trying this:

1. Give each PERSON in your home their own hamper. (By mixing everyone’s clothes together at wash time, you are double or tripling your work!).

2. Each person can wash their own laundry (in a perfect world, anyone over the age of 12 can do their own laundry)…… or at least when YOU do laundry, each load only contains ONE person’s clothes. No need to spend time figuring out whose socks belongs to who.

3. Have a hamper in the laundry room for dirty towels. Each family member takes their own dirty towels to the laundry room after final use. When hamper is full, towels are washed and dried. If you run out of time to fold and/or deliver them, at least you can have all the clean towels in a place where family members can grab and go.

4. Bed linens should also be washed separately by room. It’s easiest to wash, dry and put them back on the bed. You only need 2 sets of sheets per bed (unless you have someone with incontinence issues).

Free Tele-seminar – Overshopping for Clothes?

April Benson of Shopaholicnomore.com and Debbie Roes, “Recovering Shopaholic” blog author, are offering a free Tele-seminar on Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 9 pm EST. The call will review three steps to take control once and for all.

During this teleseminar, you’ll learn:
Why you haven’t been able to get your shopping under control (until now!)
How to stop overlooking your problem, and really see it for what it is
3 steps you can take now to make a big shift in your overshopping issues
A great trick (used by Debbie herself) to tame your closet monster
To sign up for the call, go to Overshopping for Clothes Tele-seminar.

**I absolutely loved this post from “The Minimalists Blog” and I hope you do, too.

I Don’t Love You Anymore
Posted October 23, 2013 by Joshua Fields Millburn, The Minimalists Blog

There weren’t any tears during my most recent breakup. No possessions strewn across the lawn. No passive aggression. No yelling or fighting or angry text messages. Rather, there was a twinge of relief-an unexpected pang of freedom.

The moment it all ended, I just stood there, an awkward silence between us. When I finally handed her the bag of clothes, I knew there was no turning back. But her features held no sign of sadness-more like a look of gratitude. As I drove away, I didn’t once look in the rearview.

Thankfully, this estrangement wasn’t with a person, but with a large chunk of my wardrobe. If I would’ve anthropomorphize that bag of clothes before I handed it to the pretty girl at Goodwill, I would’ve told it, “It’s not you-hell, it’s not even me-its us. We’re no longer right for each other. I just don’t love you anymore.”

I realized it was time for us to part ways just last week, after I pulled on a teeshirt and immediately wanted to wear something else. Truth be told, it was a decent shirt, one I got a lot of use out of, but I didn’t love wearing it anymore, and I hadn’t loved wearing it in a while.