Clear your clutter – inside and out

When Chartered clients Don and Joan King’s second son emigrated with his wife and four children to Australia earlier this year, Joan knew it was time for a change. Having lived in in the same 5- bedroom home for the past 33 years, Joan was keen to sell and move somewhere smaller, while Don wasn’t quite ready to move, particularly since he had yet to complete restoring his 1969 Mustang, a project which he had undertaken with his son. At a crossroads, and after a meeting with their Retiremeant^TM Specialist and Kim Potgieter, they reached a compromise. They would spend the year getting the house ready to put on the market. For Don, this meant finishing his Mustang project, and for Joan, it meant beginning the process of decluttering 33 years’ worth of stuff.

During a client vision boarding day earlier this year, Joan was very intentional about what she wanted her next chapter to look like, and it was clutter-free. Joan had done some serious decluttering a few years back when she retired and closed her interior decorating business, so she knew the process to follow.

Joan decided to declutter by themes to make the task more manageable. She recently gifted a lifetime of old clothes to workers she knew in her area. Using rails, she hung up all the clothes and invited people to help themselves. She also used to make costume jewellery, so apart from a few special pieces that she kept, she gifted those too.

The next project that she is tackling books. Slowly she is sorting out books into relevant piles. She is passionate about animals, so she has decided that most of her books will be donated to the SPCA or Saints Animal Shelter for them to sell. As for the more specialised books, like those pertaining to her interior decorating business, she is researching where they may best be utilised.

There are things that they plan on selling; for example, they were a keen family of scuba divers, so they have all the equipment. Joan has begun preparing the process of decluttering these objects and has taken photographs and gathered information so that she can sell them on Facebook Marketplace or other online platforms when the time comes.

As Joan proves, decluttering is best done the same way they say it is to eat an elephant, one bite at a time. As for her vision board, not only has the decluttering begun in earnest, but she and Don have also booked two trips to see family this year. It just goes to show.