Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Stacks

My house is filled with stacks.  Stacks of school papers, stacks of mail, stacks of books, stacks of shoes, stacks of STUFF.

I get a lot of catalogs and magazines in the mail.  Magazines are suffering from declining subscriptions, but I still like to hold something tangible and glossy in my hands.  So last year, when I ran across a raft of special subscriptions at $2-5 each, I snagged them.  So the magazines pile up.  And yes, I know all about stopping catalogs, but here's my dirty little non-environmental secret: I like catalogs.  I like flicking through the pages and seeing full size images of things that I may never buy, but are visually appealing.  I simply like them and I'm not apologetic.  But, I do not like discarding them - instead, I discovered that teachers of the younger grades like them for students to practice cutting and pasting (the physical version) pictures and words.  So I do big dumps every once in a while.

The stack of magazines and catalogs by the front door reached well over 2 feet - I missed dumping them off at school before the end of the school year and then they piled up more over the summer.  So this week I've done three bags to school.

Sadly I keep forgetting to take the last bag from the car into the school for the past few days, so I'm not done yet, but still it's nice to not have that stack by the door.  Though with holidays rapidly approaching they'll pile up soon enough again!



Declutter 2013:
Day: 6
Items gone: 3
Goal: still undecided

3 comments:

Rachel et Natalie said...

great job Susan.
At home I like to stack too. For the school paper, I trash half of it right away and after one month go through it again. For our daily mail, I do the vertical filing/recycling for half of it.

Thrift Store Mama said...

That's great that you've figured out a system that allows you to still get your catalogs and magazines but not have to keep them in the house !

Laurie said...

Well done getting those bags out of the house. They'll be put to good use too.