Wood for the Trees

They say it takes about a month to form new habits. After decluttering for a month I am now more ruthless with sorting things. Stuff before where I would have dithered over whether it might be useful in the future now get heartlessly tossed into the charity box. I have come to realise that holding on to things because I don't want them to go to landfill is just creating my home into a mini landfill site. I do try to recycle, reuse or find new homes for most things but some things are just trash. The only way to reduce the landfill for these products are to stop them coming into the house in the first place. There is a campaign called  Zero Waste Week  which essentially challenges people to live without creating waste for a week to encourage them to create more sustainable habits going forward. I am going to do a slightly toned down version by stretching it out over the month of September and to reduce waste. So over the next month I am going to try to create some new habits:

So the declutter process begins. The first evening I was super revved up about decluttering and even managed to rope in my husband. (By rope in I mean he was sat in the same room working on his laptop and I interrupted him from time to time by holding up a book and shouting "Keep or give away?") And I ended up with a good ole pile of books released from their prison of the bookshelf. Then I got tired and the books stayed on the floor for a few days. Which brought me to my first learning lesson; it's all well and good decluttering but that isn't the end of the process, you have to then do something with what you have decluttered! I don't really like binning books, they're precious texts of information to me. Though some did have to go to the recycling box as they were in no shape to give away. I put some on Facebook and some went to friends, some went to the charity shop and the rest? Well they're still in a box under the stairs but at least they&#