Too Much Stuff (Again!)

So, who's up for another round of decluttering? My house is a mess and I blame it on the fact that there is too much stuff in it. Too much stuff clamoring for my attention, too many papers waited to be sorted and filed, too many thing being kept just in case (of what?!).

For months I have been following Karen's blog as she gets rid of her excess, moving towards her eventual dream of having a tiny house. And yesterday, on the headlines that scroll on my home page, what article should come up but one on tiny houses? After watching several of the video clips, walking through my house bothered me even more. The reason there are stacks of cookbooks on the kitchen cart is that I have too many cookbooks. The answer is not more space or more furniture. The answer is cutting back to what I truly need and use.

It seems I have to go through this every few years. I declutter and then suddenly there's all this empty space so when I see something I kinda, sorta, might someday want, it is that much easier for it to make it into the house. Yes, you may roll your eyes now. I'm rolling mine at my own ridiculousness.

Here are all my cookbooks. The stacks are organized by type of cookbook: food preservation, ethnic cooking (mostly Asian - Thai, Indian, & Korean), bread-baking, garden and native foods, vegetarian/vegan, no-added-fat low-sugar vegan, and specialty like the solar cooking.

My goal was to reduce these 58 cookbooks to however many will fit in my kitchen cart without stacking any sideways. I hate when books are stacked sideways, making them hard to retrieve without handling, or knocking over, the whole stack. Give me clean, ordered shelves. They don't have to be shelved by the Dewey Decimal System as my mother did with our 10,000 books in my childhood home, but I do want to be able to put my hands on the one I want easily.

Here is the After picture. All the books I'm keeping fit in the kitchen cart plus my file of 5x7" recipe cards. The stack on top are the ones that are going away. Most were too similar to ones I kept to make the cut. Notice there is space for another book or two on the top left shelf. What do you think the odds are of me finding something to stick in there while trading the others at the used bookstore tomorrow?


Next up for decluttering? I have no idea yet, although we did remove five DVDs from our collection yesterday.