Clutter Busting, One Drawer at a Time

I love January! Not only is it my birthday month, it's a great time to tackle clutter. Magazines are full of inspirational articles about clearing out unused stuff in their January issues. (This and this and this, for example.)

There's hardly anything (besides eating chocolate) that I love more than getting rid of clutter.

So, today I decided to tackle the middle drawer (of three) in my bathroom. It's the drawer I use the least. Can you tell?

Oh, how ridiculous. Manila file folders (above) do NOT belong in bathrooms. And look at that clutter!

After pulling everything out and wiping out the drawer (total time: 2 minutes), I found these beautiful little boxes languishing in the dark. The cloisonne ladybug one my mother made for me:

And that drab-looking blue-grey one? A very sentimental, very vintage box from Tiffany:

Inside, a note in my mother's handwriting, indicating that these beads were on clothing from my grandmother's 1913 wedding wardrobe. How sweet! and how NOT to treat them, to shove them in a bathroom drawer:

Shame on me.

I also found this little beauty. It's an Estee Lauder compact from the 1980s, and although the powder in it is far past its "use-by" date, the sheer adorableness of this keeps me from throwing it out:

Another relic from the 1980s: a tube of Estee Lauder lipstick, bombshell red, that I used only when I was all dolled up for cocktail parties and black-tie affairs. The case is so darn glamorous:

But egads! I could never wear that shade now, not to mention that it's older than some of my children:

Speaking of old, this was my Nana's brush. So although it's nicked and worn, I'm keeping it:

Compiling all the sentimental things that don't belong in this drawer: another 2 minutes.

And here we have a delightful mishmash of makeup products that I don't need or use any more, not to mention tubes of medicine that are past their expiration date:

Elapsed time to identify and corrall out-of-date meds and makeup: 2 minutes.

Now, THIS I can't get rid of fast enough. A corroded eye-pencil sharpener:

Yuck! and Goodbye!

This glop, more like glue than hair gel, was purchased for a Halloween look The Boy sported last October. It's going in his medicine cabinet. He'll discover it in, oh, 10 years, when he decides to clean up his bathroom:

I also discovered I had duplicate cuticle scissors. What a waste of money!

Total time to identify and purge nasty, duplicate, and that's-not-mine stuff: 2 minutes.

So, in 8 minutes, I had a small pile of sentimental, visually interesting stuff that deserves to be displayed somewhere:

A small pile of out-of-date, never-use-it-anymore cosmetics and medicines:

And with 2 more minutes to put the survivors back in the drawer, I went from a mess like this:

to a much-neater this:

If getting a grip on your clutter is freaking you out, try taking just 10 minutes, tackling one small drawer, and see how much you can accomplish.

You have only your 1980s makeup to lose.