This article is going to be a bit unusual compared to what you usually see here at The Clutter Reports. Usually this is about me decluttering my living space and occasionally I’ll post a video of someone else cleaning if I don’t have anything to report but want to have something interesting since I have subscribers to the site and want to reward them for adding me to their emails, RSS feeds, and WordPress reader. Plus if they help inspire you and me with our decluttering, so much the better. That was the intent this week after a non-report last week and getting over a brief bout of sickness this week meaning I didn’t get anything done. So as I’m looking for a video for decluttering inspiration I came across a video by YouTube channel But First, Coffee with the title “I Finally Tried Swedish Death Cleaning (and it actually works)”. I have never heard of this before but color me intrigued.

So we’re going to watch this 12+ minute video and I’ll give my thoughts on it, stream of consciousness style. That’s something I usually do over at the media reviewing site, so I’m putting those skills to use here. Have any of you heard about or tried this? As I write this intro I have yet to watch the video so I have no idea what I’m about to walk into here. I’m assuming this is an expression and no Swedes were harmed in the decluttering of this space. Otherwise, I’m going in blind. Let’s see what this is.

  • I’m a few minutes in and I’ve been doing the weekly declutter (when I’m not sick like I was this week or have other obligations) though I have been trying to get myself to focus on the smaller declutter projects. I have other stuff I want to be doing, stuff I hope will lead to something good in the future, but I do try to declutter on the weekly. A few minor daily projects on smaller “piles” not worth doing an article about may solve the problem of focusing too much on larger projects and leaving the smaller projects behind until I finally just do a bunch of smaller projects. How to do them while in recovery mode, still trying to get my sleep cycle under control, and doing stuff for the other site and trying to improve my skills in marketable areas…yeah, I’m doing a lot for someone who can’t work.
  • I can certainly attest to the problem of sorting loved one’s left behind clutter. I wasn’t old enough to really pay attention when my parents helped do this with my mom’s parents but dad and I had to do this when my mom passed and he worked with his sisters after their parents’ past. Not only are you trying to find homes for things you won’t use and are taking up space, but you have to go through the memories. That’s the hard part because while a few mementos are fine and some of the choices may seem weird to anyone else, finding a better use for things–even if that’s with someone who can use it, either by donation or selling something–not only helps them but stops you from turning into a hoarder surrounded by memories that the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven.
  • As an avid book reader myself I can understand, certainly as a kid, how having this thing that keeps falling off the book as you try to read it can be very annoying. Book jackets seem to exists for the hardcover because they don’t have a way to print it on the book (or didn’t at the time), or maybe they want an image that grabs your attention but if you prefer your library to look like it came from the 1800s you’d rather have the fancy looking hardback with the title etched in it. Seeing as I have hardback and paperbacks I think the jackets add to the uniformity but I have few hardback books. A bit of a sidebar but this is an off the cuff commenting thing I’m doing this week. Of course you know if you go to sell those some day they’ll be worth more with the jackets on.
  • I have an even harder story than her brother’s jacket. (A lot of jacket talk in this one. :D) My late mother’s wedding dress was hanging in the closet of the room that’s now my studio for as long as I can remember, all the way in the back. My dad decided to donate it because old wedding dresses sometimes get used for brides who can’t afford one or as prom dresses for girls who can’t afford one. Well, he took it to someone to get it cleaned and she apparently told him that it was too far gone (I guess the plastic covering we had over it wasn’t enough) so we just got rid of it. That really hurt knowing how much that meant to my mom that she kept it all this time. My parents had a wonderful relationship and when she got sick he was there for her until she passed. And yet, it was just taking up space in a closet of a former spare bedroom that became my sitting room and now my studio. I don’t have any kids so I have no clue what’s going to happen to my belongings when I pass so that’s something I think about now as well.
  • When mom passed we donated a lot of stuffed animals she had but I kept one and a couple Christmas ones as mementos (and I needed some more Christmas decorations…right now I think I have all I need) just because for some reason I didn’t want to let it go. I don’t even know why, because I didn’t have any connection to it. Just something about looking this thing in the eyes made me want to hold onto it. I do question the wisdom of it but I like having it around. It does look nice. There’s also one doll I didn’t want to get rid of because it’s been in this house so long, even though we currently don’t have a spot to display it, that I’d feel weird letting it go. I’m not even sure this is healthy even though we got rid of the other stuffed animals and dolls she had, but that’s what I thought about when she mentioned the decorations made from her dad’s old clothes. I have a weird mind, folks.
  • I watch anime with people fighting when I can’t sleep. (Currently an American dub of Samurai Troopers called Ronin Warriors for any anime fans in the readership. It’s a surprisingly close translation.) I’m certainly not going to judge someone watching murder mysteries during an insomnia bout, though in both our cases you’d think this would make us LESS likely to finally go back to sleep. (If those same anime fans heard of Iria: Zeriam The Animation that would be a worse choice given the bloody clone monster killing and yet it was working until I finished rewatching that series.) Like I said, I have a weird mind. Sometimes I can watch an old Superman cartoon from the Fleischer Studios shorts and that satisfies my brain because it’s an ending story, so my story-crazed brain accepts it and then I’m off to sleep. Weird the kind of things in my stream of conscious watching this and how little of it actually involved decluttering. Maybe because I’ve written about a few of these issues over the years and I’d be repeating myself as well as what you just watched.
  • It’s nice to see another declutterer who isn’t into the whole “minimalist” thing. I’m not against it; you do you. I just like having my living area look lived in rather than staging for show. It feels like humans live here. I like things clean but I’m not a freak about it.

So what do you folks think? Could Swedish Death Cleaning be the mindset you need to get your space cleaned or is it just really morbid? We’ve kind of been doing it but more to lighten our load than anything else.

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