40 Day Trash Bag Challenge

It all started with Momma B’s Coffee Perks, a group one of my friends set up so she could keep track of the blogs she follows. (YAY! She follows mine!) Now when you run across a blog entitled The Incompetent Hausfrau, if you’re me, you immediately click on it, see that it is sarcastic & witty and full of cheeky curses, and immediately start following. That led to another, which led to another, and the next think I knew I was reading about this decluttering challenge undertaken by Simply Catholic in 2008 in observance of Lent.

Oooohhhh…my kind of challenge. And really, I’ve been wanting to declutter my house pretty much ever since we moved in..and I’ve made a lot of progress. But I like stuff, and as my husband is quck to remind me (more than just occasionally), I will get a vision of what I want and go buy the stuff to make it happen before getting rid of the stuff we already have. Which, of course, creates more stuff…more clutter…less space.

So here we are at the 40 Day Trash Bag Challenge.

How it works:

Pick what size of trash bag you want to use. (I haven’t decided on this yet, but it might be recycled shopping bags, since we have about a million of them.)
Each week day for eight weeks fill one bag (or equivalent). It can be a bag of stuff, toys, clothes, papers – anything, a box of books, an old TV. Anything that you can count as clutter is fair game.
Update on your blog how it goes.
Have fun.

I like this idea. I’m really going to strive to get into this habit for the next few weeks. Strangely, I might not need 40 days…but I might. What I ultimately want, at the end, is a place for everything and everything in its place.

THEN the challenge will be to train (retrain?) the hubby and small child to actually put the things which have a place into that place…every time. That will be more challenging.