Do you have too much stuff? Do you find it overwhelming? Some people are ruthless and just chuck things out, but Alice couldn’t do that. Waste not, want not: that’s what her father used to say.
And so, when Alice made a New Year’s resolution to tidy ten years’ accumulated possessions, she carefully considered how to declutter without throwing things away, without losing things she had paid good money for, and without wasting anything that could be reused or repurposed. With a little time and effort she worked out a way to make use of as much of it as possible, organise the things she wanted to keep, and how to get rid of things without feeling guilty.
With enough notebooks to last twenty years, more than three boxes of biros, and far too many scented candles, Alice had a tough task ahead. But by the end of the year she knew what she had and where to find it, she had clear surfaces, she didn’t have to climb over bags to get to her bed. She had new ways to think about her possessions, and strategies for how to dispose of things she had no need for but didn’t think she could bear to part with.
Written in the form of a personal memoir, this is the story of how, over the course of a year, Alice tidied up. From charity shops to ebay, from make do and mend to reuse and recycling: refusing to throw anything away what could be reused, or to give away what might be sold, Alice got things sorted.
A humourous take on the popular self-help theme of decluttering and make-do-and-mend, this charming story describes how Alice managed to tidy up around the demands of work and daily life, and explains the strategies she developed to help her stay on top of things once they were sorted.
