Getting Rid of Clutter Part 1- Blog Post

Audio File

You are listening to episode 6 of the Busy Mom’s Survival Guide.

Welcome to the Busy Mom’s Survival Guide where we discuss making the most of your family’s health, time and money. I’m your host PJ Jonas and I’m here to help you make the most of each day despite your busy schedule.

Welcome back, I am very excited about today’s special episode. I’ve asked my friend Lori Lynch to join me today to talk with me about the subject of clutter. I think this is a really important topic because so many moms and women live their lives in a constant state of being overwhelmed, and I think a major cause of this is the fact that we are surrounded by too much stuff, it’s everywhere.

Right now, I am joined by my good friend Lori Lynch, and she is a survivor of the tornadoes that just went through here that you guys have heard me talk about and I’ve asked her to join me today because pretty much in an instant everything that she had was gone and I figure that she’s got a really unique perspective on what clutter is and what’s truly important to her life.

PJ Jonas: Hi Lori.

Lori Lynch: Hello PJ thank you so much for letting me join you here and I just want to say thank you to everyone that’s listening, that just helped in any way during this traumatic experience that we had. We had people ship clothes in, gift cards, cash, we even had farm fresh eggs, one of the 21 year old choose not to have her birthday gifts and she put together a toiletry bags for us and which we are still using right now in our rental house. So we really appreciate all that help. Thank you so much.

PJ Jonas: It was amazing to us the response from people. People really just wanted to do something practical and it is so nice to hear how much that had actually helped.

Lori Lynch: It was wonderful because that first few days you don’t have clothes, you don’t shoes, you don’t have socks, you don’t have underwear, you don’t have belts, you don’t have gloves, and anything like that, that you needed. Tell you what, clothes came in quickly so then we just had to grab and sort through and figure out what each child can wear for the day and got the ball rolling.

PJ Jonas: Yeah it was amazing and we weren’t even directly affected, and it was amazing to watch. You’ve got in your hand your journal and you want to tell everybody what you did a couple of days ago?

Lori Lynch: Yea, I’ve been journaling little bits by little bits after the tornado and of course the first couple of weeks was such a whirlwind I didn’t get, whirlwind that’s kind of funny. I didn’t get a chance to write too much, but I’ve written a little bit here and there and on the month date, the anniversary date of the tornado, that morning, early in the morning I could not sleep. It reminded me a lot of that first, the night after the tornado when I had not seen the house yet, my husband and 20 year old had gone over there to see it, and I’m just imagining, I’m laying there in bed just imagining what it was going to look like, my stuff was thrown all over the field, what was left of it. We are going to have 75 people there picking through my stuff the next day and I wanted to get there so quickly so that I could just take it all in before everybody else got there to help. So a month after when I was not sleeping well, so I decided to write a little bit about the whole thing.

So I entitled this More of What Matters, Less of What Doesn’t: “In my mind’s eye, I see myself walking through certain areas of my home a month and a day ago, opening up cabinets or looking into bookshelves and asking myself, what in here is really, really, really important to me? When compared with the quantity of stuff that I had and the quantity of stuff that most people have, very few items met the criteria and thus got packed. I had journals for each child in which I had written letters to them and jotted down weights, heights and other memorable events and I grabbed baby books; a tote of pictures still on the back porch that we had just been looking through recently and it hadn’t gotten to the barn yet. I packed some family videos David had put together but not all of them. After all we packed up and gone to mom and dad’s before because of the threat of a tornado, we had no basement but they do, only to bring everything back and put it back into place. I had someone get the computer’s brain, I don’t know what exactly that’s called, I got my Bible, an extra set of clothing for each child, and Dave and I, I’ve got a special bracelet that Dave got for me, and I saved my favorite pair of shoes that mom and dad had got me from Pacers and Racers Running Store for my last few birthdays. I made sure the little boys had a special stuffed animal or blanket, I got the case of CD’s that are backed up copies of most of our digital pictures from the last 8 years or so. I got our bills and some important paper work. I got a small pile together of favorite home school stuff which I think I must have left on the bed because I haven’t found it yet. There are more things I would have grabbed had I known that this was not just a fire drill.”

“But over the 4 or 5 hours, I had to leisurely walk through my house, it produced very few physical items I viewed as really important, God was preparing me for that Friday even earlier that week. I went to the barn which contained many blue Rubbermade totes all neat and labeled on steady shelving Dave and the boys made for me a few years back, only to look at the tote of Arby’s Christmas glasses I bought for a dollar a piece at least 25 or 30 years ago but have not been used in about 10 years because I would forget about them and thought, Why am I keeping these?” Another day, it was the three totes of Christmas decorations, I thought to myself, “I’ll ask Dave if we can get rid of these, because a lot of these pieces are broken, ornaments and…” The morning of the 2^nd, I was putting away miscellaneous books that were laying in the barn into totes and my daughter Whitney came out to see what I was doing. We both laughed after I said, “I’m getting this books all nice in totes so when the tornado comes, they’ll be neat as they tumble in the wind”. Little did I know what would actually happen. People question our family several times, “How can you be so lighthearted and joke about all this?” You see I’m getting to play out what I already knew but didn’t have the confidence to do myself, clear the clutter, the things that didn’t really matter out of my life. To me it feels like a good spring cleaning, for my physical house, yes, but more importantly for my emotional and spiritual parts. Why do we want more and more of the stuff that doesn’t give you that “ahh” feeling, that stuff that robs us so much of our life, our times, our finances, even our relationships with God and others. They give us no peace of mind, no joy, no love. Next time you are falling over your belongings, saying to yourself as you stand at the entrance of your garage, “I’ve got to get rid of some of this stuff”, take heed. God could always allow a tornado. It’s a sure fire clean out method, but probably simpler in the long run if you just did it yourself, believe me. Then give a heartfelt embrace to your nearest available loved one and cherish the moment.”

PJ Jonas: That was beautiful, I loved that. I can’t believe that you wrote that before I even asked you to do this.

Lori Lynch: Perfect timing.

PJ Jonas: I know. But I said that when I asked you to do it and you said I actually just journaled about that, I thought isn’t that one of God’s coincidences.

Lori Lynch: I feel… yeah it is one of those strange blessings that most people would probably not even understand, but anything that clutters, it’s like other areas in our lives that we need to deal with and we either don’t know how to or we don’t make the effort to do it. Even though most people will not consider a tornado a blessing, I view it as that. Yeah there are sad things too, there are things that we’ve missed and that we will miss along the way, probably 6 months down the road, a year down the road and we’ll say oh, we don’t have that anymore. It was my great grandmother’s, the children’s when they were little or something like that. There have been a lot of things like that and there will be more, but I think that there’s a lot of good that can come out of this.

PJ Jonas: As you are filling up your rental house and you are now purchasing some things, I know you are not buying a lot yet until your house is rebuilt but, what are some of those things that you are saying; no, not going to get that again. Is there something that stands out like that?

Lori Lynch: I think what I have just realized is that you’ve got to have a goal, you’ve got to know what you are going for. If my goal with my children is to raise children that have excellent character, and a heart for God, and a heart for others, then my purchases are going to reflect that. I think we often times just kind of take in a little bit of this, a little bit of that because somebody said it is a really good stuff, or it was a really good deal. There is a number of things but I think until we have a goal set in our mind, what is my goal for my life, for my children, for my house, then we are going to constantly be buying things we don’t need to be buying.

PJ Jonas: I agree. You said oh that it is a really good deal, I think so many things that you pick up, oh I might use this down the line, it’s on sale now, you just have to get past that. But do I need it, is it something I’m going to use today, not down the line, not what if. I call it the frugal clutter, all that stuff that we have just because someday we might need it.

Lori Lynch: Exactly.

PJ Jonas: That can be blessing other people. That can be out of your house, out of your life and if you need it, you just have to trust that it’s going to come back to you then, or you can always go out and buy it then if it is something you truly need.

Lori Lynch: I think it is residual from the depression mentality that grandparents or great-grandparents lived through, so they kept all the Tupperware containers and the pieces of aluminum foil that were cleaned you know all that. And we still do that thing today, and I think there is a difference between being frugal and being wise in your purchases and having stuff because you are afraid you are not going to have it when you need it.

PJ Jonas: Why do you think so many people have trouble physically taking the step to get the garbage bag, put the stuff in and take it out and donate it?

Lori Lynch: I wish I knew, because that was such a hard thing for me. I knew I had so many………..most of ours was probably home school books and papers. That was a thing that we tend to collect more.

PJ Jonas: I’m ruthless, when it comes to the clutter, I am ruthless, and I have no desire to keep it. My big thing is my digital camera is my best friend and anything that the children think that they can possibly want, they get a digital photograph taken, put in their file on the computer and I get rid of it. I am really ruthless when it comes to clutter.

Lori Lynch: Well I have to say that I did come across some pictures that were where we lived in our previous home eleven years ago, I had to go through a lot of things. I had tons of papers, mementos, and all sorts of stuff. And I did resort to taking pictures of some of my five-year-olds, things they would make for me; I grouped together and take a picture of them. I saw some of those recently and I thought they were cute and I was glad I had the picture, and I could not imagine keeping all that stuff. I would have had boxes and boxes and totes of all this stuff. What I found that were really precious to me since the tornado were things like the journals that my children had done, they had maybe read a book and they had drawn pictures of it, or they had written down how they were blessed that day and drew a picture of it, those things are very special. It is not the coloring book, it is not the work book or anything like that. It’s just the stuff that came from the heart.

PJ Jonas: How have they dealt with having their possessions gone, why don’t you tell everybody how old your kids are so they know.

Lori Lynch: My oldest is 20, Whitney is 20, and Eliza is 15 and they shared a room, and so they were able to recover some of their things. Not a whole lot, all their clothes were gone, some like journals and things like that, but most of their other things were gone. Our oldest son is 18 and he shared a room with our 15 year old, they recovered absolutely nothing from their room. We don’t know where it went, we know a lot of things were in our field, or we found a few things up at the neighbors’ maybe a mile and a mile and half up the road, we never found anything from the boys’ room. Now right outside of the room, I had a bookshelf of antique books, we did find those, they were ruined but we did find those. So it’s like they just went into this black hole somewhere, probably between here and Cincinnati. They have dealt remarkably well. When I think of losing, we have pictures, you know I’ve got lots of pictures of the home and I’ve got some of their younger scrapbook, like, kind of stuff too, but anything from say the last 7 or 8 years that would be personal items for them or anything like that they don’t have. They’ve handled that remarkably well. In fact my 18 year old when I was talking to him a couple of weeks after the tornado, I wanted to really know how he really felt about the whole thing, he had had journals, he journaled every day for like the past few years and all of his journals were gone, and that makes me as a mom just sad. I said to him, “Alex, how are you feeling after this whole thing?”, and he said, “Well mom I really just feel…” and he paused 3 or 4 seconds and he said, “free”.

PJ Jonas: Interesting.

Lori Lynch: Very interesting from an 18 year old who had collected history books and he loved history and just had his room full of things that were his and he said he felt free.

PJ Jonas: You know that right there is such a lesson for all of us because that is what I keep saying, I mean, the clutter in our house it just ties us down whether we realize it or not, it is this weight on our shoulders of stuff we have to clean, stuff we have maintain stuff we have to organize, and it is just…

Lori Lynch: I think that’s a big key, that’s a big thought you know. It’s there whether you realize that it’s there and it’s bothering you or not, it probably is bothering you at the back of your mind. I’ve got 2 other children, Timothy and Ethan. Ethan is 7 and Timothy just turned 4 last week, and I don’t think they had anything from their room either. I had saved a few things when we went over to my parent’s house, but I don’t think that they had anything from their room either. But as a whole, my children have handled this extremely well. My 13 year old was very sad for a couple weeks and definitely not herself, but she’s gotten over that hump and they are excited to be where we are right now and they are excited that we are going to be building a new house. They’ve been very busy especially the older ones at the property, cleaning up and working with all sorts of people from the community and outside the community that have just come to give give give give. And so it has been very interesting.

PJ Jonas: Yeah I mean forgetting the clutter aspect to it, the whole tornado. Not that you would ever wish this kind of thing on anybody but, it has been amazing to me to watch the character building that has gone on in my own children directly because of it. We went, Brett that first couple of days, she just stayed here which was hard for her to do that we were going out and helping people, she just stayed here and literally did not stop typing out email responses and Facebook responses to people who were trying, wanted to do something, she gave out addresses and she just kept saying over and over, “I just feel so good to help, I’m just so glad that we can help”.

Lori Lynch: I tell you what, it’s those little things that really matter too. What I saw was that so many people did so many different things, but it all came together. I had my friend Heather she took upon herself the project of my photographs which a lot of them were wet, muddy in our field and for 4 or 5 days whenever anybody collected any photographs, she would get them and she would clean them up as best as she could, she said she had it laid out all over her house. She had fans all around drying those, she had journals, any journal that she found, and she would dry those out. So that was a precious thing to do.

But there are so many aspects, so many things that people did that in and of itself doesn’t feel like a big thing. You know Brett would have loved to have been out, but she was doing such an important job right here.

PJ Jonas: Yeah. You have to tell everybody about your high school diploma, I think this is a really cool thing what that lady did.

Lori Lynch: Yeah. I guess about probably 2 days after the tornado, we were at my parent’s house and my brother called me and said you are not going to believe this. He said your high school diploma is on Facebook. I hadn’t even missed it yet, it is not one of those things I put on my priority list, but he said it’s on there and for the next few weeks it got on CNN, on Weather Channel, it got just all over the place, USA Today newspaper had it and it was just amazing.

PJ Jonas: But it was found in Cincinnati?

Lori Lynch: Yeah, found in Cincinnati. We have 5 things that have actually been found in Cincinnati, there are some websites, a couple of Facebook pages that you can go to, to see if any of your stuff is there or you can post some stuff if you found it. But it is so cool, just so cool.

PJ Jonas: Just to give those people who don’t live in this area an idea, Cincinnati is what, 2, 3 hours from here?

Lori Lynch: It is about at least 100 miles away from here. We’ve found things; people in Henryville have found things close to 150 miles from here. A lot of papers were up in the tornado winds and then just got deposited that far away in Cincinnati. So with Facebook, some of the things have been able to be recovered and I tell you what, when you see a picture of your child from 15 years ago and it’s on Facebook, and you realize, “oh wow, that’s so cool” and they’ll mail it back to you. And the lady with my diploma, she was so kind, it wasn’t that dirty but it was a little bit muddy, she cleaned it up as best she could and put a picture of their local newspaper article which said “Days of Destruction”, and she framed the whole thing and she sent it back to me along with a donation too.

PJ Jonas: It was such an encouragement to see people coming together; I just keep coming back to that. You can look around at America in so many respects and be so sad at just how selfish so many people have become and how much money people spend on stuff that is meaningless and the waste of all of it, and the “I need the stuff”. And then you see something like this happen and then you see there are people out there who put people ahead of stuff and sacrifice themselves and do things. Like you said, there were people driving down from hours and hours away just to help clean up, just to go in the mud and pick things. One of our other friends had Christmas  tree lights in her yard, and she had a lady come spend hours picking up all the Christmas tree lights out of the yard because it needed to be removed.

Lori Lynch: So many things you don’t think of. You know when you have a disaster like this, there are just pieces of stuff all over the place and you salvage some of it, you through away some of it, but it’s all going to be cleared up. We had lady who is from about 3 or 4 hours north of here and she said when Katrina hit, she just really wanted to go down there and she didn’t and she listed 2 or 3 other disasters that she really wanted to go to and just didn’t so when this hit, she said I have got to go. And she came down and she basically adopted our family for 4 or 5 days, started a blog, her quilting group took part in it too and they donated handmade quilts for our sons and there have just been so many neat things. There is a prison up about 3 hours north of here and one of the churches came down that does a ministry with them and the prisoners they make quilts. And so we got several of their quilting. Now those things you can’t buy at Kohl’s, you can’t buy. They are going to have such meaning for years and you are going to be able to tell that this came from so and so in the prison. There’s a story with it.

PJ Jonas: And that becomes something that, to get back to the clutter, it’s something that you can use. The things that you can use that also have a memory, those are the things that you can keep, and those are the things that are important. We talked about all of these memories like you said before, all the papers and the drawings and the macaroni necklaces, all of that stuff that yeah those are memories, but you can’t keep totes of them overflowing because (a) you just don’t look at it (b) it is meaningless. This is something that combines both of that, something useful and something that’s a memory, that’s awesome.

Lori Lynch: I’m trying to remember what my daughter had written on the outside of my memorabilia tote, it was something like, she had probably written this 4 or 5 years ago when we were decluttering stuff in the garage. I think she wrote “stuff to keep just because we want to keep it”. It wasn’t necessarily meaningful, it was just that we just decided we were going to keep the stuff and it’s funny because half that stuff was still in the tote the next morning when I saw it and half the stuff was who knows where, one of the things was the diploma that landed in Cincinnati. So you know even if you do keep all the stuff, you may never really get to keep all the stuff because of a tornado.

PJ Jonas: And I also found out too that time changes those things that you want to keep just because you want to keep them. You put it in a tote, you go back a year later and get rid of a third of it and you go back a year after that and another half of it goes, as long as you keep going through it and not just continue to add tote after tote after tote.

Lori Lynch: Set a yearly time, some people do this around Christmas, the New Year, when they’ve got a little break and they’ll just go through. That’s why part of our pictures were on the back porch because we had brought them in in January, it is kind of a down time, and so we look through pictures. If you have collected your children’s stuff from the last year, well look through it and see what is actually going to be in some that you want to keep.

PJ Jonas: I’m a big fan too of if it is something you want to keep and see, it should be framed up on the wall so you can see it. We are so busy even in down times to sit and go through 5 or 6 totes that just takes time so I like things that you can stick on the wall. But I’ve already said, I’m the queen of declutter, I like to get rid of all of it, which is interesting for me because Jim is so not, he would keep everything if I let him. It has been a very interesting marriage as he tries to keep things and I try to get rid of them.

Lori Lynch: At our old house, we would go back and my husband would drag things down to the road as we bought my grandparents’ house and some of their stuff was actually stuff that they gave to me, stuff that we really didn’t need to keep and year after year and I would drag stuff down to the road and I would wait until he was at work or asleep and I would drag a bag out of the house, it was bad and yeah, I’m not like that anymore.

PJ Jonas: You had to let it go, especially after this.

Lori Lynch: Yes exactly, perspective changes.

PJ Jonas: When I find that with the children, if I’m cleaning out their room because they are really hard, they don’t like to clean it out so I do it, I’ll just take a garbage bag and fill up the garbage bag and put the garbage bag in the corner and if they don’t ask for anything in the garbage bag in a week, it is out of there. And if they ask for it, I dig through and I take the stuff out and I give them the thing they asked for back and the rest of it goes, because they don’t even know most of the time although I did get rid of Indigo’s Rapunzel doll which I didn’t think she played with but the next day after I got rid of it, she started crying for it and so I felt really bad.

Lori Lynch: Yeah, we’ve done that and saved it maybe for a little bit longer, I don’t remember applying periods, but you know put it out in the garage, if they haven’t asked for it, it’s probably not that major of a thing in their lives.

PJ Jonas: Because I’ve always said that for every 100 things you get rid of, there’s going to be one thing you regret getting rid of. But you can’t keep the 99 things just because of that one thing. You’ve lost everything, you’ll get over it. There’ll be a little pang every once in a while, but you’ve got your family, you’ve got your children and then…..

Lori Lynch: And then we move on.

PJ Jonas: Yeah.

Lori Lynch: Move on without so much clutter.

PJ Jonas: Yes and freedom. I love that, it shows so much maturity that Alex said that.

PJ Jonas: And just really the perspective, I know I love watching garbage of stuff go out of my house. I love it. My kids cry the whole time but I love it. I’m mean, what can I say?

Thank you so much for doing this, thank you for sharing your journal with us and all of that.

Lori Lynch: Thank you for helping us through your business, just to help us to get up on our feet, we really appreciate it.

PJ Jonas: We are so glad we were able to do it. Although I’ll still tell you that she mentioned that before, that one of our customers came to our house and she said, “We don’t have much to give, but I do have eggs from my chickens that are grass-fed and could somebody use these?” and I said, “Absolutely”. I brought them to Lori and that was giving up those good healthy grass-fed chicken eggs was probably one of the hardest things that I had to do, but I said now you know how much I love you that I’ve given you the chicken eggs.

Lori Lynch: That’s the mark of a good friend; she’ll pass on something to you. And there was also the day that I got home at our rental house, and there was a box and it said from Fairy Tale Brownies, and it was brownies. And it was wonderful; it was just what I needed for the day.

PJ Jonas: People know that and God knows just what we need, when we need it. I am so glad you are safe, I am so glad you left the house and went to your parents and it missed, because we, people know that we saw it. We sat on our back porch and we saw the hurricane and we knew it was headed right for you guys and when it was past and we got into the car, we could not get to you because the trees were down and we didn’t have anything, turning around and going the opposite way was one of the hardest things because you didn’t know what was on the other side. We didn’t know if you were there, we didn’t know if you had left, and you just pray and you just wait and you keep waiting and you are checking Facebook constantly for someone to say we are okay. When Alex said the house was gone I was like oh my, because it was, it was gone.

Lori Lynch: Definitely down to rubble. And it is one of those things that I want everybody to hear that you always think it is going to happen to someone else. There is value in not believing that, and there is value in taking some preparations, some precautions. I was glad over the last ten years, I’ve decluttered as much as I did, because your house it looks like a tornado came through, you know, when you have all your stuff just sitting over the whole place, but if I had not decluttered, oh my goodness.

PJ Jonas: It would have gone beyond Cincinnati to Dayton.

Lori Lynch: Oh yes.

PJ Jonas: It’s not something that you ever wish on anybody, but you sure do grow from it. God just really grows you during those trials.

Lori Lynch: And it is definitely one of those things that…you know just seeing our community come together and seeing all the people that have helped initially and that are still helping. There are groups that are setting up long term assistance to try to rebuild the town and on Facebook there is a $100 relief fund that has been started, and there are others too and it is just, those are the people that are going to stay, they are going to do the long haul, the months, and we need all the types of people helping in a situation like this because when you are in a devastating situation no matter what it is, you can’t be the one to rebuild everything. You are just so focused on your own than any other people.

PJ Jonas:  And you guys are going back to your home, to the land, you are going back to rebuild all of that and there are people who have not, they can’t do it.

Lori Lynch: Lots of people without insurance. And it kind of scares people too, there’s lots of scared people that it is going to come back, you cannot live your life like that. You don’t know that wherever you move to, there’s going to be some type of a disaster that can occur and you cannot live your life that, live in fear like that.

PJ Jonas: Agreed.

Well thanks to Lori for taking the time out to join me on my podcast episode today. I’m so thankful that Lori was able to share some of her experiences and what she learned from the tornado. I truly hope that it encourages you to rid your house of all the excess stuff that is weighing you down, because I don’t know about you, but I long to feel the freedom that her son Alex expressed.

Now, it is time for our survival guide tip and that is to get rid of it today, just do it. Gather up some garbage bags and start to collect all of those things that aren’t important and that you are not using, take them to a local donation center and donate them. Get them to the people who really need them, you’ll feel a lot better. You can try and do 2 or 3 garbage bags a day; it is really not that difficult once you put your mind to it.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Busy Mom’s Survival Guide, I hope you’ve enjoyed listening and that you are motivated to start removing the clutter from your home and from your life. Join me on the next episode where I’m going to continue the clutter discussion by talking more in depth on the types of clutter, how to declutter the difficult things that your family wants to keep, and then how to organize the stuff that is left behind. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave me a comment on the blog post at www.pjjonas.com or rate this episode on iTunes. You can also call my feedback line at (240) 230-SOAP. So until next time, I’m PJ Jonas and I’m praying that you take the time to free yourself of the clutter that is weighing you down.

Getting Rid of Clutter Part 1- Blog Post

Audio File

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