During one of our down times at my place we were lying on my bed when T noticed my giant copy of Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook
We went through the book, taking out unique and interesting cleaning tips and discussing as if we were in a class on the subject. This book could seriously be a textbook for an entire course. And it would be a tough course to pass, there’s loads of info in there! I love it 🙂
Anyway, after spending several hours perusing this giant tome we both agreed that we were incredibly inspired to clean our already pretty clean apartments once our weekend was over. She is currently on the drive home, but I just spent about an hour or two going through two simple areas of my life that could use some decluttering:
My purse and makeup drawer.
Baby steps, people! I’ll get to vacuuming the back of the fridge some other time!
First up I went through my purse. Even though I have a Purse Pleaser to organize it all, it was becoming unwieldy. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the nature of large purses: no matter how hard you will try not to, you will still accumulate all manner of junk in your bag.
It was time for a big dump.
Here is what I found in my purse (you can see how much my crap levels have increased since I did a “what’s in her purse” article back in May 2008) :
A view from the top
All spread out
As you can see there is quite a lot of crap there. I’ll save us all the pain of listing the exact contents simply because there are too many! I have duplicates of lots of stuff like lipgloss, USB drives, hand sanitizers, etc. It was quite silly to think I had been carting all that around with me! It was actually making my shoulders hurt at the end of the day!
So in I went and tried my best to cut back on all the duplicates and items that I didn’t really *OMG* need to carry with me on a day to day basis. I cut out a lot of lip products (why do I have so many? Sheesh!) and other cosmetics stuff. I also got rid of the purple case that was holding it all and grouped it all in a ziploc baggie to save on space.
I consolidated all my “health” stuff like advil, eyedrops, Tums, bandaids, etc. into another small baggie and stashed that in the inner zipper pocket of my purse. My current purse is awesome because it has a lot of pockets, but not all my other purses do, so I wanted to pare things down so that I could easily transfer ALL items into another purse without having to spend 30mins organizing everything again.
That’s one of the reasons I bought the Purse Pleaser. I’m still testing it out to see if I like it, but so far it seems to be ok. The real test will come when I decide to change purses. I’ll report back when I do so.
Anyway, this is what I was able to pare down to in the end (minus the “health” baggie which I had already stashed):
I’m quite happy with this accomplishment. My purse now has everything I need tidily stored away, and finally weighs less! No more shoulder aches for me! And now if I want to change my purse I can do so easily and quickly *happy sigh*.
I’ll have a post on my makeup drawer cleanout up shortly.
So, have you cleaned out your purse lately? If not, hop to it! Write up a post about it and share it here in the comments! 🙂
2 responses to “The Purge Project”
I love these "what is in your purse" posts 🙂
Mine.. has gotten a lot smaller lately LOL!!!
that's a great idea. i'm always shocked with the amount of crap that accumulates in my purse!