Hello world!
I’ve been saying for years that I’ve wanted to start a blog and just never did it… Since I’m making this website anyways, I figured it would be a good call.
This year one of my major goals is to actually organize everything I own and downsize things that I’m keeping around just to keep around. This has been something I have started and stopped MANY times – I intend to actually finish it this time. In the past week through consolidating and some light downsizing I have managed to get my 20 bins of “extra” things down to only 10 (including 3 bins of unsorted chaos). A good amount of this project has involved unboxing various dolls I’ve been keeping around in box with vague video plans that never come to fruition due to my own lack of interest as well as perceived lack of interest from the audience. This is clearing a tremendous amount of space and also has made this project more enjoyable which is always a huge bonus!
If you’ll join me, I’d like to recap this journey with you… through photos that often skip major swaths of time and start abruptly in the middle of this project.
At first I only documented the dolls I was unboxing… This little group evolved over the course of the week that I’d been working on this project. My relationship with unboxing dolls has been interesting since I’ve been participating in much of my hobby through content creation – I often feel guilty or like I absolutely shouldn’t do anything related to my hobby unless it’s being filmed, edited and uploaded in some way. I’ve been trying to shake this and not uploading every day like I used to has helped a lot. I offer this as an explanation as to why I have such a huge backlog of dolls still in box that I always intended to unbox.
Of course, the unboxing was just a fun part of the bigger picture which was organizing the bins. Something I inherited from my mom was to, in a pinch, declutter by throwing everything out of place into a bin together. This has followed me to adulthood and we both have fun projects where we have to actually assess the bin situation and deal with it… I have many spacious closets in my current house which allows me to hide the bins from myself. Despite what you’d assume, I generally do know what is in each of the bins and can locate a singular doll accessory fairly easily even when facing 10 seemingly completely disorganized bins. I have a good memory of where I place things so even if there is one Monster High accessory in the place where my makeup went during a frantic cleaning session I can usually find said accessory even several years later.
Unfortunately this perceived lack of actual need to do so makes me less likely to feel inclined to actually properly organize the bins correctly (why not just have ONE Monster High bin sorted by character like you used to?
I haven’t made this clear yet so I thought I’d insert it here: these bins are almost exclusively my doll accessories. I actually nearly completed my project of organizing and downsizing the dolls themselves last year but didn’t document the process. The dolls were a much easier part of the project… Accessories are often cumbersome, need to be identified (which I am thankfully very good at doing from memory most of the time) and range in size dramatically. Dolls, for the most part, are all uniform in size (at least within lines) which makes organizing them a lot easier.
A goal I have always is to have everything well organized and for it to stay that way and I’ve been keeping very good to that with new acquisitions but the large backlog of older stuff that wasn’t organized or became unorganized over time needed addressing… That brings us to this photo of the organization process the way that I go about it. I share this with you and trust that you can be normal with a photo that was very obviously taken in the middle of a process that by design is going to be chaotic.
If you have trouble picturing what is actually happening in that image, I don’t blame you. I know many people struggle with organizing and it is, perhaps surprisingly, something I enjoy doing. Each of the bins you’re seeing behind my very glamorous chair is an organized bin – I often do piles when dealing with smaller organization sessions but instead I did baggies and bins. Certain franchises like Barbie, Monster High and Disney get an entire bin to themselves as I have larger collections of them and thus have more accessories. Smaller lines get a designated bag (Pinkie Cooper only needs one liter-sized bag, for example). For what it’s worth: I reuse Ziploc bags and am still working through the bags my mom kept to reuse from our previous homes.
Now, for the fun part — I’m excited to report on what I found during what I affectionately call ‘bin archaeology.’ One of the bins that I wasn’t sure how to tackle was the bin of childhood toys that hadn’t made their way into any of the organized areas or simply couldn’t fit. The contents of this bin are particularly random as they often are from little DIY projects I’d done early in my teens when I first started collecting dolls and a lot of things I collected along the way in order to use them for dollhouse-type projects. How, exactly, do you organize random scraps of fabric, chunks of wood I liked to liberate from construction sites when my neighbors’ houses were being built, and every bow that fell off of something throughout my childhood? I tackled this in the simplest way – 4 bins: one for fabric scraps (and things I intended to use as fabric scraps like little drawstring bags), one for things intended for DIY, one for random generic toys (there were many little frogs and snakes and other little creatures) and one for things that actually go to a set/line I still collect or have an actual place for so I can further organize things (Ello, Playmobil, LPS etc.)
Now we can move to things I found… some archaeology. The reason I like to use the term ‘bin archaeology’ is because the objects grouped together are generally significant. I’m unearthing a bin I sealed away at some point in my life that has been relatively untouched since then. Last time I did this project with my Littlest Pet Shop bins (which were remarkably well organized, actually) I found so many relics, like the little papers my brother and I created for our scenarios – my favorite being a series of comic books called ‘Poop Cat’ he and I conjured up. It’s like looking through a photo album if your memory serves you right and is intrinsically tied to objects like mine seems to be.
Anyways, our first object is the first one I dug up that surprised me. I hadn’t seen this and just assumed it was gone. Unfortunately time has not been kind to it but I’m so happy to have it all the same! I had actually just been thinking of it and wondering where it had gone a few weeks ago so I’m very pleased to have found it. I have a very vague memory of my mom purchasing this key chain for me in the early 2000’s – if I had to guess it was likely around 2005. If anyone knows its release year, please let me know! I used to keep it in the top drawer of my white, clean Ikea dresser as a young kid – a revered space, reserved for my small collection of keychains, my glasses cases, the lollipop that was so good that I kept it for months and other priceless treasures. I do wish I knew what th brand of that lollipop was… I do still have a glasses case stained from it being hidden within).
Next I found an item that I have never been able to figure out. I know that it’s been in my life as long as I can remember. I used it as a dock in LPS scenarios and assumed it went to some random Western-themed set or something.
Since my mom solved the last mystery, I decided to text her a photo of it. Surprisingly she immediately knew exactly what it was!!
I remember the playset vividly now but had totally forgotten it! The castle set we also had was a very faint memory that I was unable to figure out- now I know!
My mom having ordered extra boulders and cannonballs for my brother is such a cute detail – I had no idea! I remember the garage sale in which we let these sets go vividly. I wasn’t aware that the big castle shelving unit was also Fisher Price! I hope I can find these sets thrifting someday!
Next we move into the cabinets in which I keep my doll accessories! This has been well sorted all along, I’m merely adding the things sorted in the other room to the appropriate areas.
The cabinet on the left is a terrible use of space – you can see that I’ve been storing some empty doll boxes in there. Another huge goal this year in decluttering is to heavily reduce the amount of doll packaging that I keep around. I’ve almost completely gotten rid of all of the Disney Limited Edition and Designer doll packaging which I was honestly mostly keeping because I felt like I had to. I’d like to extend some advice to you: your collection is for your enjoyment. For me, it was super not enjoyable to have an entire closet in my house dedicated to Disney doll packaging that didn’t bring me much joy at all. Moving those boxes across the country and wasting space in my Uhaul also was incredibly unpleasant, I’d prefer to never have to do that again.
You have reached the end of this entry! After going through my childhood things I was struck again with frustration over not being able to find my childhood Sanrio wallet. I generally remember parting with things and I had zero recollection of getting rid of it and feel that I would not have done so. I was struck with a strong desire to check a random bin of things we keep in the kitchen. In my defence – the bin was the “junk drawer” from my studio apartment/dorm room. I was actually looking for a flash drive I very regularly manage to misplace. Lo and behold I found the holy grail of my childhood belongings!!
This is your sign to declutter and organize your things! Unless you don’t need that sort of reminder. I applaud you for having your life together if so. I work no less than two jobs at a time so I unfortunately have trouble finding the time to do things like this.
