31 Days Of Decluttering In December: Day 13

Good morning! We have made it to Day 13 of our 31 Days Of Decluttering In December! I’m so thankful you have stuck with me this far, we are almost half done! I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s challenge and are ready to dig back in today!

Paper clutter is a problem that everyone has in their home. From junk mail, to the newspaper, to bills, books, magazines, and the papers the kids bring home from school, paper is everywhere! Today’s challenge deals with paper clutter but we’re focusing on only one aspect of the paper monster. (Hint, we may be coming back to this topic later in the challenge!)

Today’s challenge is: decluttering and organizing your books and magazines. For some of you, this is going to be very simple and for others (myself included!) this will take a little more effort. I love to read and have many, many books. Although I don’t read many magazines, it seems like the ones that I do read pile up around the house. I’m not going to tell you to throw them all out, but do you need to keep every single magazine? Save the best, purge the rest!

If it’s a recipe that you want, but not the entire magazine, rip it out and put it in with your meal planning list. If there is a project you want to do with the kids over Christmas vacation, rip out that article, put it on your fridge or in your calendar and recycle or give the magazine to someone else. If you have books to get rid of you can list them on paperbackswap (I love this website for getting cheap books), donate them to the library for their book sales, sell them on Facebook or Craigslist, or give them to a friend to read.

Being a bookworm, I love to have my small library! I have a few books that I keep and use them as reference books and I also just have some that are favorites that I will pull back out and read again from time to time. Those books are staying, but the rest can go! Right now I have a lot of books that I’ve stashed for my 2014 reading list as I’ve found them with sales, through paperbackswap, or garage sales. I need to put them together so I can easily find them when the time comes to read them.

I challenge you today to find 10 books or magazines to remove from your house. If you feel this challenge doesn’t apply to you, you can always find 10 paper items to declutter. If you want to link up, snap a picture and meet back at 6 CST. For those of you who don’t blog, leave a comment and let me know what you were able to declutter, and hopefully bless someone else with!

Here are the previous challenges in this series: