Only three days to go! Have you gotten rid of 30 things yet this month?
This is what I am getting rid of today.
I have seven magazines that need to go out the door. I've already skimmed through them to see if there were any recipes or articles that I wanted to keep and the rest are being donated. They are still in good shape and not very old so I think that someone else will enjoy them too - even if they are missing a recipe or two!
I really don't let too many magazines build up in the house. I get four issues a year of Victorian Homes magazine, which I love, and that is the only one that I keep. Since I live in an old Victorian home, I can always find renovating and decorating ideas regardless of how old the magazine is. I will occasionally pick up Martha Stewart's Living and Rachael Ray's Everyday magazine. I love Martha's perfectionism and I love Rachael's recipes.
But neither of these magazines stay in the house long, a couple of months tops. I then flip through and see if there is anything I want to save. I place any recipes into my recipe binder (below).
Sometimes I put the recipes that I want to keep into sheet protectors. Sometimes I just glue them onto sheets.
I have even taken a page right out of a cookbook and then donated to rest of the cookbook to charity.
I used dividers that had pockets in the front so that I could have a spot to keep all the little recipes that I had gathered throughout the years.
But just because they are all organized into my binder does not mean that I don't have to go through them every now and then and weed out the ones that we never got around to trying and probably never will. In fact, this is a job that I am going to have to do again soon.
Do you have any magazines laying around that can be either donated or recycled? Take them with you to the doctor's office so that you have something germ free to read and then leave them there at the end of your appointment. Do you keep the whole magazine for just one or two articles or recipes? It's alright to cut out what you want to keep and let the rest go. Try reading your next magazine with a pair of scissors handy. Cut out what is interesting and let the rest go.
I used to have boxes of magazines everywhere because I thought I had to read every one of them from cover to cover. I have recently realized that most magazines only have a couple of articles that I am really truly interested in.
ReplyDeleteSo I did two things - first, I stopped the subscriptions to anything that we really weren't reading and got on-line subscriptions to those that I was really interested in (like "Taste of Home" and "Simple and Delicious").
The second thing I do now is, as soon as a magazine comes into the house, I look through the table of contents to see if there is anything I KNOW I would read. If there is, I tear the article(s) out and pitch the rest of the magazine into the recycling bin.
I used to take magazines to the doctor's office or to hospital waiting rooms, but have heard that they don't want reading material brought in - just in case it has bacteria like C-Diff or MRSA on it.