It’s Thursday, so it’s on with Day Four of our Tenner Week Challenge for January 2019. How’s your budget looking today? Do you have enough cash and food left to see you through the weekend? If you haven’t already made a menu, today might be a good day to do that, just in case.

Our main theme for this particular challenge is decluttering, and there’s a new mini tidy-up to try every day. You never know, you might even find some items that you can sell.

We’re turning to our winter wardrobes today to start sifting through and organising them. Let’s start with something small and manageable, ideally taking around a quarter of an hour or less to complete.

Today’s declutter: Shoes & accessories

All you have to do today is choose one small area of wardrobe maintenance, so pick something fairly specific that you can easily complete in around 15 minutes. For example, you might want to declutter:

• Work shoes
• Winter boots
• Going out shoes
• Summer footwear (if you don’t already have that in storage)
• Jewellery & watches
• Costume jewellery
• Scarves or ties
• Belts
• Winter woolies such as knitted scarves, gloves and hats

Pick one category, and just one. If you really want to then you can do some more wardrobe maintenance and decluttering at the weekend too, but for today let’s just keep it nice and simple.

Here’s the order for the declutter:

• Collect your items all together if they’re not all in one place to begin with.
• Clean or dust the place where you want them all to live.
• Go through your items and sore them into one of the following categories: ‘This season keep’, ‘Other season keep’, ‘Recycle or throw away’, ‘Give away or sell’.
• Check your ‘This season keep’ items – do they need to be mended or washed? Do winter shoes or boots need some new laces or waterproofing? Add them to your washbasket / dry cleaning pile / mending pile or put them aside for shoe cleaning (today or this weekend) or to be taken for repairs (next week).
• Put your clean ‘This season keep’ items away where you want them to live.
• Check your ‘Other season keep’ items as above. If they don’t need to be cleaned or mended, box or bag them up and put them out of the way until next season.
• Next, get your ‘Recycle or throw away’ items and get them into the recycling or bin. Ideally, get the recycling and rubbish out of your house today if you can.
• Bag or box up your ‘Give away or sell’ items and put them aside. Aim to donate or list them for sale by the end of the weekend.
• Make a shopping list of anything you might need to buy after this budgeting challenge is over. This could be anything from replacement gloves to new insoles, or items to help with organisation or storage such as a jewellery box or shoe rack.

Let’s get tidying!

What’s happening here

Yesterday was an e-clutter declutter, and I spent 15 minutes deleting a lot of emails, including a load of junk mail that I’d missed first time around. That stuff takes up way too much space, and I feel more organised now although there’s still more to do. It’s an ongoing process that needs to be regularly revisited, but any extra effort in this area is useful.

For today’s declutter I’ve decided to go through my winter boots. They seem to be wandering around the house on their own at the moment so it’d be nice to have them all back together, and I’ve also decided in advance that my ancient wellies have to go in the bin. They’re beyond repair, I think the material they’re made from has actually perished, so they’re on their way out as we speak… I think I might be putting another pair to one side for reheeling, and doing some polishing and waterproofing as well. Can’t wait to get that all done and dusted, even if I have to put new wellies on my shopping list.

Our neighbourhood seems to be in overdrive for decluttering this month, and our nearest two clothing and shoes donation bins have been overflowing for about a fortnight. If I find any boots that need to be donated, I’ll have to make a trip to a drop-off bin further out, or hike over to a charity shop. Apparently some charity shops round here are overwhelmed with donations too, so maybe it’ll be best call ahead first to see what they’re accepting. The nearest one won’t take any books at all, for example.

In addition to our Tenner Week daily decluttering challenges, we’ve also picked out some crockery and linens that need to go to free up space in our cupboards and drawers, so that might involve more than one trip this weekend. It will be so freeing to get it out of the house, and I’ve already hit my personal target of getting rid of at least 30 items.

We’ve been staying in and mostly watching documentaries on catch-up, plus films and TV series on Netflix. As part of this we’ve watched most of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, as it’s such a good fit with the theme of this Tenner Week and I’m always interested (okay, nosey) to see how other people approach it. I’m on the fence about bits of the show in some ways – the cupboard under my kitchen sink absolutely doesn’t need to have anything in it that sparks joy – but most of it seems quite do-able and could potentially stop a lot of people from vanishing under a wave of their own detritus.

Have you watched any episodes of it yourself? I’d be interested in hearing a range of different opinions. One thing I do know is that it’s inspired Beau to get rid of a pile of ancient holey t-shirts that were breaking an overloaded drawer, so kooky Marie is pretty much okay in my book, odd foibles aside.

Last night’s dinner was ‘fend for yourself’ and I dug out a Lidl cranberry and cheese pie in the freezer that’d been left over from Christmas. Well, what a good excuse it was to use that up with a load of frozen homegrown veggies on the side. Mmmmmmm. Tonight I’ll be making a slightly healthier ginger and spring onion soba noodle stir fry, according to the menu I stuck to the fridge, which should be another tasty winter warmer but without quite so much stodge. There’s a time and a place for stodge, especially when it’s icy and snowing, but not every day.

After three no-spend days in a row we were running low on milk and a few other bits and bobs so I had to break into my tenner for the first time. I’ll decided spend the extra and get a four-pinter as it’s better value even if it affects the bottom line in the short term, only 20p more than a 2-pint bottle, and there’s no chance we’ll run out before the end of the weekend.

Spent today: £1.20

Total spent so far: £1.20

Which shoes or accessories are you going to declutter today?

Have you managed to stick to your budget so far this week? How much have you spent?