I originally wrote this post many many months ago while I was still in the middle of my discard/organizing process! I did about half of my giveaways as described in this post, but the process actually took so long that donation centers had started to open up by the time I was about halfway through. I just did a big Goodwill dropoff last week for the remaining items and can finally say that the long discard process is finally 100% done!
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In a normal year, the donation process probably would have been the easiest part of my konmari project. When I started the process I naively pictured myself proudly posing in front of the mountain of discard items before carting them off to a goodwill dropoff site and moving on with my life. As the pandemic was already in full swing at the time that I began this process, I'm still stunned by my absolute blind optimism. What I quickly learned, however, is that donating items during a pandemic is actually pretty complicated. When it came to books and clothing, donation drives and library donations made it pretty straightforward. However, the miscellaneous komono items turned out to be a much bigger challenge. Most charities weren't looking for scrunchies, orphaned pot lids, or balls of yarn, and the thirft shops that would normally accept such donations were all being deeply hit by the pandemic. After looking around, I joined a local chapter of the Buy Nothing Project and got posting.
Buy Nothing changed my life.
At first, I was intimidated by the lofty task of hand-picking recipients for hundreds of items, and then coordinating the exchange with each individual giftee. I even shamefully have to admit that there were a few failed experiments which resulted in completely failing to get the item to the recipients I'd chosen
After much trial and error, I finally found a system that worked for me, so here I'll share my tips if you decide to go this route for your discards!
- Don't do it all at once. If at all possible, pack your discards into bins and put most of it into storage. I picked up some gasket boxes for my garage and it was WELL WORTH the investment. Organizing my apartment before getting the discards out of the house was going to be an impossible task, so quickly moving my discards out of the way like this allowed me to get my apartment to a much more liveable state, which made processing the giveaways so much less stressful. Get your apartment in order first, then go back and process the rest of the discards in manageable chunks.
- Batch your giveaways based on how much time you can commit. For me, I found about 5-10 items made for a decent weekend errand. 30-40 is a full day task. Anything more than that is completely unmanageable for me.
- Individually photograph every item. At first I thought I would save myself time and effort by photographing many items at once. However, for large giveaways this became totally chaotic, as people were commenting in multiple places about the same items, and there wasn't one place I could check to see what the interest was for any particular item. It takes more work to photograph and upload each individual item, but it's well, well worth it for the sanity you'll gain later. When making my post, I uploaded all the photos into an album and requested that people comment on the individual photo rather than on the main thread.
- IF YOU HAVE A PORCH: Prefer pickups to dropoffs. Pick a pickup day upfront and let people know that selected recipients will have to come to pickup the item from your porch on that day. When pickup day comes along, you can set out everyone's pickup items in clearly marked bags and let them pick up the item whenever is convenient for them. This is by far the easiest method as it requires the least communication and coordination.
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IF YOU DON'T HAVE A PORCH: Prefer dropoffs to pickups. Without a porch to leave items on, pickups have to be coordinated individually with each person and for me got out of hand pretty quickly. Since I live in an apartment building with a security gate, the easiest thing for me was to pick one day to drop off all the items and then form a delivery route so I could drop off everything at once. Since the majority of people do have a spot I could leave the item without needing to coordinate with them coming to get the items specifically, this greatly reduced the amount of coordination required between me and my neighbors. Again, I announced the dropoff day and time when I made the post, and told people upfront that I'd be doing dropoffs. After I picked the recipients, instead of trying to juggle 20+ individual private conversations, I messaged each person a google form to collect their name, dropoff address, and instructions for where to drop it off. I then used a
route optimizer to plan the order of my dropoffs. Doing all the dropoffs myself still took a significant amount of time, but it was way lower stress doing it all at once like this, and since I've been stuck at home for the past year it was actually pretty fun getting to drive around different parts of my neighborhood.
Overall, although gifting each individual item is a lot more taxing than simply dropping it all off at a donation site like in the Before Times, I actually have found the process to be extremely rewarding overall. I felt so much better knowing that my items were genuinely being given better homes, and it was a nice way to honor each item by holding it in my hands one last time and specifically choosing where it would go next. It was also a great way to get to know more people in my community, and seeing people's gratitude and generosity has really been a highlight of my past year
Until next time!
P.S. : This is part 6 in my Konmari series! Click the links below to read the rest.
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