Today I began a quest to declutter my home.  I decided to start with an easy project, the bathroom linen closet.  I found and discarded old beauty products that didn’t make good on their promises to transform me into a Cindy Crawford look-alike; crusty tubes of lipstick, sunscreen, and serums that had turned an odd shade of grey; and soaps that were gifts and caused rashes in places one should not have rashes.

At the bottom of the closet is a milk crate that holds, among other things, my spare hair dryer.  Actually, my spare hair dryers, plural.  As I pulled items out of the crate, blow dryers began to emerge like clowns spilling out of a tiny car at the circus.  Turns out I have eight blow dryers in my home.  Yes, eight.  Eight!

My hair is a bit of an obsession, though no one would know that by looking at it.  It’s usually a hot mess.  But I think about it all the time, am constantly on the hunt for the perfect low-maintenance-but-sexy haircut, and spend ridiculous sums of money on products to tame it.  So it doesn’t surprise me that I have purchased a lot of blow dryers over the years.  What stunned me was that I had kept several of them, and they all still worked.  And some of them were very expensive.  And I didn’t know I had them.

Currently, I use two different blow dryers.  One is a traditional dryer for my bangs and the other is a blow dryer brush for the rest of my head.  You might be wondering why I don’t use just one dryer.  Well, I can’t.  Each one does a different thing, and two are necessary.  Just trust me on that.

My need for two dryers aside, that leaves me with six spare hair dryers.  I like to have a spare in case the number one — or two — dryer conks out on me.  So, I should have been able to set aside five dryers to donate.  That proved problematic.

One dryer had a retractable cord.  Well, now that’s a nice feature.  Another was a tiny dryer that folded on itself.  Great for travel.  Two were very expensive.  One was very lightweight.  And one looked like an industrial blow torch. 

I could take you through the very long and convoluted process I underwent to decide which dryers to keep, but I’m just going to cut to the end.  I kept the two I use, the retractable corded dryer, and the two expensive ones.  That left three to be donated… and five remaining in my home.  Yes… five.

I wish I could come up with a good reason why I need five dryers, and the truth is I don’t need five dryers.  Even though I didn’t know that I had this fleet of hair appliances and wouldn’t have missed them if a cat burglar in need of grooming tools had stealthily crept into my home and stolen them, I couldn’t let them all go just yet.  Three will go to new homes now, maybe more later.  And NO dryer shopping for a very long time.  Baby steps.

I guess this decluttering thing is going to be harder than I thought…