Monthly Archives: March 2019

Using a Windfall Wisely

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , ,

What can you do with a windfall of cash that won’t fill your house back up with clutter? (Or more clutter, if you haven’t gone through all of your belongings in years.)

First off is the prudent choice: invest it, in the stock market, or in a CD (I just got one with a 3% interest rate). Someday you may need that cash and you’ll be glad you set it aside.

If you really want to have fun with the money now, however, you won’t want to put it away for a rainy day. But if you spend it on big-ticket items, you’ll just add to the clutter in your house. What to do? Why not spend it on experiences?

You can use it to travel, to go to concerts and shows, or to go on vacation. Make memories with it; take people you love with you (your treat) and make even more memories with it.

Perhaps you aren’t able to travel or go too many places right now. Why not share some of your windfall with a favorite child in your life, to pay for music lessons or summer camp? What about sending a larger-than-usual donation to your favorite charity?

If none of those ideas thrills you, and you really want a new fridge, or a new sofa, or some other “thing,” go for it. There’s nothing wrong with that. BUT, don’t keep the old one. I know it’s tempting to keep that old fridge in the garage in case you have a party and need extra fridge space for pop and beer. It’s only a little challenging to lug that old sofa down to the basement in case you need extra seating down there (and if you do, you’re never going to bring it back up—things get heavier when you lug them upstairs). But once you start keeping things you don’t really need, you’re back on the road to an overstuffed house.

Instead, give your still-usable “old” item to a local charity; Habitat for Humanity’s Re-stores are great places to donate appliances that are still useful, and some also take furniture. You can also put your item out in front of your house with a very reasonable price taped to it. Post it on Craig’s List on a day when you’re going to be home. Whatever you do with it, don’t let that “old” item stay in the house, or you will begin a bad habit: allowing clutter to re-establish itself in your home.

Don’t Let Your Windfall Turn into Clutter

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , ,

As a writer, I’m not paid weekly; I’m paid monthly. Every month, it’s a different amount, depending on my book sales. Once in a while, there’s a surge of sales, and I’m paid a lot more than usual.

That’s exciting, but it’s also dangerous, because it’s very tempting to take that money and buy new clothes, new bedding, new furniture….what I want to buy usually depends on the size of the windfall.

The true danger lies in the fact that I know how easily I fall into the trap of wanting more things, which is how I got into the overcluttered life in the first place. Not only was I good at accumulating stuff, but when I got new stuff, I often kept the old stuff because “We paid a lot for this,” or “Someone might need this.” That kind of thinking is one reason that I ended up with a big house full of stuff plus two full storage units. If you tend to let cash burn a hole in your pocket, you may be prone to accumulating stuff, too.

Even if you’re paid weekly, you can still end up with a windfall in the form of an annual bonus or a much-larger-than-expected tax refund. Then there are the larger sums: your Uncle Ernie leaves you $5,000 after he dies, or you finally win the state lottery’s $25,000 prize.

I immediately put extra cash into a savings account so I don’t spend it impulsively. But that doesn’t mean my brain has stopped thinking of ways to spend it. However, my family and I worked very, very hard to get rid of all our excess possessions, and we enjoy living in our small, clean, uncluttered house now. We do not want to go back to living with too much stuff. Sometimes it occurs to me that we could buy a house that’s a little bigger than what we have now, to accommodate our growing family of grandchildren when they visit. But I fear that a bigger house would just mean more places to accumulate things.

So what to do with the windfall? How can it benefit us without overloading us with the wonderful things it might buy? I’ll share some ideas next time.

Decluttering a Working Kitchen, Part 3

By Claire Posted in Clutter, My Books, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , ,

Whether the eating area in your house is located in the kitchen, next to it, or in a separate dining room, the table in it is likely to be a magnet for anything you need to set down instead of taking time to find a place for.  That’s why it’s so hard to keep a table clear of everything except place settings.

If you eat in front of the television, this may not be a concern for you. But my family likes to eat at the table where we converse while we eat (no phones allowed), so a clear table is a necessity.

It’s also a necessity when I’m cooking, because our kitchen has so little counter space. So when I bake cookies, there may be a few cooling racks on the kitchen table. Every year, we decorate dozens of Christmas cookies on that table. We even set bags of freezer meals on the table while assembling them. But whatever we put on that table, it has to be gone before suppertime so we can eat.

In a small house, it isn’t just food that ends up on the kitchen table, as I noted in my e-book, Secrets of Small-House Living:

Most rooms in a small house need to be multi-functional, and the eating area is no exception. Our kitchen table sometimes serves as a gift-wrapping station, a crafting area, a work area (especially at tax time), and a parking zone for the groceries as they transit between the driveway and the kitchen. For that reason, we’ve had to get in the habit of keeping it clear. We can’t let it become a catch-all, because we need that space, even when no one is eating.

Often the mail tries to pile up on our kitchen table. I go through it daily, shredding and filing, but occasionally I can’t get to it. It’s amazing how quickly other papers are magically drawn to that spot! Before I know it, I’m sitting down to dinner next to a paper pile. I have to be very diligent to stay on top of that potential mess.

If you have children at home, I’m sure your table attracts far more than just paper. But even for us, it’s been a challenge to find other places to put the things that are so easy to throw on the table:

It helps to keep some filing places nearby. There’s a small basket on the wall, near my calendar. That’s where I put the bills. A few nearby kitchen drawers hold personal financial paperwork, sale flyers and coupons. Junk mail goes straight to the recycler or shredder. Everything else goes to the far end of the table, which is near the basement door. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking whatever’s on the far end of the table down to the basement with me when I pass by. (The basement is where we keep our filing cabinets.) Some days I feel like I’m just taking pieces of paper up and down the steps. But there’s no room upstairs for a filing cabinet.

Inside the kitchen cabinets that face the eating area, I keep information taped to the doors. My phone number list is there; it includes our doctors’ and dentist’s numbers, among others. (I’m old-school, so I don’t keep it all on my cell phone.) The insides of kitchen cabinet doors are great places for keeping information that needs to be easily accessible.

Since I wrote that, I did make a change in how I do things in the eating area. I got tired of constantly taking papers down to the filing cabinet in the basement. So I now keep an accordion file in a large kitchen drawer next to the table. Every six months or so, I take that accordion file to the basement and file everything. Then I bring it back up and put it in the drawer. It saves me a lot of steps, and allows me to easily access recent files.

Ultimately, the key to keeping your eating area clear of clutter is to make sure you have places to put the things that end up on the table. Backpacks should go on coat racks by the door, or on your children’s bed posts. Groceries should be put away promptly. If these things have a place to go, they won’t be left on your table. And having a clean table goes a long way toward making your kitchen, and in fact your main living area, look comfortable and uncluttered.

Decluttering a Working Kitchen, Part 2

By Claire Posted in Clutter, My Books, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , ,

Cleaning out that spice shelf in one cabinet resulted in so much neatness that I became inspired to keep going. I used the same principles that helped me get the kitchen set up when we first moved here. As I stated in my e-book Secrets of Small-House Living:

I had to eliminate kitchen items I really didn’t need anymore, if I was being honest with myself, especially the duplicate items we all seem to have, such as:

multiple utensils

more serving dishes and platters than we ever use at one time 

damaged items that I thought I would have fixed someday but was surviving without

far too many glasses, mugs, bowls and cups

multiple layer-cake pans (went from five to two)

cutting boards (went from four to one large and one small)

I did keep my two sets of measuring cups, because I often use them both when I’m cooking, rather than take time to wash one out in the middle of a recipe.

I also kept my old bread maker after finding my Zojirushi at the Goodwill for $5; both machines are old, well-made and hard to find, so it’s worth having a backup. But I keep the backup in the basement because there’s no room in the kitchen.

It’s amazing how some things multiply in those cabinets, especially mugs. I also found I had a few too many utensils in one drawer because for a while I was on a search to replace a beloved spatula, so I kept bringing them home, each one better than the last, until I had five!

I had already gotten rid of the excess bread maker a few years ago, because I no longer make bread or rolls as often as I once did. In its place in the basement sits a brand new hand mixer, waiting until the one I use now completely dies (it doesn’t sound too good but it still works).

If you’re having trouble giving up items you don’t really use very often, if at all, consider this:

Now, I’ve never been one to collect small appliances, so I only ever had the basics, and when we got here, I even got rid of the toaster because we didn’t use it. But I’ve known people who had egg cookers, rice makers, tortilla warmers, rotisseries, electric cheese graters, electric can openers, iced tea makers, electric fry pans, baby food makers, electric woks, fondue pots and hot dog cookers, all crammed into every nook and cranny of their kitchens, and most of them collecting dust. People with big kitchens can do that if they wish. But when you downsize to a small kitchen, you don’t have room for a collection of rarely used appliances. You need to prioritize.

If you use something daily or even weekly, that’s one thing. Otherwise, keep only multi-purpose items. You don’t need a hot-dog cooker; just cook your hot dogs on the stove, or microwave them. Unless you have arthritis or other dexterity issues, surely you can survive with a hand-held can opener and give up the counter-hogging electric can opener. As for the rotisserie, if I put one in my kitchen, there’d be no counter space left to do anything.

Even if you have a large kitchen, why keep items that you never use? Give priority to keeping multi-purpose items, like a good-quality, cast-iron frying pan on which you can cook eggs and warm tortillas, or a nice pot in which you can make rice and cook hot dogs, thus replacing four appliances.

And if your kitchen is small, like mine is, and you still have more equipment than storage space, consider converting a nearby closet to kitchen storage, as my husband did:

You can also repurpose storage areas. When we bought our small house, it had a narrow broom closet facing the kitchen. It barely held a broom and a vacuum cleaner. After my husband saw my collection of kitchen appliances and other items that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen, things I used regularly like a crock-pot, food processor, cookie sheets, cooling racks, etc. he told me he thought I needed additional storage more than a broom closet. Despite my initial misgivings, I let him put horizontal shelves in most of the broom closet, with some vertical shelves across the middle. As a result, I can now keep all of my must-have small appliances and supplies in there, plus there’s room for cookbooks on the top shelf and a basket of cleaning supplies on the floor. You can’t imagine how much I use that former broom closet when I’m cooking. He even put a hook on the inside of the door for my apron. The broom is now in the attached garage (just outside the kitchen door) and the vacuum is in the guest room closet. His idea turned out to be just what I needed.

Going forward, there is something else you can do to keep from having overcrowded counters and cabinets:

One more idea for maximizing kitchen space: when an item breaks, try to replace it with something smaller. Recently yet another coffeemaker died on us. Instead of buying the same model with its large water tank and bulky glass carafe, we chose a more diminutive 12-cup percolator. It works great and takes up much less space.

Next time, we’ll look at decluttering the eating area.