Memoirs of a Downsized Declutterer is here!

Now you know what I’ve been doing during the pandemic since I clearly haven’t been blogging. Memoirs of a Downsized Declutterer is the true story of why and how we had to sell our large paid-off home and find affordable housing in another state, all the while dragging our enormous amount of possessions with us because we didn’t have time to go through it all. There is a happy ending: we now live very happily with minimal clutter in a much smaller house than the one we gave up.

I hope you’ll enjoy this book, especially if you need to either downsize or declutter your life. If you need to do both, this book will encourage you that it can be done, and will show you how to do so. Just click HERE to get started.

Downsizing: A Great Solution to Job Loss

One of the saddest effects of the coronavirus lockdown has been the number of people who have lost their jobs. Although the government did send many of them a stimulus check, that will only help for so long. Then what?

If you’ve lost your job, unless you work in a sector where you can always find work, you might want to consider downsizing to either a smaller house or a less expensive area. When we went through our business loss several years ago, we found that downsizing was the perfect solution to our dilemma of an unemployed breadwinner in a career field that was disappearing. All of our financial pressure disappeared once we did that. It was amazing how well it worked out for us.

Of course it’s not for the faint-hearted. If you can’t find more affordable housing in your area, you have to leave town or even leave the state. It’s not easy to start over, especially when you’re, um, older. But the freedom and peace you can find by downsizing makes it worth the trade-off.

Consider also that downsizing is much easier when done voluntarily as opposed to waiting until you’re forced to do so. You can read stories of other people who downsized proactively in my book Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace.

See more downsizing posts here.

Words (for a Declutterer) to Live By

The Declutterer’s Motto

A couple of my kids gave me this plaque for Christmas; they were completely unaware that the quote it displays is a major theme in my most recent book, The Sentimental Person’s Guide to Decluttering.

The fact is that this principle can help you whittle down your possessions. The dual parameters of what you use and what you love are really all you need.

Decluttering a Working Kitchen, Part 3

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.