Category Archives: Personal

An Eavesdropped Story

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, My Books, Personal, Retirement, Simpler Living Tagged , , ,

Overheard while looking at cards in the store the other day:

Couple in their 80s: How are you? I haven’t seen you in ages!

Woman around 70: I’m fine. I’m moving in two weeks. Have you heard?

Couple in their 80s: No. Where are you moving to?

Woman around 70: Oh, we’re staying in town but we’re downsizing to a much smaller place. I think we’ll be really happy once this is over and we’re settled in.

Couple in their 80s: I’m sure you will be. I’ve heard it’s a lot of work, going through everything.

Woman around 70: Oh yes. So much stuff from 40 years. But it had to go, and we’re even down to just one car and one truck. Our son finally took his motorcycles!

Couple in their 80s: We’ve had friends who downsized and they’re very happy they did.

Woman around 70: I’m already feeling better without all that stuff around me. I can’t wait to get into our new place.

Couple in their 80s: Who did you hire to move everything?

And the conversation went on in that vein, while I kept looking at cards. Then my antenna went back up when I heard the wife in the elderly couple say:

“You’re so wise to downsize. We’re thinking about doing it someday.”

Right. They’re already in their 80s. I’m thinking that line really means “We’ll let our kids worry about it after we’re gone.”

That’s not a very nice thing to do to their kids, who are clearly gonna need How to Clean Out Your Parent’s House (Without Filling Up Your Own).

The Lure of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal Tagged , , , ,

I’m gonna guess I’m not the only one who struggled with Black Friday this year, but it’s a first for me.

Since I avoid crowds, I was never one to go out on Black Friday, back when crowds stormed stores starting at midnight. I much prefer to sleep at night. Over time, it’s become our habit to buy most of our Christmas gifts online.

But this year, I kept finding things I wanted for me. I was inundated with sale-announcing emails, and I actually looked at all of them, and I even left tabs open on my browser all weekend with things I was thinking about buying.

That’s not like me. And all of a sudden on Cyber Monday I thought, “What are you doing??” And I closed every tab without buying a single thing.

I don’t need anything. I already have more fabric than I can use in a lifetime. I have more clothes than I need, especially given my hermit tendencies. But that’s the logical side of my brain talking. The other side was completely sucked in by all those Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, at least for a few days.

I guess that shows that even someone who’s very committed to keeping down the clutter can fall prey to a good copywriter….or dozens of them!

The Christmas Gift Dilemma

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Simpler Living Tagged , , , ,

It’s that time of year again: decision-making time regarding Christmas gifts. When I was a child, opening gifts was high excitement. I want to recreate that for my grandkids.

But there are a few problems with this idea. Their folks aren’t looking for lots of new toys to trip over. One of my kids is a minimalist; two are moving next year. So they don’t want us to give their kids lots of stuff.

I understand, and if our grandkids were older, I’d have no problem giving them gift cards. But I really enjoy watching the littles open their gifts, and seeing how excited they get. I know from experience that there are only so many years that they show that excitement. Before long they reach the teen years, when you can’t even get them out of bed on Christmas morning.

So I’m torn. To complicate things, many popular toys are in short supply this year. Apparently an awful lot of them are sitting in shipping containers in the waters just west of California. I don’t want to buy my grandkids just any old thing so they can open something. I want it to be something they will love. I don’t want to clutter up my kids’ homes, but it’s more important to me to make my grandkids happy.

I suspect I’m not the only person grappling with this dilemma.

A Decluttering Fish Tale

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, Personal, Simpler Living Tagged , ,

I think this article is supposed to be non-fiction, but I found an awful lot of fiction in it.

The author has to move in two weeks but once she hired a woman to help her, they decluttered her whole house in a day, and still had time for tea?

She kept entire boxes of things to go through after her move, even though she was moving in with her mother?

Did I mention she was moving out of a five-bedroom home where she lived with her four children whose stuff also had to be gone through?

Yep, my BS detector went rat-a-tat-tat after I read that article. As I’ve described here and in my latest book, Memoirs of a Downsized Declutterer, we spent months moving things out of our five-bedroom house, and two weeks frantically packing up the rest once we finally had a buyer. It took us two more years to go through everything we had stored in two storage units and one rental house after we left our home of nearly 20 years. So you understand why I might be a wee bit skeptical about her story.

If you find yourself in the same boat, moving on a deadline with way too much clutter to deal with, go easy on yourself. Find one or more places to store your excess possessions until you can go through them mindfully. And know that it’s not possible to do it all in one day. (But I hope you don’t take as long to do it as we did!)