Tag Archives: stuff

How to Find Your ACL (Acceptable Clutter Level)

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

One decluttering expert believes your rooms should be empty of everything except things you use on a daily basis; another thinks you should only keep the items that make you happy. Who’s right? No one.

The fact is that we’re all different. One person’s decluttered home is another person’s nightmare, feeling either too empty or still too full. So how do you determine what is an Acceptable Clutter Level (ACL) for you?

The easiest way is to take a favorite room of your house, perhaps your living room or den, and strip it down to the bare essentials: a place to sit, a light source and one entertainment item, like a television, laptop or Bluetooth speaker. Remove all artwork from the walls. Then spend time in that room and see how you feel. Spend more than an hour; spend a few evenings. Soon you’ll know what more is needed in that room, if anything, to make you comfortable.

Years ago, we rented a cottage for a family vacation. The cottage had a small living area which was filled with a kitchen table and chairs; no sofa. We nearly went crazy that week trying to live without a sofa. We’d sit on the chairs, we’d sit on the beds, we’d sit on the floor….nothing felt right. Our kids did just fine without a sofa, but we were suffering. That’s when we learned we had to have a sofa to be comfortable.

If you go to realtor.com, you’ll find that many people who have put their homes on the market these days have stripped them of most personal effects in an effort to make their homes look cleaner and larger, and to allow potential buyers to picture themselves living in them. This makes sense when you want to sell, but for some people, it will make sense for their current home. They’ll enjoy that uncluttered look on a daily basis.

Others need to have many personal items around them to be comfortable. You may be one of them. In that case, you’ll want to start with a stripped room and then begin adding items to the room that make the room feel more comfy without feeling too cluttered. Add a few things and then live with the room that way for a day or two; you’ll soon know whether you need more stuff (or less) in that room.

The Desire to Acquire

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

The desire to acquire starts when we’re young. We’re setting up our first apartment, or our first house. We want to put our stamp on it and make it feel like home, so we shop for just the right pieces and decorative items. It doesn’t matter how much or little money we have; whether we’re going wild at a pricey shop or at a thrift store, we regularly buy lots of goodies for our new digs to make it feel like home.

Over the years, we tweak and sometimes redo our environment, which means acquiring more things. Add to this our continual need for clothes, linens, kitchenware and entertainment options, and we’re amassing quite a lot of things.

Should we decide to have children, we’ll find that our desire to acquire increases exponentially, because there are just so many cute little toys, duds and pieces of furniture crying out for a place in our home. And of course, as our kids grow up, their needs change, and we bring into our home anything else they (or we) think they need.

By the time we reach middle age, most of us are afloat in stuff, thanks to that desire to acquire. I said “most of us” because some people are very good at keeping a minimum of stuff in their homes. But they are few and far between. Meanwhile, the rest of us have overflowing basements, attics, garages, and sometimes even rented storage units.

But there is good news. As we age, the desire to acquire begins to subside. It takes a lot more to impress us, and there’s not much out there that we really want anymore. We find that a small quantity of chosen beloved items can make us quite comfortable, especially after we’ve jettisoned the bulk of the belongings that we acquired over the years.

So if you’re awash in stuff, so much that it’s keeping you tied to a house that’s larger than you need, take heart. Once you decide to free yourself of the burden of stuff, you may find that the desire to acquire is just a little impulse you feel occasionally. In its place roars the desire for freedom from clutter, which is all the motivation you need to lift the burden of stuff from your shoulders.

 

You Love It Now, But…

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

In the early 1980s, my husband and I bought a lovely Oriental rug that graced our dining room for many years. It was a big purchase for us, back when we had two incomes and no kids, and we really loved that rug.

Yesterday he asked me whatever happened to that rug, and I couldn’t remember. We bought it for our first house, but it didn’t really have a place in our second house, which was fully carpeted, and so we put it in the basement, and then…what? We must have gotten rid of it during our big downsizing ten years ago, but neither of us remember what we did with it.

It’s funny how you can have possessions that you love a lot, that you don’t think you’ll ever get rid of, but then you do, and over time you forget what even happened to them. This is an important point to realize and remember when you need to declutter your home, because you’re forced to, like we were, or because it just really needs to be done, and you’re having a hard time letting go of things.

The truly important things in your life are people, not things. Everything else is expendable, and someday you won’t even remember what you did with most of your stuff. I wish I’d known that when I was younger; decluttering wouldn’t have been such an enormous, time-consuming project!