Author Archives: Claire

About Claire

I’m a writer, declutterer, and lover of fabric, furniture and books (oh, and my laptop!) I especially like to write about decluttering and debt-free living.

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.

The Plague of Fast Fashion

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

It saddens me to think that young people (maybe you’re one of them) have zero experience with high-quality fashion. Fast fashion has been around long enough now that many young people are only familiar with clothes that look funny after the first wash. They’ve known nothing but shirts that spring tiny holes in them fairly soon after wearing, or skirts or slacks that quickly pill in the lap and thigh areas.

But this used to be unheard of. Our parents and grandparents grew up with quality clothes made out of sturdy fabrics, and they were taught to take care of their clothes, because unless they were wealthy, they didn’t have too many. Now people have closets-full, and Instagram influencers make their living by persuading people that once you’ve worn something, you should move on to the next new thing, which they happen to be wearing today and that you can buy through their links.

So what happens to all those discarded clothes that either quickly went out of style, or have an odd shape or shade from being washed? Well, this article includes stunning photos of where your old clothes go.

What a waste! I’m glad to know that some of these cheap fabrics are being recycled into insulation, but it would be better if they had never wound up there in the first place. Without fast fashion, there would be no piles of unwanted clothing. They would either stay in our closets or be worn by someone who found them in a thrift shop. And they would hold up for a long time, and then they could be turned into cleaning rags.

Instead of closets overcluttered with fast fashion, we’d have closets containing fewer garments of much higher quality that we’re able to wear often. That’s why the closets in old houses are so small. People didn’t have a lot of clothes clutter; they had far fewer clothes of much higher quality. I’d like to see the world head back in that direction.

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!)