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.

Finally Decluttering

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

Our neighbors at the house we had to sell have just sold their house after three decades of raising a large family in it. Now their kids are all on their own and they don’t need all that space anymore.

If you’ve been reading here any length of time at all, you know I looked up their house on realtor.com and checked out all the photos. Wow, did that ever bring back memories of happy times when my kids and theirs were young, and “going next door to play” was big excitement for them.

They still have a fair amount of furniture to deal with, but that’s to be expected. It looks like they’ve already dealt with a lot of the stuff because the rooms are fairly empty.

This is going on all over the country. Baby boomers who never bothered to downsize are finally doing so, often lured by the high selling prices that have resulted from the housing bubble. If they never knew how to declutter, they’re learning it now!

One Hazard of a Small House

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

An elderly couple I know has lived in the same little house for over 50 years. They raised their kids there and it has served them very well, until now.

The problem is that there’s not a lot of room to move around in their house, and they both use walkers. So “traffic jams” are not unusual.

There is one solution: remove some of their furniture to make more room for them to get around. But they’re very attached to their belongings and don’t want to allow any changes to be made (their offspring are willing to do the heavy work).

This actually reflects a common problem that keeps people of all ages from decluttering: they hate change, so they would rather live with belongings that no longer serve them than to give them up. That’s how they end up living in cluttered houses.

In a large house this might not be such a problem (unless even the hallways are full of clutter). But in a small house, it takes very little for the halls and traffic patterns to become blocked. Only someone who is committed to keeping their home livable would be willing to get rid of possessions if that’s what it would take to keep them in their home.

I’ve thought that about my own small house. The living areas have some spare space, but the bedrooms do not. They’re pretty small. If we live here until we’re elderly, we’ll have to get rid of some furniture in order to move around safely if one or both of us end up using walkers. We have several tall bookshelves that are full of our treasured books and hobby materials. They would probably be the first to go.

What Was I Thinking?

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

I have two sewing areas. One is in the little sewing room on the main floor, where I sew clothes and piece quilts on one of two vintage sewing machines, and also have a serger squeezed in there. The other is in the basement, where my high-speed sewing machine sits on two large tables so I have lots of room to spread out whatever it is I’m quilting.

Nearby on an old dresser sits a basket full of thread for that machine, and a dish tub filled with extra parts and feet for it, along with other related items. That dresser was supposed to have been given to a relative 18 months ago, but then the pandemic came along.

I got to thinking that I would like a cabinet to replace that dresser once it goes; that way I’d have somewhere to park the thread, extra parts, feet, etc. I’d want something with cubbies up high, because I have a bum knee and have trouble reaching things in lower cabinets. I began looking at freestanding cupboards and cabinets online, trying to find just the right thing.

And then it occurred to me: I have no business adding furniture to this house! It’s got enough furniture in it. So I looked at the furniture we do have, thinking something could be repurposed as my new sewing cabinet. But nothing would work.

What to do…..as with so many other things in life, I realized I should just wait until an idea came to me. Within a few days it did. If I reorganize the storage under the big counter where I cut fabric (it was our kitchen island in the big house we gave up) I should be able to easily fit in the stuff that currently sits on the old dresser.

And here I was looking at new furniture. What was I thinking?

Home Decluttering to the Extreme

By Claire Posted in Clutter Tagged , ,

I’ve mentioned once or twice that I have a guilty habit: I’m a Realtor.com addict. I love to see inside of other people’s houses to see how they decorate them. I can do it from my laptop and it’s much safer than peeking into people’s windows and getting arrested for being a female peeping Tom.

As far as I can tell, there are four general categories of houses on Realtor.com:

  1. Neutered. They painted all the walls light gray, dark gray or white, and installed dark wood-look engineered flooring on all the floors.
  2. Trying to be trendy. They did all the things in #1, then went to Hobby Lobby and bought a car-load of wooden plaques with sayings like “Live, Love, Laugh” and “This is Us,” (and in the bedroom, “Always Kiss Me Goodnight”) and put them all over the house.
  3. Love it or leave it. This is what house listings used to look like before staging came into vogue. Each room looks very lived in. Surfaces have stuff on them, walls have paintings, bric-a-brac, and family photos. Often there are dog beds or cat climbing units featured prominently. These are the “before” houses when it comes to decluttering.
  4. Empty. These make me sad because there’s nothing to look at!

Years ago, when you toured houses for sale, most of them looked like #3, and you had to use your imagination to get an idea of how your stuff would look in their house. Now you just have to hope all of your stuff goes with gray. How times change!