Category Archives: Clutter

His and Hers Clutter

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

Within our extended family, there is a pair of married packrats. Their house achieved hoarder status long ago, with tall piles of junk lining paths through rooms. No one has been in their dining room for 20 years because the floor is covered with piles of stuff; you can’t even see the table or chairs.

It sets off my claustrophobia to see teetering piles of stuff on every surface. I don’t really like eating at their house on holidays or birthdays because their kitchen counters have so much stuff on them that I don’t see how they can possibly keep them clean enough to prepare food. My adult kids won’t go there anymore because it’s too hard to keep their toddlers safe.

So I have a very hard time visiting these two relatives. I just want to back up the truck and clean that place out. I don’t know how they stand all that mess. But I suspect that there’s some kind of competition going on.

You see, they use each other’s clutter as an excuse for keeping their own. When one brings home more stuff, the other declares that they shouldn’t have to give up any of their own clutter just to make room for their spouse to bring home things they’ve bought. The result is a steadily filling house.

It’s hard enough for an individual to conquer their clutter issues. But it’s twice as hard when it involves a couple. There’s no one there to encourage them to get a handle on the mess. Instead, they keep adding to it.

Interestingly, no one in the family ever comments on the piles of stuff surrounding us as we sit and visit. After all, they’re both middle-aged adults, and we’re not their mommies. But I guarantee, many of us are thinking, “Get a dumpster! STAT!”

 

How to Get Over Decluttering Regret

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Debt-Free, downsizing, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , ,

It’s been seven years since we completed our massive decluttering effort, and six years since our grandchildren began arriving. What this means is that from time to time, I find myself wishing I still had something I got rid of, usually something that a grandchild would have liked or that one of my adult children who is now a parent wishes I had saved.

This is tough. That regret is painful. I can picture the item so clearly in my mind, but it’s long gone.

The most recent example is educational toys. I once had a fine collection, curated over many years of raising a large family. But I let go of most of it when we moved to the small house we live in now. There just wasn’t any room for it.

According to her pediatrician, one of our grandchildren may be gifted. This child has a very active mind and body and needs to be kept busy; her response to boredom is to get into trouble. Her parents have discovered that keeping her occupied with challenging puzzles and other activities is the key to saving their collective sanity.

I understand completely, and wistfully imagine how nice it would be to give them all those great educational toys we once had. But they’re gone.

I’ve begun to see, however, that it’s a complete waste of time to regret this, and particularly to dwell on it. It’s not as though there are no other educational toys left in the world. Rather than mourn the loss of what we had, I’ve been taking that energy and putting it into finding new educational toys for my tiny tornado, as I fondly call my very active granddaughter.

I’ve been checking out thrift stores and garage sales, and what I’ve discovered is that many kids are given educational toys, but few use them. So I’m finding very nice puzzles, games and other toys in like-new condition for mere pennies. Sometimes the packages are still sealed!

I buy these things and keep them at home until I see my grandchild. Until that happens, they take up space in my little house, so I’m glad to get them out of here. And, of course, my grandchild and her folks are thrilled with them.

There are no strings to these gifts, no emotional attachment involved. They can keep them or get rid of them once she’s bored with them. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just happy to help out.

This is a new attitude for me. If I’d kept all of my kids’ educational toys, I’d be saying things like, “Give it back to me when she’s tired of it in case another grandchild needs it,” or “Don’t let her rip that, it was yours when you were little.” I would want that collection to be preserved.

But it’s gone. These “new” items are serving a purpose for a time and then they will be gone, too. That’s OK. There’s a lot of freedom in doing things this way, and the end result is that my house stays uncluttered. So much for decluttering regret!

It’s OK to Give Up Birthday and Christmas Gifts

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

Often, after a birthday, or the holidays, we’re left with more goodies than we really need. That’s why we need to go through the gifts we received, deciding which are keepers and which need to be moved along, so we can remain clutter-free, or at least somewhat clutter-free.

Of course, some gifts are absolute keepers: the scarf your daughter knitted for you, a book you’ve been wanting to read, a bottle of your favorite wine. But what of those gifts of a more generic variety? Items like:

  • A shower kit with a cheap plastic “loofa” and bubble-gum scented shower gel,
  • A box of cheese and sausage snacks from someone who isn’t close enough to you to know you’re vegetarian, or
  • A sweater (with no gift receipt or tags) in a color combo that hasn’t been popular since the 1980s.

These gifts are easy to pass along to someone who you know will want them, or to simply donate to a thrift store or charity that takes items to resell. Make the time to do that now, rather than move them around for the next few months before you finally become fed up and do something with them.

Then there are the wonderful gifts which replace something you already owned. For instance, someone once gave me a lovely pair of woolen slippers. They were sturdy, practical and quite expensive, I later learned. So why did it take me months to start wearing them and to throw out my old, ratty slippers? Emotional attachment is the best explanation, I suppose. But I tripped over the box containing the new pair for ages before I finally made myself do the trade and pitch the old pair.

Duplicate gifts are a bit easier to deal with. If you received two of something, and it’s not consumable, share one with someone else you know who might need it, or pass it along. Why try to make space for it when you already have one?

As you go through your gifts and decide which are keepers and which need to go, let the momentum that builds up carry you along so that you take anything else you happen to see that’s no longer useful to you and move it along, too. You’ll be surprised how that momentum works.

If you need help making the tough decisions about which gifts to keep and which gifts to get rid of, see my book, The Sentimental Person’s Guide to Decluttering for tips on moving along a variety of gifts, including heirlooms and expensive gifts.

 

Even Low-Income People Can Benefit from Decluttering

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

Reading “The Class Politics of Decluttering” just got my blood going and incited in me the urge for rebuttal.

In short, the author labels decluttering as a trendy habit that has become popular thanks to “the well-off middle class,” who are spoiled and want to make themselves feel better by reducing their overabundance of possessions. Being low-income herself, she feels that poor people flock to sales because it allows them to get the things they need at affordable prices, and suggests that asking them to declutter their excess would be cruel. As she puts it:

Those aren’t the people who would benefit from a minimalist life. They can’t afford to do with less.

Oy, where to begin? Most people in every social class tend to keep more belongings than they need. Even low-income Americans find themselves tripping over bags of clothes their children have outgrown, toys no one plays with anymore, and more cheap plastic tumblers than they can use in a lifetime. Indeed, the author herself describes what happened when she had to move to a smaller apartment:

I had to sort through and get rid of carloads of clothes, my childhood toys, school papers, books, movies and artwork. I couldn’t afford to store all of these items, which had value to me only as a record of my history — including mementos from my parents.

My stuff wasn’t just stuff, but a reminder that I had a foundation of support of people who had loved me growing up: a painting I’d done as a child that my mom had carefully framed and hung in our house, a set of antique Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls my ferret once chewed an eye out of when I was 15, artwork my mom had collected over the decade we lived in Alaska. Things I grew up with that brought me back to a time of living a carefree life.

Goodness! Here’s a grown woman with children of her own still dragging around “carloads” of her childhood belongings? Like so many of us who have had to downsize our living quarters, she could have kept a few of the most precious items and photographed the rest in order to keep her memories intact. Seriously, how many adults keep all their childhood school papers and artwork?

If anything, you would think someone who lives in small quarters, whether by choice or by financial necessity, would see the wisdom in streamlining their possessions so that they can live unencumbered by what they no longer need, leaving extra room in an already small place for the items they need and/or cherish most.

Another thing that got me going: the author implies that the more “stuff” you have, the wealthier you are. Nothing can be further than the truth in 21st century America. Even the poor have more C³ (Cheap Chinese Crap) than they know what to do with. I’ve seen so much evidence of this. In my town (median income $35,000), in both the “poor” areas and the nicer areas, people leave oodles of belongings out on the curb after they move or after they have a garage sale. It always amazes me how much of that stuff is left there for days until the trash truck comes to carry it off. When I was a kid, lots of people “garbage-picked,” but now I rarely see that, most likely because everyone has plenty of stuff of their own.

I won’t go into what I think the author’s real issues are, though they should be obvious to anyone who can read. But it bugs me that she labels decluttering as an elitist pastime. For me and for many others, decluttering is a process that brings many good things into everyone’s lives, including (as I say in the title of my first book) “freedom, flexibility and financial peace.” And people of all social classes can benefit from those!