Category Archives: Simpler Living

Whittling Down the Wardrobe

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

Some areas of clutter are easier to conquer than others. For me, keeping my wardrobe under control is a challenge, so I tend to put off doing so until my closet becomes too crowded. It has now reached that level, so it’s time to go through my clothes again.

This gets complicated. We have very definite changes of season where I live, so there are summer clothes and winter clothes to be gone through as well several seasonally transitional items.

To make matters worse, like many women I have three sizes of clothes in my possession: tight clothes, clothes that fit fine and larger clothes for when I overdo it.

I’ve learned over time that the best way to start getting rid of clothes is to first find and pull all of those that have seen better days. I have tops that I love but that are looking pretty worn, to the point that I don’t wear them when I leave the house. There’s no reason to keep them all except that I’m sentimentally attached to them, and if you’ve read my latest book, you know that is not a good reason to keep things. So out they go!

I’ve also learned to keep the highest quality clothes that I like, as well as those I love. It’s been a while since I’ve seen well-made clothes out of good material in stores, so I will hang onto anything I like that is good quality because it will keep its shape and last longer than most other clothes I own.

Sometimes I have to pretend I’m someone else when I’m assessing the condition of each item; this helps me bypass my innate sentimentality in favor of the part of me that adores well-made things.

I make a yearly effort to go through all of my clothes because I live in a small house with small closets and limited storage space. My reward will be that great feeling I’ll get when I go through my closet and drawers to find that everything is neatly arranged and nothing is squashed in. Know what I mean?

A Future Decluttering Trend? Taking Control of Digital Clutter

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

Last time I wrote about a man who is completely controlled by digital clutter. He loves having a break from it, but when that break is over, he allows his smartphone to take control of him again.

There is a cure for this: it’s called digital detox. It’s very similar to decluttering your house, except instead of getting rid of all of your digital clutter, you learn to control it, keep only what you need, and to escape it whenever you feel the need.

Given the fact that so many people are addicted to their smartphones, I think the potential market for digital decluttering is even larger than the currently popular market for decluttering your home. Once people taste freedom, whether it’s being able to move about their homes freely, or going through life without the tyranny of checking their phone constantly, they find that they want more.

Like detoxing from other bad habits, there can be some negative emotions at first, like cravings and anxiety. But those who make it through are usually pretty happy they stuck with the detoxing program.

One challenge is that modern life makes it very hard to live without going online. Our bank accounts are there, people pay their bills there, they socialize there. How do you give all that up?

Like decluttering your home, decluttering your digital clutter does not mean getting rid of everything. Instead, you make choices. You choose to keep only what’s most important while weeding out the unnecessary clutter. Keeping up with work emails and phone calls is essential; keeping up with your high school classmates’ latest political diatribes on Facebook is not. When you choose to get rid of unneeded clutter, physical or digital, you leave room for the most important things, and also extra room in your home, or your life.

Taking Control of Your Clutter is Not Merely a Fantasy

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Simpler Living Tagged , ,

Clutter:

Gets in your way.

Takes up time that you’d rather spend on other things.

Distracts you when you’re trying to get something done.

Lurks in your mind even when you can’t see it.

Displaces more important things in your house and your mind.

This is true of digital clutter as well as physical clutter. When I took my digital vacation a few months ago, I was able to focus more on reading and on thinking as well as working with my hands. I wasn’t a slave to a device; it no longer controlled me. The physical comparison would be how rearranging your clutter around your house controls your actions and keeps you from doing other things because all that clutter is in your way.

I’m old enough that taking a break from devices lets me go back to the way I used to be, before the Internet. But younger people don’t know what life was like before the Internet. Their reality is a life of being controlled by devices, and I mean controlled. Take a look at this article by a man who visits England every summer and purposely takes the long way home in the form of seven days on the Queen Mary, where it’s too hard to access the Internet.

He loves the break from being online. He loves being able to think, or read, or just sit. But as he nears the U.S., and Internet access becomes available again, his smartphone sucks him back online like an octopus pulling him under the ocean. Once again, he loses control of his actions.

Like physical clutter, digital clutter must be conquered if you ever want to get your life back…..or enjoy having a life for the first time in memory. Am I the only one who thinks the headline of this article, “The Fantasy of Being Disconnected,” is tragic? The author is a person who is completely controlled by digital clutter.

Rental Cars and the Downsized Life

By Claire Posted in Debt-Free, downsizing, Personal, Simpler Living Tagged , , ,

Since we downsized our lives over ten years ago, we look at our belongings in a different way than we once did. Now, keeping things simple and keeping expenses down have become the determining factors in what we own and what we do.

Case in point: by moving to a small city, we don’t have to drive far for anything, yet we have most everything we need here so we can go a month or more without leaving town. Add in the fact that we both work from home, and the result is that we put very few miles on our cars. So we haven’t had to replace them; they are now getting a little long in the tooth, being 12 and 16 years old, with 85,000 and 130,000 miles on them, respectively.

Recently, the air conditioning began to go on the “newer” car, and the repairman says it’ll cost about $800 to fix it. Since the a/c still works well on the older car, I’ve been driving it around town lately. But when we’ve taken some longer trips this summer, we decided we’d rather drive something newer and cooler (literally) than our “newer” car. So we rented vehicles instead. (The car rental office is a mile from our home, so it’s quite easy for us to pick up and drop off rental vehicles.)

It will take several rentals to equal $800. A 2019 minivan with 6,000 miles on it cost us $210 for a week-long rental in June. A 2019 SUV with 17,000 miles on it cost us $130 for a three-day weekend in August. So we can enjoy a longer trip with a newer vehicle for a reasonable price and without adding miles to our own vehicles.

If we drove new cars all year long, our car insurance bill would be quite a bit larger than the $500+ we now pay for one year of driving two old cars. But it doesn’t matter how much you pay for car insurance as long as you have it when you go to rent a new car. So we enjoy a low car insurance rate all year, and new cars when we travel.

I should point out that those affordable car rental rates are due to our Costco membership. We get quite a discount on car rental rates by going through them. See https://www.costcotravel.com/Rental-Cars for more details.