Category Archives: Simpler Living

Don’t Let Your Windfall Turn into Clutter

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

As a writer, I’m not paid weekly; I’m paid monthly. Every month, it’s a different amount, depending on my book sales. Once in a while, there’s a surge of sales, and I’m paid a lot more than usual.

That’s exciting, but it’s also dangerous, because it’s very tempting to take that money and buy new clothes, new bedding, new furniture….what I want to buy usually depends on the size of the windfall.

The true danger lies in the fact that I know how easily I fall into the trap of wanting more things, which is how I got into the overcluttered life in the first place. Not only was I good at accumulating stuff, but when I got new stuff, I often kept the old stuff because “We paid a lot for this,” or “Someone might need this.” That kind of thinking is one reason that I ended up with a big house full of stuff plus two full storage units. If you tend to let cash burn a hole in your pocket, you may be prone to accumulating stuff, too.

Even if you’re paid weekly, you can still end up with a windfall in the form of an annual bonus or a much-larger-than-expected tax refund. Then there are the larger sums: your Uncle Ernie leaves you $5,000 after he dies, or you finally win the state lottery’s $25,000 prize.

I immediately put extra cash into a savings account so I don’t spend it impulsively. But that doesn’t mean my brain has stopped thinking of ways to spend it. However, my family and I worked very, very hard to get rid of all our excess possessions, and we enjoy living in our small, clean, uncluttered house now. We do not want to go back to living with too much stuff. Sometimes it occurs to me that we could buy a house that’s a little bigger than what we have now, to accommodate our growing family of grandchildren when they visit. But I fear that a bigger house would just mean more places to accumulate things.

So what to do with the windfall? How can it benefit us without overloading us with the wonderful things it might buy? I’ll share some ideas next time.

The Effect of Decluttering Mania on Children

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

Last time I explored the mania that now surrounds decluttering: how some people are buying elaborate (and expensive) storage systems in order to have a “perfectly organized” home.

I feel sorry for the children of these people. It’s been a long time since I raised my kids, but I clearly recall how they loved to pull out all their toys and play with them. They made quite a mess, but they had a lot of fun. By the time they were toddlers, we had taught them to throw everything back into their toy box at the end of the day so that the room was cleaned up.

But imagine being the child of someone with decluttering mania….a five-year-old picks up his Legos and throws them in a plastic box, but his mom tells him, “No, the Legos go in the green box! Don’t put them in the blue box. That box is for your Matchbox cars. No, put them in the green box, not the brown box! The brown box is for your Transformers!”

The poor kid is just trying to put his toys away, as requested, but he soon stops caring whether he puts anything away because of Mom’s complicated system.

It’s important to teach children to pick up after themselves. But if you get caught up in some pricey storage system, you may raise children who stop picking anything up at all. Kids aren’t known for their patience.

The Hazards of Decluttering Mania

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

Lately I’m noticing that some people (including a few “decluttering experts”) have taken the concept of decluttering to such an extreme that they’re actually recommending that you buy systems to store your belongings in so that everything is color- and shape-coordinated. And of course these “systems” cost plenty of money.

I’m afraid the decluttering trend is turning into a mania. It’s one thing to reduce your possessions to a manageable level so that you can live in an orderly, uncluttered home. It’s another thing to require everything to fit in pre-purchased, matching-color containers and shelving. We’re talking entire walls of shelving with matching storage containers that fit into their appointed slots with barely any room to spare.

Does anyone else think this is all getting a little, um, OCD?

Many of us were forced to declutter because of a financial reversal that led to downsizing our life by moving into smaller quarters. So we don’t have the kind of money that a big, coordinated storage system costs.

Take this pantry, for example. Just the rack on the door with its little accouterments costs nearly $130 on sale (reg. $184—eek!)

Then there are the goodies that go on the shelves. By goodies, I don’t mean food, of course: just the matching containers that you put the food in! Here’s a starter set for “only” $168.

When you go from weeding out the old stuff in your pantry and putting the rest of its contents in neat rows to buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of containers and shelves, not to mention pouring food out of the store packages into matching plastic containers, you are officially part of a mania.

And does it occur to anyone that by buying all these containers and shelves that go together, that you are actually adding clutter to your house? You’re also feeding your urge to accumulate, which is what you got you into trouble in the first place.

If you reduce your belongings to only what you find useful and beautiful (a theme I thoroughly explore in The Sentimental Person’s Guide to Decluttering), you won’t need coordinated storage systems. You won’t need to ruin a perfectly good wooden door by screwing an elaborate shelving system into it. And you’ll save a lot of money, too.

Why Japanese-Style Decluttering Isn’t Optimal for Most Americans

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

With her new Netflix series, writer/declutterer Marie Kondo is leading the decluttering boom that continues to grow. There is no doubt that her work is inspiring to many people.

But she lives in Japan, where the average home is 700 square feet in Tokyo, 1023 square feet in Japan as a whole, and 1600 square feet in small cities outside of Tokyo. Compare this to the U.S. where it’s been estimated that homes are twice as large as in Japan, approximately 1800-2000 square feet in the cities and almost 50% larger than that where there is new construction, and it becomes obvious that decluttering American-style requires a completely different dynamic than the way Ms. Kondo declutters.

Yes, her ideas are often clever, but she can’t address the special kind of desperation that results when you’re overwhelmed with clutter in multiple rooms and levels, not to mention offsite in a storage unit (or two). Her techniques are useful, but you need a plan to work through such a lot of stuff, step by step, so that you don’t get discouraged or run out of energy and give up before you’ve gone through everything.

Just the fact that Americans tend to have more children than the Japanese results in larger homes with more kiddie clutter that reproduces faster than one can imagine, thanks to generous doting relatives and friends. Like everything else, when it comes to clutter, we Americans do it up big.

So when you consider the quantity of stuff we’re talking about, it could literally take years to say thank you and goodbye to each item you’re giving up (as Ms. Kondo recommends) in a major decluttering effort. Personally, I’ve learned over the years that sorting everything, keeping only the most useful and beautiful items, and filling the car with the rest of the stuff and dropping it off at the Goodwill without a backwards glance is quicker and less emotional. But that’s just me 😉