Tag Archives: decluttering

Clutter and Different Generations: Baby Boomers and Their Parents

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

I notice that today’s young people don’t seem to keep as much stuff as my generation has kept, and certainly not as much as their grandparents kept. I think there are several reasons for this.

I was born at the end of the baby boom, so I had parents who were born during the Great Depression. They were raised with relatively little in terms of material goods, and by parents who were poor. My maternal grandfather lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929, while my paternal grandmother raised a large family as a teenage mom whose husband left soon after their youngest child was born. As a result, these people valued…no, treasured…every item they owned, and particularly anything that could possibly be useful, right down to pieces of string.

Since they lived with very little income, they learned to stretch everything as far as possible, and to keep anything on which they had spent their hard-earned income. Even if they no longer needed something, they kept it because “Someone else might need it someday. What if we have another depression?” That’s what my parents grew up hearing and seeing. As a result, I was raised to waste nothing and keep everything.

But that’s not all. Looking back, I realize that I grew up during the golden age of merchandising. The quality of the clothes, housewares, and other products we bought during the 1960s to 1980s was extremely high and also very appealing. I grew up in the Chicago area, so I cut my shopping teeth on Marshall Field’s flagship store downtown, where there were 13 floors of incredible goods, all waiting to be wrapped in tissue by the friendly Field’s employees and placed neatly in forest green Field’s bags or boxes.

My love of fabric began when my grandmother took me shopping at Field’s fabric department, where she bought me my first pattern (clothes for my Barbie doll) and led me up and down rows of gorgeous fabric. Gram could not leave Field’s without a large stack of green boxes. When she wasn’t up for a trip downtown, she would call Field’s on the phone and request something she saw in one of their ads in her morning Chicago Tribune. The next day, the big green truck pulled up and delivered Gram’s new dress, or bedspread, or throw pillows. They were always sturdy and beautiful, qualities which she had come to expect from Marshall Field’s goods.

By the time I became a teenager, we had a new shopping option in our area: Woodfield Mall. Billed back then as the world’s largest indoor shopping mall, it boasted all of the major anchors of the 1970s (J.C. Penney, Sears, and of course, Marshall Field’s). You could spend the entire day there and find an amazing variety of fashionable and well-made clothes, shoes and home goods (mostly made in the U.S.), and also visit many specialty shops that made your shopping experience a lot of fun. All of the stores were full of tempting buys.

Then I got married and we bought a house. It wasn’t hard to fill a big, empty house with furniture, window treatments, and carpeting, not to mention sheets and towels. By now we had Marshall’s and T.J. Maxx, where I could find the same high-quality items sold at the mall, but at discounted prices. Back then, sheets and towels were designed for eye appeal, and before long, our linen closet was overflowing. (My family used many of those items for twenty years; that’s how well-made they were.)

For my generation, shopping was a pleasant experience that eventually became a pastime. No wonder we have so much stuff! Faced with the poor quality of many goods since most of our manufacturing went to the Far East, and companies became focused on how much profit they could make with lower-quality goods, many of us have kept our high-quality goods. It’s hard to let go of something when you know it will be impossible to replace it in the future with something of similar quality. No wonder many Baby Boomers and their elderly parents still have so much stuff!

Next: why today’s young adults have so much less clutter than older generations do.

Has the Decluttering Craze Jumped the Shark?

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing Tagged , , ,

Decluttering has been a very popular topic for several years now, and like most crazes, it produces all sorts of people offering advice on how to declutter your home.

Some of them make a lot of sense; I hope I’m one of them! Then there are the others….like this guy who sells shoes on the Internet and has curated his personal collection down to about 100 pairs of trainers.

Yes, 100 pairs.

Of course, since no one can wear more than a few pairs a day, he also uses them for his décor (check out the link and see what I mean.)

I’m worried that this means the decluttering craze has jumped the shark. I sure hope not, because freeing people from an overabundance of stuff shouldn’t ever go out of style.

Words (for a Declutterer) to Live By

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, My Books, Personal, Simpler Living Tagged ,
The Declutterer’s Motto

A couple of my kids gave me this plaque for Christmas; they were completely unaware that the quote it displays is a major theme in my most recent book, The Sentimental Person’s Guide to Decluttering.

The fact is that this principle can help you whittle down your possessions. The dual parameters of what you use and what you love are really all you need.

Decluttering a Working Kitchen, Part 3

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

Whether the eating area in your house is located in the kitchen, next to it, or in a separate dining room, the table in it is likely to be a magnet for anything you need to set down instead of taking time to find a place for.  That’s why it’s so hard to keep a table clear of everything except place settings.

If you eat in front of the television, this may not be a concern for you. But my family likes to eat at the table where we converse while we eat (no phones allowed), so a clear table is a necessity.

It’s also a necessity when I’m cooking, because our kitchen has so little counter space. So when I bake cookies, there may be a few cooling racks on the kitchen table. Every year, we decorate dozens of Christmas cookies on that table. We even set bags of freezer meals on the table while assembling them. But whatever we put on that table, it has to be gone before suppertime so we can eat.

In a small house, it isn’t just food that ends up on the kitchen table, as I noted in my e-book, Secrets of Small-House Living:

Most rooms in a small house need to be multi-functional, and the eating area is no exception. Our kitchen table sometimes serves as a gift-wrapping station, a crafting area, a work area (especially at tax time), and a parking zone for the groceries as they transit between the driveway and the kitchen. For that reason, we’ve had to get in the habit of keeping it clear. We can’t let it become a catch-all, because we need that space, even when no one is eating.

Often the mail tries to pile up on our kitchen table. I go through it daily, shredding and filing, but occasionally I can’t get to it. It’s amazing how quickly other papers are magically drawn to that spot! Before I know it, I’m sitting down to dinner next to a paper pile. I have to be very diligent to stay on top of that potential mess.

If you have children at home, I’m sure your table attracts far more than just paper. But even for us, it’s been a challenge to find other places to put the things that are so easy to throw on the table:

It helps to keep some filing places nearby. There’s a small basket on the wall, near my calendar. That’s where I put the bills. A few nearby kitchen drawers hold personal financial paperwork, sale flyers and coupons. Junk mail goes straight to the recycler or shredder. Everything else goes to the far end of the table, which is near the basement door. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking whatever’s on the far end of the table down to the basement with me when I pass by. (The basement is where we keep our filing cabinets.) Some days I feel like I’m just taking pieces of paper up and down the steps. But there’s no room upstairs for a filing cabinet.

Inside the kitchen cabinets that face the eating area, I keep information taped to the doors. My phone number list is there; it includes our doctors’ and dentist’s numbers, among others. (I’m old-school, so I don’t keep it all on my cell phone.) The insides of kitchen cabinet doors are great places for keeping information that needs to be easily accessible.

Since I wrote that, I did make a change in how I do things in the eating area. I got tired of constantly taking papers down to the filing cabinet in the basement. So I now keep an accordion file in a large kitchen drawer next to the table. Every six months or so, I take that accordion file to the basement and file everything. Then I bring it back up and put it in the drawer. It saves me a lot of steps, and allows me to easily access recent files.

Ultimately, the key to keeping your eating area clear of clutter is to make sure you have places to put the things that end up on the table. Backpacks should go on coat racks by the door, or on your children’s bed posts. Groceries should be put away promptly. If these things have a place to go, they won’t be left on your table. And having a clean table goes a long way toward making your kitchen, and in fact your main living area, look comfortable and uncluttered.