If you've tried other organizing and decluttering books and been stymied, then you need Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space. While the book is aimed at a more mature audience who are downsizing to smaller homes, the way it addresses the thought processes and emotional work of decluttering would be good for anyone. The authors, Judi Culbertson and Marj Decker, have been professional organizers for many years. They have obviously heard it ALL. Scaling Down includes many anecdotes of various people who succeeded (or failed) at downsizing in different scenarios. There are cartoons and a lot of humor, although there are some sad moments. For instance, it never ceases to amaze me how grown adults will allow a trivial family trinket to destroy relationships, and there are examples of that here. The most valuable part of the book is the way it walks through the way to make different kinds of decisions about stuff. Not just physical possessions, but downsizing to a smaller home, clearing out storage units, disconnecting from a career at retirement, setting boundaries in new marriages or with adult kids, and more. There is a chapter on dealing with the possessions of an older relative who has become incapacitated or passed away. For those of us who haven't yet had to confront the types of issues that are common to senior adults, it brings true perspective to the effort of downsizing. Future Self is simply not going to need all this stuff. It's so much easier to make the decisions and do the sorting now, while we're relatively hale and hearty. I'm currently living in a space slightly less than half the size of the house we moved into as newlyweds. We've had to downsize the kitchen four times in seven years of marriage. We've found that we prefer a cozy, snug, human-sized space, the type that was common in the early 20th century. It feels more homey. It's also easier to clean, easier to find things, and cheaper to heat and cool. With two middle-aged adults and two messy pets, we can attest that everything in Scaling Down is true. In my professional work with hoarding and squalor, I have seen a lot. I can't say I've seen everything, though, because I know there's one thing I've never seen. I've never been in a home with an empty closet. The paradoxical thing about closets is that they're meant to hide things, yet they are usually so full that most of the stuff that they're meant to hide has to be left out in the open. We use our closets to store things we never use. Then the space isn't available for our "real" stuff when we want to put it away. There's no away to put it. The clothes we really wear are either in the laundry basket, on top of the dresser, draped on a chair, or in the dryer. Meanwhile, the closet and dresser are full of clothes that don't fit or that we forgot we even owned. The coat closet is so full of random junk that there's no room for coats or backpacks. The kitchen cabinets are so full of mismatched plastic containers and travel cups with no lids that there's no room to put all the dishes away. We rent storage units we can't truly afford because we think we don't have enough space. We use them to store stuff we can't bear to get rid of, that we think we really love, and we demonstrate that by keeping it away from our house and never using it. I live in a 728-square-foot house that was built in 1939. All the houses in our neighborhood are about the same size - or smaller - because that was the norm back then. The bedroom closet rod is four feet long, and that's supposed to be for two people. There is no coat closet. Even though this house is half the size of the house we moved into when we first got married, there's plenty of room. It turns out that even the tiniest studio apartment has room for the true necessities: toiletries, linens, a functional kitchen, enough changes of clothes for two weeks, some books, and a file of important papers. There isn't as much room for things that didn't exist in 1939, like a large-screen TV, a desktop computer, a set of every small kitchen appliance ever made, or my hula hoop collection. When our house was built, people had an average of nine outfits. They didn't have massive inventories of craft supplies or holiday decorations like we do today. Kids only had a couple of toys each. Stuff cost more and most people didn't have access to credit. People believed in these mysterious things called "nest eggs" and "life savings." They got their sense of security from their family, friends, jobs, pantries, and savings accounts, not a thick insulation of material goods. Most of us live in homes that were built more recently than the 1930s. Living space has expanded over the years, adding roughly three hundred square feet per decade. As of 2013, the average was 2600 square feet, which is more than triple the size of the house I rent today. What the heck are people doing with all that space? How do they clean it all? How can they afford the heating and air conditioning? I'm starting to think the answer is that we can't keep up with the cleaning, and it's stressing us out. We can't afford the heating and cooling, either, or the mortgage, and that's stressing us out even more. We think we need all the space, though, because it's the cultural norm and because WHERE ELSE WOULD WE PUT ALL OUR STUFF? We live in historically unprecedented ginormous houses and yet we still think we need storage units. What if we started prioritizing the home itself over the stuff it contains? What if we paid more attention to the experience of living where we do? How much of our time do we spend looking for lost items, arguing over housework, fretting over money, or grumbling about the laundry? Home should be a sanctuary. It should be a place of comfort and relaxation. Our living space should reflect our personal tastes and show that YES, this is how I choose to live! This is intentional! I have one place in all the world that I can shape to reflect my preferences. In this little corner of the world, everything is exactly the way I want it. That can't be the case when our closets are bulging and our dresser drawers are cracking. I should know; my closet rod snapped under the weight of all my clothes one day. There can be no tranquility or serenity in a cluttered, grubby house full of power struggles and money worries. The structure of the home itself teaches us that there are natural physical limits. Just as we have physical limits for sleep deprivation, thirst, and excess food consumption, our homes have limits for how many objects they can logically contain. We start by looking at the available space and using it for the obvious: our practical needs. Anything that doesn't fit and isn't a practical necessity is under suspicion for getting in the way and lowering our quality of life. I know why we surround ourselves with stuff. Because we’re bored. We can’t think of any reasons to clean up that are interesting enough to actually get down and do it. We’re totally okay with doing almost the exact same things almost every single day. We’re fine with having the same things to vent and complain about. We’re good with having the same unfinished projects, open loops, and procrastinated chores from one week to the next. Wake up. Go to work. Come home. Eat. Get maximum amount of screen time. Lather, rinse, repeat. There are thousands upon thousands of things we could be doing with the physical space that we’ve claimed with our clutter. We simply choose to leave it filled up with stuff because we don’t have any better ideas. I’m a horrible snoop. When I walk around town, and someone’s garage door is up, I always take a peek. Here in the US, almost every garage looks about the same: full of boxes with a goat trail over to the washer and dryer. Sometimes there will be one that’s set up with a “bedroom” space or two. People sleep out there in the heat. That’s interesting, but maybe in a bad way? What else do I see? Surgically immaculate space with nothing but a car, a laundry area, and a rack of mops and brooms. A woman’s kickboxing practice area. (I’d offer to make friends with her, but unfortunately we were already planning to move). Various weightlifting gyms. Various motorcycle and custom auto shops. Various wood shops. Ping-pong tables, pool tables, air hockey tables, foosball tables – open and actually in use. The neighborhood social hub, with a dozen laughing people in their 20s and a couple of hookahs and bean bag chairs. What I’ve noticed with the working garages is that they’re all really cool in their own unique way. The guys who run custom vehicle shops usually have a bunch of signs, neon, and often a mini fridge. The many gyms I see in use are clean, well-lit, and usually playing music. The dens of socializing tend to have chairs and party lights. It often seems like the garage is the center of the home, that at least one household member spends more time out there than the rest of the house put together. The only thing they all have in common is that they’re not boring. They’ve all been carefully arranged for maximum use and enjoyment. Patios can be the same way. Everyone in my 1930s-era suburban neighborhood has a back yard. Tiny SoCal yards, but yards all the same. Some people have a lot of yard parties and barbecues. Others don’t. Some have them filled with stacks of rubber tubs covered with tarps. We can thank whoever remodeled our rental house for putting in a covered patio with a ceiling fan and leaving behind a great outdoor dining table and chairs. It’s the first yard I’ve had that makes me want to be out there all the time. In fact, I like it so much that I took a picture of it and put it on the lock screen of my phone. There’s nothing out there but the table, the fan, and my parrot’s climbing tree, but it looks perfect to me. Noelle loves it so much that she resists every time it’s time to go back inside, even if it’s getting chilly and windy. Why do we buy things we don’t need? I think it’s usually because we’d rather be at that particular store than back at home. Every store tends to be better organized, cleaner, and better lit than most people’s home living areas. It’s the same reason we like to go out to eat, even when the food is contributing to problems such as our rapidly expanding debt. We don’t have to fight over who does the dishes and we don’t have to clear counter space first. Home and hearth aren’t nurturing, relaxing spaces where we feel our most fulfilled. Our homes are instead places of irritation, resentment, frustration, and boredom. When we got back from Spain, we realized that we physically hadn’t sat on a couch in three weeks. We had been everywhere in planes, trains, buses, ferries, funiculars, and taxis. We had slept either in sleeping bags or the beds of four-star hotels. We had climbed a few hundred flights of stairs. What we hadn’t done was to simply sit on a couch. It was a revelation! We wallowed in it. We were jet lagged, so we unapologetically lounged all over it with our dog. A month later, it had somehow transformed from Cushions of Wonder to plain old ordinary couch again. We’re careful, though. We put our planning focus, after maxing out our retirement contributions for the year, on travel. That means whenever we pick up an object and think about buying it, we see the price tag in terms of what experience we’re trading off. The two of us took a day trip to Morocco for about $65. We could spend the same amount on an average Saturday by going out for breakfast, picking up Starbucks, going to a movie, and buying a bucket of popcorn. Or I could spend it on a single pair of shoes that were too uncomfortable to even wear. We could also fritter it away slowly on sodas and bags of chips. It’s the same money, but we’re more likely to notice the impact when we plan a peak experience versus letting it trickle out on dumb stuff over weeks or months. We didn’t clean out any closets while we were in Spain. We didn’t clean out the garage, either. That’s because we didn’t have to. We have the money to go on cool trips every couple of years because we don’t spend it fighting everyday boredom the rest of the time. We don’t have to clean out closets all the time because we don’t fill them with stuff. These things are connected. We build our lives around activities other than shopping, screen time, and procrastination. I sometimes rush to work ahead a bit, because I like leaving an immaculate house before locking the door for a long trip. We keep the house clear because we’re paying for the smallest house we could find, and we physically don’t have the space to fill with anything we don’t actively need. Our version of a life worth living doesn’t include a bunch of extra physical possessions. What could you do with your space that would be more interesting than the way it is now? Clear out a storage unit and use the money to take a class, or to free yourself from the shackle of debt? Clear out a “spare” room, scour the house top to bottom, and start renting the space on AirBnB? Have an empty room for dance or yoga? Have a home office and start seeing clients? (Bookkeeping, palmistry, or what-have-you). Clear out the garage and make a robotics laboratory? (Oh, that’s us). What’s the most interesting thing you can think of doing? If you’re not doing it, what could you do to make it happen? My guess is that it would include freeing up either space, money, time, or all three. What’s stopping you? I found a note tucked into the slats of the picket fence around our front yard. A film production company wanted to advise our neighborhood that they would be filming on Saturday. They politely explained that extra crew trucks and vehicles would be using our street parking, and provided a permission slip for us to check off. There was contact information for the film company and the relevant city office. Essentially, we were being informed that this was happening, like it or not, and they had the legal right to be here. The next morning, a surfer-looking guy knocked on my door and asked for the form. I signed it and gave it to him. We have no reason to be concerned about our house being in a movie. We also have no concerns about street parking. We only have one vehicle, and there’s room for at least two in our driveway. We rent this house. The two owners of our house live next door, and they send a yard service once a week. It comes out of our rent. That’s standard in suburban SoCal. This is all a roundabout way of explaining that we don’t identify with the way our house looks from the street. It’s fine; it’s a nice place to live, but we don’t expect it to reflect our personalities or anything. I’d be surprised if we still live here in four years. It made me think, though. I work with hoarding, squalor, and chronic disorganization. Most of my people would freak if they knew someone might capture their house or yard on film. The idea that someone would knock on the front door and potentially see inside the house for a moment would be a very creepy thought. Picturing their home displayed on a big screen in front of a national audience would be depressing and overwhelming. There’s one like it in every neighborhood, and often more than one. Sometimes when I walk around my ambit I wish I could leave a business card in the mailbox. I know my crowd, though, and such a gesture would more likely catalyze a shame spiral than anything productive. “People can see! They are JUDGING ME!” It’s hard not to notice that some houses are different, even if they don’t have a feature like a waist-high wall of rubber tubs of clutter under a tarp. Nothing about one of these yards actually says “home.” All that shows is lack of love, neglect, trouble, or even danger. It’s not a judgment on the occupants if the house doesn’t look so great from the outside. Passersby are generally going to guess that someone elderly, ill, or financially strained lives there. Maybe they just moved in and are working through a long list of repairs and remodeling before they tackle the landscaping. Who knows? New roofs are expensive. Painting an exterior is a lot of work. The drought (here at least) is affecting everyone, and there’s a wait list for lawn removal and drought-tolerant landscaping. The nearest neighbors may impatiently be waiting for a makeover on the least-attractive house in the neighborhood, but nobody else really cares. They’ll only notice after something starts happening to make it prettier. When the tubs and piles and stacks start showing up, then people do start judging. It’s one thing if the bags are going out to the street and getting hauled away on a regular basis. It’s another thing if a dead couch or recliner or mattress or television suddenly appears on the curb and sits there for weeks or months. Every single person who sees something like that there on the second day starts muttering, “It only costs $20 to drop that off at the dump.” The nightmare is really on the other side of the door. Almost everyone who lives in a troubled house would fix it, if only it were that easy. We don’t always know what to do. We often have some kind of mobility or health issue that makes the physical aspects of space clearing too difficult to do alone. Usually the financial situation does not allow for repairs, remodeling, or hiring people to help. In every case, we’re in such a bad emotional space that we can’t even imagine what “better” or “good” would feel like. My people try hard, but when I assign them a visualization exercise about a perfect day or a fantasy outcome, they can’t do it. They don’t have a dream of something better, and trying to come up with one is one of the hardest things I ask of them. That’s why having their house in a movie would be a horror scenario, not a romantic comedy. Everything is simple at my house. It’s only 728 square feet, but we downsized until we fit. There’s a tiny front porch, and we brought out two of the metal patio chairs from the back. We had a couple of decorative pots, and we spent a few dollars on rosemary and lavender. Then we really went nuts and bought a rosebush for $16. That’s it. We sit out there sometimes and watch our dog roll on his back in the grass. We bring out the parrot and watch as she learns to climb the steps all by herself. (That’s tough when you’re only nine inches tall). The only maintenance we have to do is to bring in the mail and NOT ADD any physical objects. As a result, if our house appears fleetingly in someone’s movie, it’ll be nothing more than a smooth backdrop. Nobody would ever remember seeing it. That’s a good thing. If my home is going to be in a movie, I’d prefer that the house and yard be the least interesting part of it. This is basically a pro-junk book, in the sense that Alison Stewart treats junk as an interesting subject. It is, of course. Nobody would collect clutter otherwise. Junk is a sympathetic and funny look at what is increasingly becoming a major part of American culture. The book begins with Stewart’s quest to clear out her parents’ basement. She has the help of her sister and a friend. Still, it takes them eight months. This includes a mutual agreement not to even glance at any photographs, but put them aside for later. The project introduces her to the world of junk haulers and professional organizers. Apparently, the need for organizers and junk haulers still provokes skepticism in many people. All I can say to that is that they must have only well-organized friends. My work over the past twenty years leads me to estimate that at least 20% of the population in the US has trouble with chronic disorganization, Stage One hoarding, squalor, or all of the above. This was probably not the case earlier in our nation’s history, as people had to make their own material goods and repair, reuse, or do without. Now, we are constantly surrounded by junk mail and cheap consumer goods. Stewart explores these issues, even including an interview with the man who sent the first spam email. Anything described as ‘junk’ has a place in the book, including space junk. I learned that ‘junk’ began as a nautical term for worn-out rope, giving the word a connotation of stuff that is not only useless, but worse than useless, as trying to make it last longer can be dangerous and destructive. Minimalism and tiny homes make their appearance. A couple of people who are profiled live a minimalist lifestyle in tiny homes. There is also a tiny home community for people who are transitioning away from homelessness. Junk hauling plays a large role in the continuing function of this community. It is interesting how some of the people whom Stewart profiles wind up absorbing some of the junk they haul, while the work causes others to shy away from it and cut back on material things in their lives. (I fall into the latter camp, getting rid of more stuff every time I do a job). Junk is a really intriguing, sometimes funny book. It includes discussions about all the clutter-related reality TV shows, from Antiques Roadshow to Pawn Stars to Hoarders. Stewart interviews various professional junk haulers, showing how many of these businesses are owned by or employ veterans or the formerly homeless. She shows how much of the hauled junk is reused, donated, and given a new life. She interviews the founder of Freecycle and explores an organization called Repair Café, something that caught my attention and made me look for one in my own area. Maybe I’ll make an appearance some Saturday and help people mend some old clothes. It’s a bit of a paradox, but valuing our old things enough to repair and care for them may be the only solution to the never-ending tidal wave of stuff that we send to the landfill every day. Coat closets are rare in California. Since I moved into my own place here in 2006, I have lived in 7 different homes, 5 of which did not have a coat closet. I grew up in Oregon, however, and my husband is from Mt. Shasta, so we keep heavy winter gear for family visits. Where do we put these coats that we only really need for two months of the year? What about all the other stuff that tends to be stored in a coat closet, when we have one? That includes the dog’s leash and other paraphernalia, our luggage, mops and brooms, the earthquake water, Roomba accessories, and canvas shopping bags. Our coat closet conundrum is one example of the way that home infrastructure does not always match the material needs of the inhabitants. It’s also an example of the way that we insist on putting stuff in particular places in our home, regardless of whether there is space for it all. We just moved into a 728 square foot house that is 53% of the size of our old house. Part of the space that was cut from our accustomed living area includes the aforementioned coat closet, a bedroom, about 2/3 of a linen closet, half a bedroom closet, a pantry, and a walk-in storage closet off the garage that had considerable built-in shelving. We also accidentally destroyed a cabinet that used to hold all our office, art, and sewing supplies. It was really challenging to find places for the last 10% of our stuff and make our office a usable room. We’ve been traveling back in time. When we first moved in together, I had been living in a 900 square foot “granny unit” built in 2001 that would technically qualify as a mini-house. Our newlywed house was built in 1988, had 1544 square feet, and came with a walk-in closet in the master bedroom, an astounding amount of kitchen storage, two living rooms, a cavernous garage, and, of course, a coat closet. The next house was 1056 square feet, freshly remodeled but built in 1972. Then we spent a few weeks in temporary housing that was part of an apartment complex. After that, we moved into the 1346 square foot, 1961 house where we lived last. Our current house was built in 1939. The closet rod in our bedroom measures 40 inches. This closet could have hidden behind some clothes in the walk-in closet of our newlywed house, and we wouldn’t have noticed it was there. We’ve learned a lot about what distinguishes homes of different decades, and how what is considered standard changes over the years. As a newlywed couple, we combined two complete households’ worth of furniture, housewares, and linens. The 1988 house was so big, and had so much built-in storage, that we were able to keep both our couches, both our dining tables, and enough pans and utensils for 3-4 kitchens. We never really had to negotiate about downsizing anything. Four years later, we moved to another city, and the new house was 1/3 smaller. If the move had gone the other direction, starting in the 1972 house, we probably wouldn’t have chosen such a large house. We would have been used to the smaller space, and we would have wondered what anyone would do with an “extra” 500 square feet. If we were looking at buying a new home built in 2015, well, the median is around 2400 square feet! That’s more than 3x bigger than what was, judging by the 5-mile radius around our new house, absolutely ordinary in the 1920s and 1930s. Believe it or not, maybe 20% of the houses around us are smaller than ours. We moved into our new bedroom, and I felt proud that I could fit all my clothes and my hanging shoe racks on a 40” closet rod, 4 inches shorter than my half of the previous closet. What’s missing? My husband’s clothes. They’re all in the office closet, because he often wakes up at 5:30 AM and considerately leaves the room to get dressed. In 1939, our “office” would almost certainly have been a children’s bedroom, and there might have been 2-3 kids in there! (In the late 50s, my mom shared her bedroom with two of her four siblings). My hubby and I would have fit our entire wardrobes on that 40” closet rod, including our coats, because that’s all the clothing we would have had. The shelf where I keep my sweaters and pajamas probably would have held our hatboxes, a suitcase, and perhaps a box of old letters from our courting days. We would not have had our current California King mattress, because they date to the 1960s, so there would have been room for another dresser that we don’t have, or perhaps a vanity table. What else would have been in our 1939 house, if we were 1939 people? We would have had a radio cabinet in the living room, probably with a built-in turntable. We would each have had an easy chair, and next to mine would have been a workbasket for my knitting. Every night, I would darn socks, sew buttons, or work on a sweater or blanket while we listened to The Benny Goodman Show. I might have a sewing machine set up in the corner, or I might have my clothes made by a local seamstress, who would come over and hem them right on my body. We would not have had a dishwasher, clothes dryer, or microwave, so more of my time would have been spent hanging our clothes out to dry, ironing, washing dishes, and cooking. I’d be spending upward of 30 hours a week on domestic tasks, instead of six. 1939 happens to be the year that my maternal grandparents were married, so I have built this narrative from family photos and oral history, as well as a certain amount of web research. Part of why we modern folk have a clutter crisis on our hands is that we have easy access to uncountable masses of cheap consumer goods. We have more leisure time than middle class suburbanites could ever have imagined a few generations ago, because machines do all our domestic labor. (Most time use statistics compare today with the 1970’s, which presents us as wage slaves [true] rather than presenting our grandparents as slaves to housework and food preparation). We want to know where we’re supposed to put all our collectibles, fabric hoards, laundry piles, DVDs, CDs, software, electronics, charging cables, shopping bags full of items with the tags still on, and other things that didn’t exist when our homes were built. We would never have been able to afford to buy these things in such volumes in the past. In 1974, my mom got a pocket calculator for a high school graduation gift. It would have cost about $150, or over $700 in 2015 money, for an item that now costs $3, fits on a keychain, and has more functions – IF you don’t just use an app on your phone. A few months ago, my teenage nephew sent out a group text of his Christmas wish list, including a Go Pro, a tablet computer, a PlayStation 4, and a TV for his room. Quod erat demonstrandum. What are the 2015 items we’re having trouble storing in our 1939 house? The eBay stack. My extra ergonomic keyboard. A handy place to charge our two tablets, three smartphones, my Bluetooth headset, my Apple Watch, and my laptop. A half-gallon plastic bucket of Spike’s racquetballs. Some board games. A dry erase board. My husband’s Arduino workbench. We have plenty of room for our kitchen wares, tools, books, and clothes – things that we would have used in 1939 – but the modern stuff doesn’t seem to fit quite as well. It seems that on a society-wide level, our material goods ballooned from the 1980s through the 2000s, and are now starting to contract again. One example is the boom box I bought in the late 90s. It played CDs and cassettes, neither of which category I own any longer, and it was bigger than my gym bag. Its place has been taken by my phone. My clock radio from the same era suffered the same fate, as did my answering machine. What happens is that we hand our obsolete items down, either to younger relatives, yard sale patrons, or Goodwill customers. Eventually, even the poorest households will wind up with things that were expensive and state-of-the-art a couple decades earlier. In 1939, the year our current rental house was built, apartment dwellers would have had one bathroom per floor that they shared with other tenants, while rural people would still have used outhouses. Almost everything on the house rental market is 20-50 years old, meaning what used to be curb-appeal innovations gradually become standard, even for broke people. Thrift stores are full of items of every description that were top of the line a decade or more in the past. Eventually, our more minimal lifestyles will trickle down *cough* and having a house crammed with clutter will seem as weird as it actually is. Minimalism is a stylish luxury commodity in the same way that having a lean, toned Pilates body is. In the past, only the wealthiest of the upper crust could afford to be fat or to have possessions beyond ordinary functional housewares. Most people through most of history did not own a second outfit. Now it’s flipped the other way, and our poor people are the ones who carry the extra weight and the housefuls of extra stuff. Conspicuous non-consumption of particular goods and foods marks the elite. I’ve been talking a lot about my new neighborhood, because we’re so excited to be here, and part of the reason is that it’s a safe, well-manicured (read: expensive) oasis. Most of our new tiny-house neighbors also seem to be quite house-proud. We can brag about how far we are below 1000 square feet, rather than how far we are above 3000 (or 10,000, not all that far down the road from us). Gradually, social comparison will pull more and more people toward a more minimalist lifestyle, in the same aspirational manner that more people have quit smoking, adopted healthier diets, taken up yoga practices, and joined book clubs. More and more of us will show off the way our capsule wardrobes fit so neatly in our vintage closets, just like we would have shown off our increasingly tiny phones a decade ago. We’ll still have to figure out where to put our winter coats, though. Once upon a time, there was a woman who had her own sewing room. She had married her high school sweetheart, and both were talented artists who loved to Make things. Then they had children. The oldest daughter is sixteen. For her entire lifetime, her bedroom closet has been full of her mother’s sewing things. She has never truly had a private space to call her own. Once upon a time, there was a woman who had her own sewing room, complete with a walk-in closet for fabric. Her house was adorable, a decorator’s paradise. You couldn’t tell when the fabric closet got filled. You couldn’t tell when the sewing room itself got filled. You could only tell when the guest room got filled if you were invited upstairs. At some point, you weren’t invited over anymore. Nobody was. She would have been Pinterest royalty, if Pinterest existed in those days. Now? Well, let’s not talk about that. Let’s just say she doesn’t have a sewing room where she lives now. A sewing room is the ultimate fantasy of many people. It’s a bottom-up fantasy, a whimsical solution to the pressing problem of Where Do I Put All This Fabric and Stuff? A top-down fantasy would be more along the lines of What is My Ultimate Fantasy? or, If I Had Only One Wish, What Would It Be? I once wanted a sewing room of my own, but I don’t any longer. Let’s unpack this. I can do pretty much everything. I can knit and crochet. I can draft patterns. I can do various stitches by hand. I still have an antique industrial sewing machine, which I use on vanishingly rare occasions. I can make hats and shoes and socks and mittens that fit. I can do tablet weaving. I can quilt and do cross stitch. I can use a pressure canner. I can use shop tools. I have personally assembled most of the furniture in the house, cut my treadmill desk, made the wall hangings and pot holders and afghans and the beaded lamp, and even put together some of the sequined fruit in my collection. I made all my brother’s drapes. Many of my friends and family members have, at one time or another, had at least one object I made for them. It used to be a huge part of my life. My grandmother once pointed out that she never saw me just sit; if I was sitting, I was working on a project. (That is still true, but the projects are usually ink-based now). If anyone could have used a sewing room, surely it was I. I quit making stuff. Well, more accurately, about ten years ago, I decided to “get caught up” and finish every project I had ever started. After that, I was going to use up all the fabric and materials I had stored. When I was at Fabric and Yarn Zero, the plan was to reevaluate and check out how it felt. Plan A was to conceive of a project, plan it, schedule a day to start working on it, and then go out and acquire the materials when I knew I would be able to complete it in a reasonable time period. That day has not yet come. I am still working on the last project, something I began over ten years ago. I still have fabric that I bought farther back along the timeline than that. I have gotten rid of all the knitting and crochet stuff, the table loom, the inkle loom, the lace bobbins, and one of the sewing machines. There are various other notions and supplies that I still have, even though I know I haven’t touched the stuff in at least the last two houses we have lived in, even though I write about clutter every day. Why? Why do we feel the need to keep SO MANY YEARS’ WORTH OF STUFF? It just might come in handy. Some felt I had bought to make a new hat got cut up and used to fix the motor in the freezer. One of the first rules of clutter is that, soon after I get rid of something, a situation will arise in which I can imagine having used the thing, reinforcing my desire to keep everything even when I have so much I can’t find anything and have to make do without it. (A cluttered sentence for you there). Why else do we keep years’ worth of materials? They are full of bright and shiny POTENTIAL. We remember how much they cost, and it makes us nauseated to think of wasting that money. (Sunk cost fallacy). We get really excited when we look at them. We know we’ll use them as soon as we find other things that go with them well enough to complete the project. We’re afraid that the next time we go to look at materials, suddenly they will all be less attractive than what we bought last time, in spite of the fact that we find everything more attractive each time we go. We see it as our lone vice. We prefer shopping and starting projects to organizing, cleaning up, and completing projects. We feel like we’ve ruined something, and we don’t want to try to fix it, but we also don’t want to throw it away, so we put it aside and start something else. Someone gave it to us, and paradoxically, it’s usually harder to get rid of things we got for free than things we bought. We’ve never thought about it, and we have no idea how many person-hours of labor each bolt or skein represents. We feel guilty about throwing away scraps. (We’ll keep “cabbage” but we won’t eat real cabbage). We have compulsive acquisition issues. A sewing room can represent many things, above and beyond its value as a workstation. Truth be told, many people with functional sewing rooms (or offices) hate working in them, because they are isolated and dimly lit or because the work table faces the wall. The work gets carried out to the couch or dining table or living room floor. A sewing room generally serves as a Room of Requirement. It’s a parallel to the Man Cave. Many suburban couples have a garage and at least one spare bedroom. The garage becomes a wanna-be fantasy shop space, choking with boxes and scattered junk. The spare bedroom becomes a wanna-be sewing room, similarly choked with fabric and yarn and holiday decorations and unopened moving boxes. The sewing room represents conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, a temple to potential artistry, a symbol of female power (similar to handbags and unwearable shoes), the desire for privacy and High Quality Leisure Time, a yearning for respect of our boundaries and our competence, a dream of order and beauty throughout the home, a pocket existing outside of time where we can enter a flow state. My husband and I share an office. We each have our own desk. There is space to spread out a sewing project, if we wanted, but there isn’t space to leave anything out for long. In our 728-square-foot house, there simply isn’t room to have a closet or a stack of bins full of fabric or yarn. It would feel cramped and keep us from getting anything else done. That is a small price to pay for being able to afford to live in our dream neighborhood, where my husband can walk to work every day. If we want to look at carefully folded shelves of different fabrics or mounds of yarn, we can go to the craft store. I don’t need a special room to feel like I have plenty of privacy, leisure, or respect for my personal space. Clothes are the biggest clutter issue for almost everyone I’ve ever worked with. This is really interesting to me, because for most of human history, most people didn’t own a change of clothes. Later, when humankind became comparatively wealthy, people did start having clothing to store, but not much of it. The house I live in was built in 1939, and the bedroom closet rod is 40 inches long. That’s for sharing between two people. I’m talking about the TWENTIETH CENTURY. My grandparents could have bought this house as newlyweds. Our closet problems and laundry problems are very, very, VERY new innovations. I set out to purge my closet for three reasons. 1. My stuff barely fits since our recent move; 2. A postcard came in the mail announcing a charity pickup; 3. January is a fantastic time for such a project, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather is dreary, it gets dark early, everyone is broke, and many of us are still in the Resolutionary frame of mind. What else are we going to do this month? What other month could possibly be better?
I’ve done many closet purges over the years, and I know how overwhelming and draining it can be to make all those decisions. Don’t go it alone! I opened my blinds and put on a cheerful, funny podcast. It’s better to have physical company, another person to kick back with a beverage and offer opinions: thumbs up, thumbs down? Better still, kick back yourself and have the friend hold everything up. The toughest thing about clothing purges is the desire to come up with reasons to keep each item. This is natural. We wouldn’t have it if we hadn’t chosen it or received it as a gift (or shoplifted it, I suppose, in which case, isn’t it time to free yourself from that burden of guilt?). When we’re doing a closet purge, it’s best to focus on reasons to get rid of each item. Make it fight for you. Put it on the witness stand, swear it in, and make it justify its existence. I make you look great! I work well with your other clothes! Anything less is not good enough; even five-star, perfect items sometimes need to go when there are just too many of them. Why do we keep stuff? It doesn’t fit, but we want it to It doesn’t fit, but it’s insurance in case it does again We love the fabric We love the color We love the pattern We love the brand name It was expensive It was a gift and we’re required to keep all gifts until we die, in which case we pack them and take them with us to the afterlife The very thought of making one permanent decision and putting something in a bag feels as exhausting as radiation sickness We need lots and lots and lots and lots of extras because we’re always behind on the laundry, because we have enough clothes to leave five loads on the floor at all times Our clothing size fluctuates dramatically We feel nostalgic about the time when we used to wear it It has costuming potential The closet is big enough, so why not? Two years ago, I had to declare wardrobe bankruptcy. I had lost a bunch of weight, and 80% of my clothes no longer fit. I work at home, but I didn’t even have adequate clothing for that. I went to Goodwill and tried to cobble together a wardrobe that would stay on my body. Then I dropped another size and had to go back. After I had been at my new size for a year, I finally started to trust that I really had figured this stuff out, that it was okay to pay retail and get full value out of new garments. As I set about this closet purge, I know that nothing has been there longer than two years. The goal is to free up enough space for the hangers to slide back and forth, at least a fraction of an inch. I estimate that I need to remove at least four hangers for this to happen. I use wooden hangers, because they give more space for each item to avoid being crumpled and because they don’t tangle together like wire or plastic. Due to their bulk, they also limit how much excess can build up in the closet. I used to pick up a set of 5 every time I went to IKEA. What did I get rid of, and why? There wasn’t anything from my closet purge that I wouldn’t wear right now, depending on weather. Making more space is more important to me than keeping specific things, though, and I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of them. I have a “$1 per wear” guideline. If I pay $10 for something and wear it 10 times, or $50 for something that I wear 50 times, I’m good. The Goodwill clothes mostly cost between $3 and $7. They tend not to match with as many things as the clothes I’m keeping, and they’re not nearly fantastic enough to earn special status as singletons. Two skirts, four dresses, two pairs of shorts, a tank top, a t-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, two sweaters, a cardigan, a pair of old sandals, a pair of dress shoes. One skirt wrinkles badly every time I wash it. One skirt is too loose, getting threadbare, and is a different color scheme from my core wardrobe. One dress is too big; one is too tight in the sleeves; one has a weird pattern I’ve started to dislike; one has simply had its day. One pair of shorts is a bit tight at the hem, compressing my big hamstrings. The other pair of shorts is loose and getting threadbare. The tank top can only be worn over another tank top with a built-in bra. The t-shirt only goes with a couple of things (that are in the purge pile) and I was never completely sold on the color or the neckline. The long-sleeved shirt is a little tight in the bust. One sweater always rides up above my waistline in the back. One sweater has a fussy bustline that always needs adjusting. The cardigan has useless pockets and doesn’t work well with my other clothes. The sandals have already been replaced, and I’m not sure why I still had them. The dress shoes gave me blisters on the top of my foot the last time I wore them. There are some commonalities between some of these garments that I only notice now that they are stacked up together. Everything I had in the aqua, teal, or turquoise range has gotten pulled. It’s not a color I would choose if I were paying retail. Everything in the pile is from Goodwill except the shoes. Six items are here because they don’t fit quite right and are distracting to wear. Six are here because I like the brand; I see them as well-made and durable, even if they aren’t working for me. Eight items only went with something that’s in the pile. Most of these clothes are neutral or pastel. Only two have pockets that would hold my phone. If I were to design my dream wardrobe, none of these things would be in it, neither for color nor fit nor fabric. I won’t miss them. The longer I sit with them, the more they start to look frayed, shabby, undesirable, and mismatched. Clearly they aren’t doing me any favors. Now I do an inventory. What’s left? 9 skirts, 2 shorts, 2 Capri pants, 6 jeans, 13 dresses, 2 jackets, 2 short-sleeved button-down shirts, 4 long-sleeved button-down shirts, 3 sleeveless blouses, one tunic, one gorgeous suit that makes me want to give a speech. 5 sweaters, 7 cardigans. 27 t-shirts, tank tops, and various other tops. One bikini and one beach cover-up. That’s 114 total items, although I think technically the swimming clothes fall into the same category as underwear, pajamas, and workout clothes, i.e., they don’t have to count. Mysteriously, I have 18 bottoms and 52 tops. If everything was interchangeable (which it isn’t), that would multiply out to 949 different combinations of outfit, including dresses, OR, something different every day for 2.6 years. And that doesn’t include accessories. I definitely don’t need everything I have left. Realistically, I should ditch some of the t-shirts and get more pants. Mine is an optimistic, sunny-day, warm weather wardrobe. I’ve removed eight hangers, measuring five inches in total width. Now I can shift things back and forth. I have enough to fill a grocery sack of donations for the charity drive. I’m aware that if I am attracted to any new garments, something I have right now will have to go. I could easily fill a second bag and still have plenty to wear. Mischief managed! I go through my closet every season, and I skim it every time one of these neon postcards comes in the mail announcing a charity pickup. Clothes come and go. They’re not designed to last forever. Our bodies change, the weather changes, people will insist on honoring us with lovely gifts. We have to make room somehow. We remind ourselves that we have plenty to share and that someone else may get some use out of what is no longer useful to us, at this moment. If we save only what fits today, looks great today, and works with all our other clothes today, we’ll still have more than enough. Before I ever learned that ‘minimalist’ referred to a lifestyle as well as a design principle, I started hearing about the trend of taking a complete inventory of one’s personal belongings. There seems to be a sort of contest among avowed minimalists as to who can detach from the most things. Surely a monk who owns nothing but a yellow robe and a begging bowl is the all-time winner of this game? (Although the last time I saw a yellow-robed monk, he had a tote bag with a 16-oz plastic bottle of Coke peeking out…) I have tried taking my own inventory of personal items. It didn’t take long before I realized I should work out a list of must-haves, sort of like the accessories that are stapled to the inside of the display box of a new doll. It’s the middle-aged suburban writer model! She comes with a laptop bag, Scrabble board, battered notebook, parrot carrier, ukulele, and four hula hoops. Wait, that’s the custom version. What I found during my attempt to devise a minimalist inventory checklist was that everyone who has done this… has cheated! The main cheat is to consider an entire category of objects as a single object, namely: BOOKS. You have got to be kidding me. Books are the heaviest and bulkiest aside from furniture! Of course books count as single items! The other pitfall is CLOTHING. Okay, no. I work with hoarding and compulsive acquisition, and I have only ever had one single client who was an exception to the rule that Clothes Will Take Over All Available Space and Then Some. There is a subcategory of minimalist inventories, and that is the cult of the capsule wardrobe. If they can do it, anyone can. If clothing, shoes, coats, and accessories don’t count as separate, individual items, then there is really no point to the exercise of trying to take the inventory in the first place. I think I’ve hit on the problem here. I look at my belongings in the context of having to pack, move, and unpack them on a regular basis. Most of the minimalist thought leaders exclude shared or household items, such as furniture, linens, and housewares. That’s legit: it can be a real minefield when one person in a household becomes enamored of minimalism and tries to drag everyone else into it without the proper emotional adjustment period. From a more nomadic perspective, every toothpick, safety pin, and spare button has to count, because all of it has to be tracked, packed, and stacked. I’ll never win the minimalist inventory game. My “go bag” alone has a few dozen items in it. My backpacking gear fits in a plastic tub, but it also consists of dozens of separate things. I’m not counting my sewing box as “one item” because, well, where does it stop? Do we just limit ourselves to, say, 100 categories? Do we then merge categories to capture everything? How about just calling it “MY STUFF” and leaving it in the singular? My household consists of my husband, a dog, and a parrot. Hubby is better at minimalism than I am in some ways; I have seen him pack his entire work wardrobe into a single suitcase for a three-week international business trip. My minimalist project makes sense to him, and it supports his career development. We’re in it together. We have to be, as we’ve been married 6 years and we’ve already moved together 5 times. Our focus has been more on downsizing furniture and workout equipment – the big stuff. There is a base level of material goods that makes a comfortable home. We’re still in the process of unpacking from our latest move, and it is astonishing how much space is taken up by the blankets, pillows, soup pots, towels, mops, brooms, and hangers. Even such mundane items as a laundry basket and a dish rack start to add bulk and numbers quickly. What counts? What doesn’t count? There are a lot of standard household items that we don’t have. We don’t have a barbecue, a roasting pan, a recliner, a wine rack, a second vehicle, a gaming system, holiday decorations, a stereo, a collection of CDs, or, well, actually we don’t even have a couch right now. Many of our ‘things’ are virtual. Do they count? Does it somehow not count that I have a couple dozen e-books, three movies, and hours of podcasts stored on my phone? How about all those digital photos? We are now entering a twilit world where we can be emotionally involved with things that aren’t there, whilst surrounded by physical things we don’t even notice anymore. My response to this has been to try to be more portable. We are now living in a 728 square foot house that was built in 1939. We love it. It doesn’t feel small at all, perhaps because the ceilings are maybe a foot higher and the ratio of window to wall is higher, too. This place is 53% of the size of our last house. We’re not going to have to get rid of 47% of our stuff, though. The closet rod is 40” long – that’s THREE FEET FOUR INCHES - and all my existing clothes (and two hanging shoe racks) fit on it. We were able to contemplate moving here because we realized that we had a lot of wasted space. Each time we’ve moved, we’ve gotten rid of a certain amount of stuff. Either we had too many redundant spatulas or whatever, a piece of furniture wouldn’t fit the appropriate room, the colors were off, or we realized that time had gone by and we hadn’t been using it. Every time we cull items, we think about our desire to eventually live and work overseas for a few years, which means most of the basic housewares are completely expendable. All our media will eventually be digitized, from books, music, and movies to our few remaining binders and handwritten notes. The important things aren’t things at all. What we want to bring is our marriage, our pets, and our lifestyle. The core of minimalism is to focus on what is most important in life. We are too prone as a society to focus on shopping and interacting with STUFF. Counting every item in the house is a great way to return our focus to STUFF instead of our loved ones, our values, and living our purpose. What I want to be thinking about are enduring topics like: Can I make my husband belly-laugh today? Can I teach my parrot to whistle any part of the Harry Potter theme? Can my dog learn to jump rope? The idea is to live life. We want to break our cultural addiction to debt, driving, staring at screens, overeating, under-sleeping, and clutter. We want to live within our means. We want to have the strongest relationships possible with all the people we care about. We want to find out just how big life can get. There needs to be room for it. We make space by turning away from material things and turning toward one another. Time passing is marked in so many different ways. We remember major events based on their significance in our lives, and after a few years, we may have to rack our brains to figure out the date. My parents used to ask me how old I was, because my birth was one of their mileposts. We remember what car we were driving, whether we were still in school, who was born, who got married, who was still alive. For me, the main milepost is where I was living. This is the 28th house of my adult life. This time, the move closely corresponds with a new year, which is my other favorite time marker. It makes me think of everything that has changed in my life since the last time we moved. When we moved into our now-old house, we had had a challenging year. We were coming to roost after three moves in about seven months, with two job changes to boot. We thought we were going to have to move to Alabama, a place thousands of miles from friends and family, where we knew nobody whosoever, on two weeks’ notice. Somehow, miraculously, my husband secured a better job here in Southern California instead. Our heads were still spinning, and I still had my Alabama road trip spreadsheet on my home screen. My stepdaughter had just started her first semester of college, and we were living as empty nesters for the first time in our marriage. We rented the house at the last minute, signing the papers electronically in the car on the way back to our old-old house. Neither of us had ever lived in such a tight rental market before, and we were bewildered by the way that every house we saw for rent was unavailable later the same day the listing was posted. The pace of life had changed in the same way as the speed of freeway traffic. When we moved in, we had four things on our minds, aside from the matter of our kid’s fresh independence weighing on our hearts.
Losing the extra weight took a bit longer. I had put on 17 pounds in 2013, and my health was in a tailspin. I wasn’t sleeping, I was getting migraines on a weekly basis, and I was having fibromyalgia flare-ups for the first time in over a decade. The stress had caught up to me. I already knew quite well that all my various health issues correlate perfectly with weight gain, and there was nothing in the extra visceral fat that was pleasing or helpful to my life. I could only really fit in two pairs of pants and three shirts, and we couldn’t exactly afford to buy me an entire new wardrobe. I started running again: 38 miles per pound burned. Then I started keeping a food log, and I decided to make “healthy weight for my height” my goal weight. I went on a strict diet for three months. That changed my life. For most of the 2 years since we moved to that house, I have stayed in the 120-125 pound range (I’m 5’4”). I also trained for, and ran, my first marathon. Oh, and I did wind up with a whole new wardrobe, just two sizes smaller instead of two sizes larger. We came to SoCal in a state of chaos. Our family life had been sundered, we were broke, our truck was on its last legs, our dog seemed to be dying, the movers broke some of our stuff, and we were moving into a dumpy little place down the street from a smoke shop, a massage parlor, and a Popeye’s Chicken franchise. Two years later, everything is different. The new vet put our dog on a new medication regimen for his Addison’s disease, and he’s so frisky at 7 that nobody would ever guess he is ill. I have transformed from an overweight, ill, headachy person to a lean marathoner. My husband got promoted into management. I started my coaching business. Our kid has been getting straight A’s. The old truck died with over 200,000 miles on it, and we replaced it with (don’t laugh) a VW Jetta, just in time for the emissions scandal. Moving again is exciting. I can only wonder what will happen in our lives in the next two years, or rather, what we will make happen. Last time, we felt that we were at the mercy of fate. This time, we are moving under our own power, a steamship instead of a storm-tossed sailboat. We are “done” with many of the crises that distracted us last time. “Done” with the health problems and the weight gain. “Done” with the high-maintenance old vehicle. “Done” with parenting; she’s 21, independent, and thriving. “Done” with downsizing and streamlining our stuff. The new house was just remodeled and meticulously detailed by our landlord. There’s nothing for us to fix. In the New Year, in this new home, all there is for us to do is to live and to grow into a bigger life. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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