As we finish our first week of the nomad life, I think it's fair to say that we've passed novice level. The difference between 'nomad' and 'vacationer' is that you're trying to do your regular workweek without your regular home environment as a support system. That infrastructure tends to fade into the background until it is disrupted. What have we learned? Power outlets are far more important to our marriage than we had realized. We're staying in a room with only one wall outlet, two phones, three tablets, a laptop, and a Bluetooth. Plus it took my husband until the fifth day to remember where he put his backup battery. Thank goodness for the travel splitter. Electricity is the new coffee. No matter how carefully you try to prepare and bring all the important stuff with you, there will always be something in storage that you had no idea you would need. This time it was our marriage license. If you can't tell we're married by looking at us, wait twenty minutes. Nobody can fake a long marriage. Sleeping in a bed two sizes smaller than your customary mattress = challenge. Welcome to the game of blanket tug-of-war! Cooking in someone else's kitchen is almost as weird as sharing a bathroom with total strangers. Cooking without access to a fridge takes some imagination. Planning not to have leftovers is a totally different chapter of home economics than our usual methods. We never realized how much we rely on condiments that require refrigeration until now. The only truly hard part is missing our pets, wondering what they are doing, hoping they are sleeping okay. We could probably never be "real," full-time nomads because there's no way we could bring our critters on the road without living in an RV. Our goal in life is less driving, not more, so that isn't going to happen. What do we truly need during an average workweek? Not as much as one would suppose. Work clothes with matching shoes Phones and chargers Shower kits Something fast and easy for breakfast, like protein bars Warm pajamas, at least when you're used to a million blankets at home Our own pillows, because SPOILED As it turns out, the biggest challenge we've had has been access to important documents. They're the only things you can't just replace at the store. Our desktop computer is boxed up in our storage unit, so we've been fortunate that various information we have needed has been available in our cloud storage. We're getting better at this. I had a copy of my previous marriage license, but not the current one. Revision control fail! The desktop is 9 years old now, and we're getting ready to upgrade to a laptop, especially since the hard drive crashed right before the move and we had to pay to get our data backed up. (Then it magically started to work again, go figure). It's weird how much more important our virtual, intangible, non-physical stuff is than our actual stuff-stuff. What about all our stuff??? Living with almost every single thing we own in a storage unit for a week and a half has been an eye-opener. We're supplied with furniture and appliances and housewares, as we're in someone else's home, and it turns out that it doesn't matter so much which bathtub or vacuum cleaner or microwave you have. As long as they're functional, they're basically interchangeable. What about entertainment? Sure, we have some books, DVDs, board games, and sports equipment in storage. It turns out, though, that we haven't missed them at all. Almost everything we do for casual weeknight entertainment involves the internet. As long as we have wifi, we can get almost any book, movie, TV show, or lizard video we could ever want. What the heck is in the rest of the boxes? Take away the furniture, sheets and towels, dishes and pots and pans, cleansers, power strips and extension cords, and all the things that make a house impersonally functional, and it really depends on the person. What makes our home into our home is: Us Our pets Our cooking Our conversations Our taste in art and music Our clothes In a lot of households, those core elements are represented by hundreds or thousands of individual items. A lot of them are decorations, a lot of them are books, a lot of them are clothes, a lot of them are souvenirs and photos. It's not so much the types or categories of things as the quantity of them. How much do we feel we need in the pantry to truly feel nourished and supported at home? How much do we feel we need in the clothes closet (and on the floor) to feel that we truly have options in self-expression? How many books, magazines, etc do we feel we need to truly feel content that we will never be bored? How many of our memories do we feel need to be represented in a physical format? How many projects do we feel we need to have in progress to truly feel that we will never die? How much of our stuff insulates us from uncomfortable emotions? Here are some uncomfortable emotions that come up during the nomad life: Anxiety about misplaced objects Awkwardness around strangers Nervousness about one's habits, noises, and smells bothering others Annoyance when others' habits, noises, and smells bother us Jealousy over scarce space, power outlets, countertops, blankets, etc. Strong desire for more privacy Loneliness Frustration Stress Desire to cook soup and sleep in one's own bed as new ultimate fantasy Mysterious realization that there is nothing to do "around the house" but relax and read When we get the keys and drive the moving van up to our new home, we'll be doing it with a new perspective. We had a yard sale and gave away three carloads of stuff afterward. Already we have a list of more things that won't fit or that we won't need. We're learning with every trip that we really need very little to feel like ourselves, to feel at home in this world. Very little but a larger mattress and more power outlets. Money and no home is an awful lot easier than a home and no money. We're officially nomads right now, which is the technical term for when you have no fixed address but you do have an income, plenty of money, great credit, health insurance, renters insurance, and a strong social network. Without all of those underpinnings of privilege, we're...well, we're homeless. No home and no car. We don't even know what city we'll be living in next month. Society doesn't really know what to do with a pair of university-educated, middle-aged people with no forwarding address. We had trouble putting a hold on our mail. We had trouble renting a storage unit. We had trouble arranging to return our internet equipment. I had trouble getting a check from one of my side gigs. Everything is done through computer forms with required fields these days. This will be totally different a decade from now, as more and more people enter the distributed workforce. It's already started. Young professionals will insist on working remotely, setting their own schedules, being evaluated primarily by their output and results rather than Butt-In-Chair Time, and changing locations on a whim. Why own a car or a house if you don't want to and don't need to? My husband and I decided seven years ago that we wouldn't bother trying to own a house until we retire, if then. We're open to the possibility of coming into a windfall and using it to buy a rental property, but it's not Plan A. Home ownership is like gambling in a casino, except that with real estate the bank, rather than the house, always wins. The first five years of mortgage payments are almost entirely interest. Our bet that we wouldn't stay in one city for a minimum of five years has proven to be prescient. The further we go down this road, the more assured we are of our combined ability to predict trends. We've preserved our ability to cut strings and relocate to better career opportunities, and it's paid off. When we left the dealership where we sold back our car last week, my husband clearly had a moment of panic. It doesn't bother me; I didn't even learn to drive until I was 29 and I only owned a car for three years. I loathe driving. I made an offhand comment that he later told me struck him as profound. "We do this on vacation all the time." It's true. We never rent a car on vacation because we're either backpacking, in a major urban area, or in an historic area of archaeological interest. Finding our way around on mass transit or chatting with cab drivers are things we pay good money to do with our leisure time. That statement made everything click into place for him, and now he's digging it. It stimulates our sense of adventure. Right now we're staying in an Airbnb in an affluent neighborhood. It's much nicer than where we were living before. The houses here have whimsical features like balconies, stained glass, decorative ironwork, three-car garages, and actual turrets. The week is costing us the equivalent of a week's rent in the house we just vacated, minus utilities, plus we don't have to do any chores. This is where privilege confers the magical feeling of vacation on our spurious, temporary case of homelessness. Let's pause a moment while I turn off the flippancy and talk about real homelessness. I have worked at a homeless shelter and for an affiliated transitional housing program, as well as a drug rehab center. I'm familiar with the incredible complexity of the homelessness epidemic, and if I had to pick one social issue I was allowed to care about, this is the one. My husband and I live in a region that has 40,000 homeless people, which is about 1/3 greater than the population of the city where I grew up. There is nothing funny about it. While most people who live on the streets are back in some kind of housing within 3-4 months, those who remain are stuck in a rigged game. Many have jobs and can't earn enough to get back into lodging. The longer you're out sleeping rough, the harder it is to look presentable and the harder it is to compete in the job market. I get so upset about this issue that I sometimes find that my hands are shaking and I am squirting rage tears. Not having somewhere to live could be a mildly interesting challenge, or a fun vacation, or a temporary logistical hiccup. It could be, it could be. It could be if we had the societal will. We throw away 40% of our food production and we have nearly 33 MILLION storage units, every single one of which is big enough for a live human being to sleep under a roof at night. We simply choose to value hyperconsumerism over human lives. When I think of all the dumpsters full of edible food and all the billions of boxes of worthless junk tucked away in climate-controlled environments, while veterans, the elderly, and mentally ill people sleep on sidewalks, it boggles my mind. I can't understand it at all. One is too many. Ahem. Sorry about that. Back to our regularly scheduled possibility thinking, abundance, optimism, and minimalism. So, yeah. My husband and I found the keys to our temporary home in an envelope in the mailbox. The hostess wasn't even home; she just wrote us a note and let us in. Full access. For all she knew, we could be axe murderers or meth dealers. We've never used Airbnb before and have no references or reputation points yet. The payment cleared and my profile photo didn't have horns or facial tattoos, though, so here we are. Trusted and welcomed. Money and no home is a mere blip in the system for us, nothing more than an anecdote. We're the lucky ones. Every time I have a yard sale, I swear I'll never do it again. It tends to take about five years to forget how dumb I think yard sales are, and then I hold another one and remember. I'm in the middle of one right now, so I'll share how it's been going. I have plenty of time, because only one person has come in the last hour and a half. We've made $109 in three and a half hours so far. That works out to $31.14 an hour.* Divide that by two people, why don't you? This has been the first really beautiful sunny spring weekend of the year, and we could be walking our dog at the duck pond, but instead we're both hanging out in the driveway trying to sell our old junk. I put up ads on Craigslist and Nextdoor, plus a couple of big neon poster board signs on the corners near our house. The ads listed roughly the categories of stuff we were selling: tools, housewares, kitchen stuff, games, fabric and crafts. I clearly wrote '10-5' on the signs and put 'please, no early birds' in my ads. This means that people started coming only a little over an hour early instead of 7 AM. By 10:00 there were about eight people lined up at our gate waiting. What this means for you is that you should have price tags on every single item before going to bed the night before your sale. We started setting up at 8:30 and it really wasn't enough time to haul everything out and set up tables. Plus, we were constantly being interrupted by people calling questions from the gate. (They are looking for specific things like furniture, electronic games, baby stuff, or collectibles, and if you don't have what they want, they'll leave). Until I finally shut the garage door, every single person who came wanted to look around in the garage. This is a universal law. People will make insultingly low offers for the stuff you actually use, such as your appliances, vehicles, bikes, tools, camping equipment, and, of course, the folding tables you are using for the sale. Har de har har. I priced almost everything at one dollar. A few larger items were marked at $2 or $3, and my husband priced out his shop tools and garden tools, mostly in the $5 and $10 range. At these prices, some people were still willing to walk away empty-handed even after showing interest. Don't expect to make more than 1970's yard sale prices for your stuff. We had three large boxes marked 'FREE' and most of that stuff is still sitting there. You can hardly give it away. When people make an offer, we say yes. Our motivation for holding a yard sale is that we're moving. We're also (spoiler alert!) getting rid of our car later this week. We didn't want to have to pack, haul, store, and unpack extra boxes of stuff, much less buy the moving boxes for the extra stuff. Anything that anyone buys (or takes away for free) is one less item we have to arrange to discard. I got a message about a church fundraiser for a cause I support, which is building housing in the Third World, and we can drop off anything that's left over afterward. Hopefully there will only be one carload by then. A few things on the tables right now are items that failed to sell on eBay for 99 cents. The thing is, our stuff isn't worth anything. Neither is yours - no offense. Everyone already has four houses' worth of stuff crammed into one house already. Everyone already HAS a kitchen full of stuff they don't use, a garage full of stuff they don't use, and closets full of stuff they don't use - some of which they bought at someone else's yard sale. You almost have to pay people to take it. Material possessions tend to be surrounded by fallacies and cognitive bias. We fall for the 'sunk cost' fallacy every time, paying higher rents to continue to store stuff we don't use because we can't bear to let it go. We think the stuff we own has appreciated but that other people's virtually identical stuff is worth only those 1970s prices. I'll sell you my old coffee mug for $12.99 but I'm not paying more than fifteen cents for yours, buddy. The only thing that is true is that stuff is worth its usefulness to us. If we are not using it, it has zero worth. If we are paying for a storage unit, or for a room in our house that is only used to store junk, then our stuff has a NEGATIVE VALUE. When we found that we would have to pay an extra thousand dollars a month in rent to get a place with a garage in our new city, we understood that it was time to downsize. Even the garage. Even tools. Even stuff we like and use that's in great condition. We're not going to have a yard anymore, not for the foreseeable future, and storage units in our area are going for $200-$300 a month. Eff that. That's our vacation money! We're in a 728-square-foot house already, one that came with a garage and a laundry room. We'll most likely wind up in a little condo or apartment. That's what it's like when you want to live near the beach. Many people would say (even if nobody is asking them) that I COULD NEVER DO THAT. We believe we can't live in a small space because we think our material possessions are actually body parts. They are organs that we need in order to biologically function. We cannot cognitively process the effort of imaging ourselves without our clutter, stuff, and junk. The reality is that we really only need a bed, a couch, a functioning kitchen, some towels, our electronics, and three weeks' worth of clothes for each season. I say 'functioning' kitchen, but most people's kitchens are not functional at all. Rate your home by whether your meal prep, laundry, housework, and financial systems are working in your life, not by how much you think your belongings are 'worth.' Grand finale: Between 2 and 3 PM, only one person came by, and he spent $1. Not a single person came between 3 and 5. We made a total of $146 in 7 hours, for a return of $20.85 an hour, again divided by two people. Considering what we both earn per hour in the marketplace, it was sheer unadulterated lunacy for us to waste our weekend on this kind of activity. Price your free time at double the rate you earn at your job, unless of course you hate having free time. If we had this sale to do over again, for the purpose of having fewer donations to pack into our car, we would have run it from 9 AM to noon and quit after that. We only made $37 in the three hours between 2 and 5. We could have had our sale, dropped off donations, and gone to the park for the rest of the day, or lounged around reading, or really anything other than wishing and hoping someone would come and pay us for our old junk. We did donate a carload of stuff to the charity rummage sale, and no, not everything fit in one load. We'll take another one or two carloads over tomorrow before we get rid of our car. It's time to shift gears from 'how much could we get for this' to 'they need it more than we do.' We're halfway through packing up our house. This house is 728 square feet, with a detached garage and laundry room, meaning it's about half the size of our previous house. We've downsized quite a bit. Now seems like as good a time as any to try out an experiment in organizing our stuff for the move. I have no idea whether this will turn out to be a good idea or not! This is a peek into our thought process and the way we tackle our strategic planning. I had the idea of doing a running inventory as we pack. The idea was to number each box in the notepad app on my phone, with brief notes about the contents. That way we could theoretically track down specific items while we are unpacking. This is more relevant than usual for us during this particular move, because (spoilers) we will be living in The Place of Uncertainty for a week or two, and all of our stuff will be in storage. There is a slight, but real, possibility that we might have to bust into the storage unit in frantic haste, and I'll be darned if I'm going to scramble around untaping 65 boxes to find whatever it might be. (What could such an item be? Something that can't be simply bought at a store or accessed locally in a short enough time frame? A passport or some other vital piece of paperwork maybe. I dunno. The point is just to test out this system). The first issue I had with my box inventory idea was that we would be working independently in different rooms. Our house is small, and it's physically challenging for both of us to be in the same space while any boxes are on the floor. How could we number the boxes without duplicates? I suggested that we split by odd and even numbers. It turns out that there is actually a computer science solution to this! "You start with one and I'll start with 100." "But there are 65 boxes... Yeah, I guess that'll work." [I think he means he'll work backwards from 100, which he doesn't realize, because 'ludicrous' doesn't come naturally to him] We eventually clarify that he is working forward from 100, 101, and so on. Then he comes back and tells me that actually, I should start with Box Zero. I am humoring him because I figure other people will know what he is doing with these arcane things called numbers. The box numbers are written at all three corners on one side, so that they are visible from the top, the front, and the side. They are labeled with the destination room. We have something like five different sizes and shapes of boxes. Most of them stack, which is helpful. While we have been packing and assigning numbers, we have used whatever box was the most appropriate size, so there is no muss or fuss over packing in any kind of order. The boxes are being stacked in the garage staging area by size, and roughly by number. There are two more organizing points still ahead of us. One is the order in which we load the boxes onto the van. The next is the order in which we unload the boxes into the storage unit. Anything we want to go into the front of the storage unit will need to be loaded into the back of the van, meaning it goes on first. It's like a train car going one direction up the track, then reversing and going the other direction on the track. ON with the important stuff, followed by the caboose. OFF with the caboose, followed by the important stuff, right behind the rolling storage unit door. We are working out the next point as we go, which is, How do we know which boxes are important? Answer: ALL of the boxes should be important, or why do we even have them? That is not so helpful from an immediate, Where IS That Thing? standpoint, though. We can go in any of several directions, but first we need to figure out what we need on Day One in the new place. This is going to vary depending on your situation - our hypothetical was a family with six kids and three dogs, and the kids need to be ready for school first thing Monday morning. Beds and bedding. Towels and shower stuff. Clothes and shoes. First aid/meds. Pet supplies. Breakfast box with bowls and spoons. Dish soap, sponge, and dish towels. Toilet paper and hand soap. We have solved most of this for our own move using kanban. We can tell at a glance where our most important stuff is, because it's visually distinct from the packing boxes. We have both already packed our clothes for the week in our suitcases. My husband has his work backpack with important papers for his first day at his new job. I have my own work bag, a bag for shower stuff, and another bag I am referring to as my pacifier. It's full of books and will undoubtedly have more random, useless stuff in it by moving day, none of which I will use at all, but at least I won't be climbing the walls wishing I had it. There will be a few VIP boxes for our first day in the new place. The bedding - the comforters and pillows are in two of the three wardrobe boxes, which are much larger than the other boxes. We will want to mark the box with the bowls and plates, and another box for sheets and towels. We can do this with any combination of colored ink, stickers, a symbol (like a star), stacking them in a separate staging area, or possibly with box tape designed for the purpose. (There are sets marked with the different rooms of the house, like Caution tape, which frankly some houses could use throughout the year...) When it comes down to it, almost everything we own is either there because we have room for it, or for comfort. We aren't really emotionally attached to such things as laundry detergent or ice cube trays, we just use them. The more often we move our household from place to place, the fewer the things we want around us, because it turns out that there is a shocking amount of stuff to haul, even for basic comfort purposes! Sheets and towels and plates and bowls and forks and spoons and spatulas and extension cords and cleansers and sponges and mops and brooms and a dish rack and a fan and dog shampoo and ye gads, where did all this stuff come from?? Usually we are unpacked and settled in within about three weeks after a move. This means no lingering cardboard boxes. No MISC (the dreaded misc). This time, so far, looks like the most organized we have been, and this is our sixth move together. Soon we will find out whether this system has any merit, and whether we can unpack in any less time. Garages are for cars. Did you know that? Weird, huh? That's like someone claiming that dining tables were originally designed for eating meals. It's bananas. About two-thirds of people who have a garage don't park their car inside it, and 90% say they only would if someone had tried to steal their car. It's funny that other than the house itself, most people's most valuable possession is their car, and yet we leave them outside while making room for boxes of old high school yearbooks and holiday decorations we bought for 99 cents. In our case, there are two reasons we don't park in the garage: 1. Someone carpeted it, and 2. We no longer have a car. That's a post for a different day. Let's go back to the process of packing and moving all the junk from a garage, since it's a near-universal conundrum. Why do we have so much stuff and not enough room for it? What is it about garages that makes them like the Bermuda Triangle of clutter? Garages are not fun places to work most of the time. Usually they are not insulated, which means they are too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. Usually they are very dim. Usually they have lots of holes to the outside, which you can plainly see if you stand in your garage during daylight with the doors closed and the lights turned off. That means bugs, spiders, and sometimes bigger and creepier things. These are reasons not to go in the garage at all, much less to use it as a fabulous workspace. If you wonder whatever happened to your former passion for a neglected hobby, the poor ergonomics of your garage may be to blame. It's definitely one of the major reasons any given garage is a mess. Who would want to go out there, for even an hour, and when would they do it? There is never a good time for space clearing. It's never going to be fun and you're never going to be in the mood. It's just a question of having a pressing reason to do it by a certain deadline - such as relocating. Every garage is a tangle. Ours is like many - a combination space. It had: A workbench Shop tools Camping equipment A laundry area Old paints and brushes Gardening equipment Canning equipment Winter storage (coats, scarves, gloves, etc) Bicycles and a unicycle and a tub of motorcycle gear Hula hoops Extra chairs A dartboard Lots of shelving units of different styles and materials Stuff the previous tenants and the owner left here Holiday decorations Boxes of memorabilia Yard sale/eBay stuff Electronics recycling Empty shipping boxes Empty product boxes we planned to reuse Dead projects Stuff that didn't fit in the house (like a too-big dry erase board) Artwork we weren't decorating with in this house Stuff we didn't know what to do with Stuff that needed repairs Materials that We Might Need One Day Stuff we didn't know how to get rid of I see the garage as a Man Cave, even though I can and do use shop tools, fix things, build things, and do garagey-type stuff. I just never had my own personal garage until after my husband and I got married, and I'm used to doing my projects on the back porch or wherever. My husband is an engineer and ex-logger - think TOOLS and lots of them - and he has a lot of gear-intensive hobbies like hockey that demand storage space. I figured I would give him the garage as a hands-off interference-free zone. That's why I had no sympathy when it came time to sort the garage. Have fun with that, babe! [runs off chortling] I told him I would do the kitchen. I'm sweet that way. The first thing we did was to hold a one-day yard sale. There was zero traffic for most of the day. We only sold maybe 1/3 of what we put out, and we only made $146. That was it for us. We had already tried and failed to sell a bunch of stuff on eBay, even for 99 cents. We decided that it simply wasn't worth any more of our time to try to extract a few dollars from the things we had left. We made up our minds to donate everything to a charity rummage sale, and we did that in two trips. These included a few items we had already moved as many as six times, without using them, and we know we won't be missing them. Little emotion here other than relief, and feeling silly that we hadn't done it sooner. The second thing was to make some strategic decisions, like so: Are we going to have a garage in our next place? In perpetuity? What about a storage unit? For how long? Where? How are we going to spend our time at the new place? After that? What hobbies are important to us now, versus 10 or 20 years ago? We're moving to the beach (spoilers) and almost none of the listings we have seen include garages. It also turns out that the nearest storage facilities are in other towns entirely. Also, (more spoilers) we just got rid of our car. So if we kept too much stuff, we would find ourselves in the position of having to pay $200-$300 a month to store things, take a cab to go to the next town (and back) to get stuff (assuming it would fit in a cab), and do it again to put it back. The prices were shocking. When we listed off what we thought we might not be able to fit in a small home, it seemed dumb to pay to store it. Backpacking gear (fits in a closet, because we carry it all on our backs) Tools (what if a pipe bursts late at night?) Guest bedding (for those prices, we'll get you a hotel) Stuff we never use - what, with our vacation money? I think not Due to our major lifestyle policy changes and strategic decisions, we knew we could get rid of whole categories of things. Gardening tools. Automotive repair tools. Shop tools. The ladder. Materials for things we "might make one day" that we never did in our last eight years together. We estimated the replacement prices for these items, some of which we sold, and realized that it wasn't a big deal to us to buy a new one if we needed to. It would be less expensive to replace ALL OF IT than to rent a storage unit for one year. Six months, actually. Storage units are emotional decisions, not logistical decisions, and almost never financial decisions. We looked at our hobbies and our new region, and realized there were certain things we would probably do more often. My husband has a wetsuit I've never known him to wear once, but he used to, and now it's plausible that he will again. It still fits. We have bikes that we haven't ridden together in a long time, but now that we are car-free they are suddenly relevant. The dog has a floaty vest that my dad got him, and suddenly that seems like a really key item to have. Thanks, Dad! The poor hubby set to work. I helped to come in from time to time and bring mental bandwidth. There were some decisions that felt a bit overwhelming. Decision fatigue leads almost immediately to physical fatigue, and sorting through MISC (the dreaded misc) can feel like trudging through waist-deep molasses. We got through it, though, and found that we had enough room to set up a staging area for our moving boxes. It took about three hours. Imagine having less in the garage than you do in your house. Imagine being able to use your garage space - for any purpose at all. Imagine if you actually DID all the aspirational activities that are represented by the clutter in your garage. Imagine if your honey-do list no longer included 'clean the garage' and you could just sleep in every weekend and go to the park instead. Or the beach! The first thing we did when we found out we were moving again was to start sorting the kitchen. Literally. We had a brief conversation, and then we walked into the kitchen together and started opening cabinets. Most people probably would not do this! Moving is different when you've done it so many times that it's made you into a minimalist. This will be our sixth move as a married couple, and we haven't even had our eighth anniversary yet. We've downsized each time. Now, every time we prepare to move again, we just have to ask ourselves, "Have we used this since we moved here?" If not, out it goes. We started with the kitchen because it's the most complicated area of the house. This is true for most people. All those drawers and cupboards are deceptive! We forget that each shelf and each drawer represents its own moving box. Half the stuff is either fragile or sharp. There are a lot of nesting items that don't look like they take up much volume, until they have to be packed, that is. There are also a lot of things with lids, or things that used to have lids, or lids that used to have things. There is a reason why so many horror movies have a scene in which a poltergeist makes all the cupboards open at once and all the utensils fly into the air. Although, a lot of kitchens look like that most days of the week... Most people's kitchens are overwhelming on most days. It is the home of the domestic power struggle. A sink and countertops loaded with dirty dishes, sometimes overflowing onto the floor. Trash, recycling, and compost waiting to go out. A fridge full of spoiling food and scary leftovers. Sometimes there is a backlog of at least three hours' hard work before any packing could even be done. THIS IS RELEVANT. If ever there were an area of the home in need of systems, the kitchen is that place. Lack of a system coupled with clutter and excess is the recipe for disaster. Add in food hoarding, and we're back to the horror movie theme again. We started with the kitchen. We started with the kitchen BECAUSE it's the hardest room in the house. We started with the kitchen because it's the heart of our home. We started at 6 PM, and we were done in time for my husband to cook dinner and wash dishes afterward. By 'done' I mean that the countertops were clear and nobody would have known we were planning to move. All right, what is it that we did? We started with a strategy. What do we do in our kitchen and what stuff do we need? When we first got married, our house was bigger than both our bachelor houses put together. The kitchen was ridiculously huge. We both moved in our full bachelor kitchens, and found that there was still space left over. (I filled it). We also had open shelving in the garage, and a bunch of stuff went out there. Partly because we had so much room and so much kitchen capacity, we entertained a lot. We would have as many as twenty people over every week. We wound up accumulating a lot of serving platters, extra utensils, and extra cutting boards, potato peelers, and the like so that guests could cook with us if they wanted. We had two dining tables and enough chairs for everyone, except for the night we had to put a couple of people on our camping coolers. Then we moved. I was really emotional about wanting to hang onto all our stuff for entertaining. Just because the dining table filled the ENTIRE dining room from wall to door didn't mean we couldn't still have big dinner parties! Then we moved again, and my ten-top table physically would not fit in our house. Not unless we wanted to sleep on it at night, anyway. I had to adjust my emotional attachments. Time went by. I started looking at all this stuff with a more analytical eye. I realized that, even when we had two dozen people one Thanksgiving, I still had more serving containers than we needed. What if I only kept enough so that everything we had was in use? Did I really need three gravy boats? We had the space, and most of these things were stored in high cabinets where I didn't see them on a daily basis, but I let them spin in the back of my mind. When we went into the kitchen preparing for our next move, the emotional homework was already done. I stood on a chair and handed things down to my husband. It went like this: I decided that we didn't need the majority of our plastic food storage containers. He was relieved. We have various shapes and sizes of glass and ceramic baking dishes with lids that can do the job. We also have dozens of Mason jars for canning that can certainly hold leftovers. We realized we didn't need four muffin pans, three corkscrews, seven mismatched ramekins, and various other redundant redundancies. We both pulled out personal items we knew we weren't using, such as my old work Thermos and a coffee mug that was a gift from his ex-wife. I got down all of the big platters and serving dishes I'd decided to let go, plus a vase and other random items. Most of that stuff was there because 1. We had it and 2. It fit there. We decided we needed to replace our knives and the pancake flipper. I pulled out a set of little bowls I use for mise en place, because I have two sets, and he convinced me to keep them because I use them every week. Suddenly we turned around, and the entire counter was covered with stacks of excess kitchen clutter! The weird thing about space clearing in a kitchen is that you can usually remove a truckload of stuff, and it won't look like anything is missing. Our kitchen is definitely still functional - we cook together when we're backpacking, and we can do everything we need to do with a pot, a pocketknife, and a portable propane stove. We still have silly things, like an angel food cake pan and a skull-shaped cookie cutter, that we virtually never use. All we did was to get rid of the 10-20% we knew we didn't use at all. It took 35 minutes. This was the first pass. We do the second pass after we move into a new place, when we are confronted with the configuration of a new kitchen. So far, we've always found at least a few more items that won't fit, and we've never once missed any of them. Our kitchen system works like this: Six large plates, six small plates, six nesting bowls. Eight drinking glasses. A dozen sets of flatware. Teacups. That's all we need for eating meals. All of these items come from matching sets, so they're all the same size for portion control purposes, they nest, and they all fit into one dishwasher load. This is key. When the dishwasher is full, the cupboard is empty. We run it at night and he unloads it first thing in the morning. We have a set of pots and pans, one of each size. When one gets used, it gets washed right after dinner, it sits in the drying rack overnight, and it gets put back in the cupboard the next morning. Weird, huh? Three dishwasher-safe cutting boards. A stack of nesting food storage containers in two sizes, for leftovers, but no more than would fill the freezer. Once the containers are full, something needs to get eaten up or there's nowhere to put any further leftovers. We take turns cooking and cleaning the kitchen. We used to alternate, but recently we agreed to trade nights and do our own cleaning, mostly because I cook much more elaborate dishes and he was getting stuck with more of the cleanup. If there are leftovers, either the other person will cook them on their night, or they will sit until the second night. About once a week, one or the other of us will root around in the fridge and freezer, planning a meal with the goal of finishing off a container of something. A condiment, a leftover, half a cabbage, or whatever is there. We've been on a conscious plan of culling our pantry, where most things aren't replaced after they are used up, because we don't need to have 175 different flavors in our pantry every day of the year. They call it a 'store' because it 'stores' things. The week that we pack and move, we won't cook. We have part of a package of paper plates and bowls hanging around, and we'll use those. We have some compostable forks. I have three days' worth of backpacking meals, and we'll microwave those. We could always go out, but I hate that feeling of having cardboard particles in my hair, being totally exhausted and grubby, and wandering into a restaurant looking like I got trapped in a warehouse overnight. We're moving again. We started with the kitchen, because every other room looks easy in comparison. Guess what? You'll never guess. Actually, you probably will, if you've followed my exploits for more than a year. Surprise, we're moving again! Cue party noisemakers and confetti. This will be our first move in... *counts on fingers*... fourteen and a half months. This is why we're minimalists, and getting to be more so every year. I'll be writing about this process over the next few weeks, as we strategize, pack, move, unpack, and get settled in. We decided not long after we got married that we will probably never own a house. The reason for this is that mortgages are structured in favor of the bank, and the interest and fees are front-loaded. If you aren't completely positive that you'll still be living in the same house at LEAST five years from now, it's financially extremely risky. You are almost guaranteed to lose money. If you're underwater on your home loan and you're forced to sell, you're sunk. We looked at our situation after the crash of 2008, realized that we were unlikely to spend THREE years in one house, much less any longer, and accepted the nomadic life. Now, when my husband gets an enticing job offer, it's a simple matter for us. Accept offer. 2. Give notice to landlord. 3. Order moving boxes. 4. Reserve moving van. 5. Pack. 6. Move to whatever new city has the latest most awesome job opportunity. We did the first four of these steps in about an hour. Two days later, we advertised a yard sale. Now, we're still waiting for the delivery of the moving boxes. We're not sweating it, though, because our house is only 728 square feet. We can fit both our entire wardrobes in a pair of large suitcases. We've scheduled three days to pack so that we can take breaks. I plan to use a stopwatch when we pack each room, so I can get an estimate of how long packing really takes. This is one thing I've never done before. I've counted the number of moving boxes we've used before, which is 100, but I haven't tallied them by room yet. I have a strong suspicion that we won't be needing 100 moving boxes this time. Minimalism is all about strategy. We made a policy decision not to buy a house. We made a policy decision not to spend more than a certain percentage of our income on rent. We made an aesthetic agreement that we prefer small houses, and for comfort, we both prefer putting our bed in the smallest bedroom. When my husband began his job search, we understood that we had about a 5% chance of being able to stay in the same neighborhood. Another of our policy decisions is that it's not worth it to us for him to have a long commute. We'd rather spend one week packing and unpacking than have him sitting on the freeway for five hours or more every week in perpetuity. I married him and I kinda like seeing his face from time to time. The clock started ticking two months out. We started planning meals around what we had in the fridge, freezer, and pantry. Points for every meal that finishes off a container of something. The last time we had professional movers, we learned that they would not take certain items overnight, including food, any kind of liquids or chemicals, explosives, firearms, plants, live animals, and various other items. We wound up with an entire truckload we had to haul ourselves, partly consisting of our suitcases and the crates for our pets, but mostly made up of pantry boxes. I was very embarrassed and annoyed, and made an effort from that point forward to eat it up and buy less. That is another policy decision: a streamlined, minimal pantry. Every time we've moved, we've wound up in a smaller house with a smaller garage and less kitchen storage. We wind up downsizing twice: first, before we move, and second, after we try to unpack in the new place and realize that certain things just won't fit. This will be our sixth move in eight years, and we're much more serious about it this time. Anything we don't use physically, literally, every single day, is under scrutiny. Even some of the things we DO use every day are subject to analysis. We base our plans around our emotional experience of life. What do we do in our living room? We lounge around relaxing with our pets. What do we do in our kitchen? We cook a lot and we like to talk at the dining table. What do we do in our office? We like to work on our passion projects. We plan what we keep in each room based around how we are using the room. Heaps of junk mail, mounds of dirty laundry, stacks of dishes, and piles of random, unsorted stuff are not on any of our lists for Favorite Use of Space. Knowing how we like to spend our time at home is a big help when we start scrolling through pictures of dozens of houses and hundreds of rooms, looking for our new place. The less stuff we have, the smaller a place we can fit in. The smaller our home, the better the neighborhoods we can afford. We have found that our quality of life improves immeasurably when we can live close enough to work for a short commute. That often means fitting in a really small home. It's not just about high rents: a lot of areas don't even have large homes at any price. We learned that a 1500 square foot home in our current city would cost $1000 a month more in rent, and I don't know about you, but... yeah, no. Most people probably would choose the larger house with the longer commute explicitly so that they can keep all their stuff. We're the opposite. Calculate your hourly wage including your commute time, and then go and get your crying pillow, because you're going to need it. At time of writing, we have a moving van to pick up on Friday, a storage unit reserved for our stuff, and a pending Airbnb reservation. What we don't have yet is anywhere to live in April, because WING-IT METHOD. Watch this space for exciting dispatches from the Place of Uncertainty! People are coming over. Quick! Hide the evidence! ‘Scoop and stuff’ is one of the classic techniques that my people use when they are working hard to make a good impression. It’s a gesture of hospitality. Hospitality infused with large quantities of shame, dread, and embarrassment, perhaps, but hospitality nonetheless. Welcome to my humble home, and please tell me if I’ve passed the audition. The way it works is that you cast a wild eye around the room, looking for anything out of place, and then grab it and hide it somewhere. Many people keep their bedroom doors closed for this reason. Others have an office or guest bedroom, or even an official junk room, for this purpose. These locations are always intended to be temporary, in a way that attics, basements, and garages are not. The stuff itself may linger for years upon years, but the aura of intentionality is subtly different. This is part of how specific areas get cluttered. There’s the “deal with it later” area that got out of control. It is superseded by the “deal with it later, but SOONER later” pile. After that comes the “no, really, deal with it later, but not as later as those others” pile. It calls to mind a rubber stamp a former supervisor had made that read EMERGENCY, because URGENT didn’t connote the desired level of urgency. (A true emergency generally involves the need to call 911). In my world, the stamps would read something like ‘anxiety,’ ‘dread,’ ‘frenzy,’ ‘panic,’ and ‘terror.’ It’s like all this misc is covered with venomous spiders or kale or something. That’s the everyday level of anxiety and urgency that drives ‘scoop and stuff.’ Stacks and piles get stuffed into bags or boxes. Several scooped and stuffed bags will get popped into a box. The boxes will get stacked. Piles will collect on top of the boxes. It’s like excavating for fossils. There are often clear date markers in the strata. The next level is when the scooping and stuffing happened during a relocation. People who had no idea what was in any of the various piles or stacks are working as hard as they can to box everything up. They’re “helping.” It’s true that it is helpful to have one’s important papers rescued rather than shredded or burned, which is what most people would like to do with others’ clutter. We have to keep that in mind when we shake the boxes and the Dementors start shifting around and moaning. These bags and boxes don’t scare me. On the contrary! I know from experience that many of the hidden bags are at least half full of:
‘Scoop and stuff’ happens most often in people’s cars. The bags get brought in because there may or may not be important mail in there. As often as not, there is, or at least it was important at some point. Usually it’s only 5-10% of the total volume, though. The next most common areas for ‘scoop and stuff’ are dining tables, kitchen counters, coffee tables, and desks. What we do is to spread out our papers in the hope that it will help give us mental clarity, or at least a definable chronology. The pattern is the same, but the specifics vary from person to person. “I put it somewhere important” – and now, of course, I can’t find it. The “urgent emergency” spot for that individual may be on top of the microwave, in a windowsill, tucked sideways in a bookcase, or on the floor. Other, less urgent items get stuck there because there are only so many hidey-holes in one home. Note that ‘scoop and stuff’ almost always consists of paper. This is because, for a small blip in the history of humanity, paper is cheap and widespread. I don’t think I even need to document the assertion that the people of antiquity did not have problems with paper clutter. Cholera and siege warfare, maybe. Junk mail, no. The main non-paper items that tend to get scooped are clothes, shoes, bags, and dishes. One jacket, one backpack, one pair of boots, and one pizza box can somehow spread themselves across an entire room, yet hiding them is relatively quick and easy. I used to hide dirty dishes in my empty vegetable crisper on occasion. I knew even at the time that it would have been faster to wash them. That frantic feeling does things to us. It makes us feel that time is running out. It keeps us from thinking straight. Clutter hides the emotions that were generated when it was laid down. As we start to excavate, the miasma of anxiety, grief, depression, or confusion wafts out. It’s like mold spores. Body fat does the same thing, storing our negative emotions just so that they can topple us twice. Once in the past when they were stored, the second time when Future Self finally has to deal with them. This is part of why having a partner or coach can help so much. To anyone but the owner, a stack or pile or bag or box is just stuff. Sorting it is simple and obvious. Junk mail in one pile, receipts in another, anything that looks important in another. Anything like a spare hairbrush just gets put away. Suddenly, 80% of the mess is gone. All that’s left are a few scary-looking sealed envelopes, or a stack of important papers such as applications. We bury the things that scare us so we can uneasily pretend to forget them for a while. Our friends and allies aren’t scared, unless they’ve had a papercut to the eyelid like I once did. ‘Scoop and stuff’ is a dead giveaway of a certain thought process. It’s nearly universal among my people. There seems to be something sinister about plastic grocery bags that causes them to collect large amounts of clutter, usually with a “prize inside” – the one seriously important item that makes it necessary to sort the whole bag rather than throw it away. The bags themselves constitute a considerable quantity of clutter. Every time I have done a home visit, there have always been plenty of plastic bags to use for the inevitable thrift store donations. What is this mysterious thought process? It’s simple. There is no structure or plan in place to deal with the daily influx of mail, paperwork, or shopping. (Many of the scooped and stuffed bags contain new things with the tags still on them). The only people who don’t have paper clutter are people who have a formal information management plan. This stuff doesn’t happen automatically. It’s not really hard to set up and maintain that flow of information, but it does require System Two thinking. That is the type of concentration we need to make decisions, do our taxes, book airline tickets, or read instruction manuals. When we’re tired, System Two thinking becomes difficult. We have to kick it in gear. When we’re tired at the end of the day, our brains get lazy. We grab whatever was in the car, whatever was in the mailbox, whatever else we brought home, and we. Set it down. For later. There is never a signal for “later.” If we don’t schedule it, the only time we are signaled that it’s time to handle these items is when something unusual happens. Guests come over, the landlord or a repair person comes over, or we have to move. Depending on how infrequent these occasions are, the piles of “later” can get pretty big. The bigger the piles, the more dread we feel when we think about touching or interacting with them in any way. When a spider appears in the house, most people freak out a little, especially if it shows up in the bedroom late at night and then vanishes. Personally, I carry spiders outside, and if I don’t act fast, my dog goes after them. It’s always interested me that we feel the same level of dread about sorting paper and other clutter, but we don’t feel the same sense of urgency about getting rid of it! Even when it’s obvious that spiders could hide in there. If I had a mass of paper clutter and ‘scoop and stuff’ bags, and I was determined to clear them without help, this is what I would do. I’d set aside a predictable time slot every day to handle all the incoming stuff: shopping bags, mail, those stupid coupon circulars… Then I’d give myself an extra 5 minutes to go through some of the older stuff. “Touch it once.” Pick it up and force myself to make a permanent decision about it before I move on to the next thing. The secret here is that the most important stuff will come back to haunt us again. It catches up to us in the same way that skipped dental cleanings catch up to us. Bill collectors won’t forget, catalogue companies won’t forget, and the IRS definitely never forgets. A replacement notification will come if we lose the first few. What we’re trying to do is to build a solid new habit of processing information as it comes in. Dealing with clutter without a system in place just means it will build up again, and it’ll start the very next day. One of the first things to do is to empty a bag. ‘Scoop and stuff’ items are usually together by sheer coincidence. They just happened to be near each other at the time of scooping. When ordinary stuff turns into misc, by dint of being combined with other ordinary stuff, it has supernatural powers of confusion and emotional darkening. The presence of one paperclip in a stack of paper can make it seem twice as hard to process as it should. What we want to do is to first engage System One thinking, whipping through and categorizing items as quickly as possible, getting rid of things like sticky cough drops as quickly as possible. At least 80% of clutter processing can usually be done relying only on System One thinking. We can come back and do the complicated, high-concentration System Two thinking later, when there’s space to sit and evaluate it. It’s not impossible. There might not even be as much as you think there is. There’s nothing wrong or shameful about scooping and stuffing – on the contrary, the habit of feeling shame during ordinary daily activities is what drives the ‘scoop and stuff’ activity. We try to buy ourselves a feeling of peace and tranquility by putting off and delaying certain things, like sorting mail. Then the shame of “never good enough” pops up again when we blame ourselves for that desire for leisure. The interesting thing is that processing stuff as it comes in each day takes less time than trying to hide things – and later search for them – on a regular basis. Having an information processing system means spending a few minutes every day to handle things, and then being able to relax without nagging thoughts or dread. Or bags of junk everywhere. There are three things that are inevitable: death, taxes, and the fact that young people will make a 15-20 year commitment to a pet the minute they get their own place for the first time. I did it. I bought a kitten as a high school graduation gift to myself. Six weeks later, I was on my own, not earning enough to pay for cat food and not able to afford a pet deposit. Jackson was a great cat. He lived past 18, and he was my parents’ responsibility for about 99% of those years. My decision was a classic young person’s mistake: taking on a major commitment without understanding all the ramifications, then dumping it on someone else. Debt is the same way. (We just dump the consequences on Future Self). Pets and debts are two of the biggest strings tying us down when we contemplate travel or relocating for career purposes. We’re planning a trip to Europe right now. Choosing flights and booking tickets are as nothing compared to the stress of finding a reliable pet sitter for our dog and our parrot. It costs $55 a day to board them at the vet in our old city. The local cheapie option is literally a kennel, where all the dogs sit in cages and cry. It’s one rung above “I’m reporting you.” Ms. Feather Pants is simply not welcome at most boarding operations. We think it’s because she’s gray. Blatant discrimination. First World Problems, I know. At least they’re cheaper than kids. Think about it, though: on some of our trips, we’ve paid more to board our animals than we’ve paid for our own hotel accommodations. Sometimes we bring them with us, and then there is a room surcharge. Spike is turning 8 this week, and Noelle will be 18. Hopefully, they have a lot of years left in them; the fluffy lizard might outlive us all. That means we have to continue to plan around them, not just for short trips, but for major moves, as well. If we want to relocate internationally, there are all kinds of complicated, ever-changing regulations regarding permit applications, vaccinations, health certificates, and microchips. It turns out there is such a thing as a “pet passport,” even for parrots. Many countries require a lengthy quarantine, which is a pretty big bummer for lonely little animals. I don’t even want to think about the bill. This is where debt comes in. We’ve reached an interesting cultural moment when many of us regard our pets emotionally in the same way we do family members. Certainly many of us would rather hang out with a creature that bathes with its tongue than with our biological relatives. We refer to our fur babies as fur babies, as kids, as grandchildren, as best friends. So, when they get sick or injured, we’ll pay whatever it takes to give them the best care possible. I’ve seen vet bills rack up thousands of dollars on people’s credit cards even when they are destitute and/or unemployed. We want to give “forever homes” to strays and feral cats, but we don’t care as much about feral men, aka “the homeless.” I know several people who have four cats, and some who have more. (Cat ownership has tripled since the 1970s). A common topic of conversation in my social media feed has to do with people who are forced to move and can’t find a place that will take all their pets. Invariably, their friends urge them to lie. This is part of what raises rents and pet deposits and causes ‘strictly no pets’ policies. Look at it from the perspective of a landlord who has to do an expensive remodel because the whole place is soaked in urine down to the subfloor. Having pets (yard chickens, goats, horses) can seriously restrict where you are allowed to live. Our dog barely meets the 25-lb weight limit imposed by most property managers, and if he could open the cupboard with the dog cookies, he’d surpass it. He’s also not on any lists of restricted breeds; whatever your opinion on those lists, they are indeed up to the landlord to enforce. We once spent an entire day looking at five houses rented by the same property management company, only to learn that Miss Sneaky Beaky counts as an exotic pet. Donkeys were not on the list but parrots were. Back to the listings we went. Rent/mortgage is the single biggest expense for most people. Paying hundreds of dollars in pet deposits over the years can really add up, in the same way that storage units and pay cable can. We see these as fixed, non-negotiable expenses, so we shrug them off. There are going to be many occasions when that $250 or $500 lump sum would have been really helpful. We don’t have it, thanks to our furry little ingrates, so we put unanticipated emergency expenses on the credit card. The credit card. The card-zuh. Plural. Most of us don’t know exactly what we owe to the last penny, because we don’t want to know. There is only one thing as scary as an accurate, up-to-date balance sheet, and that is stepping on a scale and finding out how much we weigh. We never stop to calculate how much we’ll pay in interest for every pizza, set of new tires, or vet bill that we charge. I did, and that’s part of why I paid off all my consumer debt 10 years ago. I still owe on my student loan (at 40), and that’s bad enough, but at least that is fixed at 3.2%. Many of us are travelers at heart. We want to see this big old world. We’d go right now, if it weren’t for two things: who’d watch our critters and how we’d pay for it all. It is absolutely possible to finance the travel dream by getting a menial job over there. I know several people who’ve done it; one came back with the experience to vault himself into a new career with a much higher salary. I would have done it myself, after college, when I found myself single, childless, and with no strings. I was going to teach ESL in Japan. I studied Japanese for three years, and I was sure I could pass whatever certifications were necessary to teach English. It turned out, though, that I’d have to pay for my own flight, my visa, and my rent and expenses for the first month. I owed money on two credit cards and I had zero savings. Incidentally, I also had a pet, the dearly departed Mr. Puffy. I put aside my maps and applications and spreadsheets – a whole sheaf of papers – and resolved to get a temp assignment until I had saved enough. The second day on that job, I met the man to whom I am now married. Still haven’t been to Japan. Do it while you’re young. Everyone says that. There was a brief period when I could have, if I’d known what I know now. I found out about a year too late that I could have worked in Europe as a nanny until age 26. If I had the information, if I hadn’t bought that kitten in the pet store window, if I had known how valuable just a couple thousand dollars would have been – I would have done it. I’d probably be well into a career at the UN by now. Now I’m trying to pretend that a two-week vacation is anything like living abroad. I already know I’ll be sound asleep every night before the best nightclubs even open, because I’m middle-aged and dancing all night doesn’t even sound like fun anymore. There are always going to be pets in my life. I probably should have been more intentional about which pets and when, though. When I decided to buy a kitten, it was pure, 100% spontaneous impulse. If I’d given it any thought, I could have waited a year or two, and just spent more time with my cat-mommy friends. It wouldn’t have been the same specific cat, but I’m sure it would have done just as good a job of barfing on my carpet. Our current canine love-ball will probably be our last personal dog. The plan is to pet-sit, volunteer at a shelter, or borrow running buddies when we need dog time. There are lots of ways to enjoy animal companionship. Then there’s the one sitting next to me with the silver feathers and the golden eyes and the ruby-red tail. She requires a multi-generational contingency plan because she could live past 70. That tends to put pet ownership in a different context – the context of retirement planning. If we’re going to give them “forever homes” then we need to think about our debt, our savings, and our ability to give ourselves forever homes. Wherever in the world those homes may be. 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. |
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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