Category Archives: decluttering

October 14, 2011 · 7:35 AM

Things I Love

Yesterday, I was unloading the dishwasher  in that ho-hum, autopilot fashion that I think most of us employ when tending to mundane tasks.  Grab the cups, stack the plates, sort the silverware…  Grab, grab, stack, stack, sort, sort.  This mug was the last thing I took out of the top rack, and as I set it on the counter, it made me smile.  This mug makes me happy  – seriously, how can you not be happy when you look at the Life is Good guy?? –  and I don’t use it often enough.  It occurred to me as I was looking at this mug that it was one of just a very few items that I’d taken out of the dishwasher that I really loved.  (My striped mugs still fall into the “love” category as well)

As I looked around the kitchen, and then the rest of the house, I started asking myself how much of what I was seeing did I love.    Not what was “nice” or expensive or fancy, but what I really loved… for whatever reason.  It didn’t take me long to realize, “Dang, we accumulated a lot of extra ‘stuff’ again.”  It’s stifling, and suffocating, and I don’t want to live that way anymore.  I want to love what’s in my house.   Now granted, I know I’m not going to love everything.  I don’t jump for joy every time I open a new package of q-tips or kitchen sponges, but I use them.  If it’s not something I – or something else in my family – love OR use, what on earth is it doing in the house?

It’s not the first time I’ve done this either.  I’ve been struck with inspiration before, determined to de-clutter and simplify…. but somehow the extra stuff creeps back in.  I don’t like it.  So, starting today, I’m going to purposely change that. I’m going to streamline.  Simplify.   I’m going to take the next week, or month, or six months or however long it takes and go through my house room by room.  If it’s not loved or used, it goes.  I want my home to be mindfully filled with things that make us happy, not a receptacle for so much accumulated extra stuff that we can’t even find the things we love.  Thankfully the kids are all helpful and discerning when it comes to decluttering as well.  They have no problem parting with old toys and clothes they no longer use, especially when they know they’re going to go to another child who will enjoy them.   They always get into the project once it begins, and are excited by the new, less claustrophobia-inducing house once progress is made.  Tegan, at three, tends to be more of a saver than the others, but who am I to question her love for a stick or a rock or a gum wrapper from 6 months ago?   And the husband is even more supportive than the kids.  Any time I’ve suggested the possibility of less stuff, it’s always been met with a resounding, “Yes.  Throw it away!  Get it out of the house!!”

So I’m gonna.  Now.  And I can’t wait.

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Filed under about me, decluttering, life, perspective, simplifying

June 20, 2011 · 12:51 PM

Messy Monday

If you don’t see me for the next 13 days, it’s because I’m trying to turn this:

Before      

Into this:

After

All. Over. The. House.  Before we leave for vacation.  And without making myself crazy in the process. 

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August 12, 2009 · 3:28 PM

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify


In his book Walden (one of my all-time favorites), Henry David Thoreau says, “Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify, simplify!” With Thoreau in mind, along with my recent and nearly overwhelming sense of being suffocated by stuff, I have been slowly and systematically re-making my house and my life.

Ten years ago, we moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, and faced a long interim with a job but no housing. We eventually found and purchased a house, but of course the time between finding and closing was considerable. We stayed with my sister for awhile, stayed with my parents for awhile, and stayed at a campground for awhile. I’ve been thinking a lot about that tiny little camper we lived in… just us and a 2 year old Spencer. It was an undeniably stressful time (living in a state of limbo is a difficult thing to do), but it’s a time I’m remembering with increasing nostalgia.

It was just so simple. Mike would go off to work in the morning, and I’d have the day to spend with my boy. The camper just had the bare necessities, so it would take 20 seconds to have things clean and ready for the next day. We’d head outside as soon as we ate breakfast, and walk down to the playground. We’d draw in the sand, go down the slide, dawdle by the edge of the road and collect pine cones. We’d make a daily adventure out of going to the post office to get our mail. We’d make a campfire at night, and ate dinner on our laps.

We weren’t bombarded with phone calls and emails, with rooms and rooms of toys and books and old broken things that no one can even identify anymore. We washed our dishes by hand and never had to deal with a dishwasher that malfunctioned more often than it should.

We lived.

Life is good now, but it is so different from the way it was that I hardly recognize that young family in my mind. It’s been clouded with details. And surely this house, SO crowded with all these unnecessary things can’t belong to those same people?? I don’t want to live in a campground again – although I admit to some sincere fantasies about moving us all to a log cabin in the middle of nowhere – but I want to have that feeling again. I want to simplify.

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die Discover that I had not lived.”

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