A big step

For this would-be hoarder I took a big step today. I took my dresser from my childhood bedroom to the Salvation Army, so it could "bless" a family that really needed it. There is no room for it in my house and it was taking up space in the studio. And I remember during the renovation I clung to that dresser and kept it in the hall, leaving one foot of space to get around it. I clung to my childhood. I couldn't get rid of it because... I might need it some day... if we created a guestroom I could put it there... because I used to sit at it as a teen-ager and mope about how horrible it was to be a teenager. Whoa, all that crazy karma and I still wasn't able until now, at age 55, to give it up.

The hard part was giving it away without the mirror. I looked high and low and in the barn and shed and the mirror was nowhere to be found. I have/had/have this completeness thing, thinking that I can't give something away until I find all the pieces to it. I am having it with one of my son's toy sets. Until I find the scarecrow piece, urgh, it just doesn't feel right to send it away.

But I gave away the dresser. And if the scarecrow doesn't show up soon, the toy is traveling light.

I am half afraid I'm going to end up with nothing in the house except some very nice pillows.

Connelly to all the extraneous "stuff" in my life: Go away!

It started with a friend recommending the book, "Stuff," by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, about compulsive hoarders. I read the book, fascinated, realizing as I got deeper and deeper into the book that I share a lot of the traits of people who fill their houses with piles and piles of stuff.

Emotional attachment to inanimate objects? Check. Collection of art supplies in the belief that the supplies will make me an artist? Check. Ice skates never worn for 25 years? Check. Pieces of papers filling and falling off my bulletin board because I thought if I couldn't see the information I would forget it? Check.

Fortunately over the years I have had several painful but useful "interventions" that kept our house from overflowing. Like after buying "Clearing your Clutter with Feng Shui," when I went an emptied all the stuff from behind all the doors in the house. Like the time Dave and Laura stayed with us and picked up a four year old bouquet of moldy dusty pussy willows and asked if I really really needed to keep them around, and kept asking questions like that. Like the time the contractors took the entire contents of the attic over the garage and put it in the driveway and said, "OK, decide what you're going to keep and what you're going to put in the dumpster. It's gonna rain in three hours.

Since I've read the book I've been making a lot of painful (to me) decisions about things kept "just in case," and things I "might use someday." And clothes that belonged to my grandmother and dresses not worn in 40 years. And eyeglass cases. And bags of t-shirts kept 37 years. And unused frying pans. And empty sketchbooks. And riding boots. Sigh.

I never got to the state where my house was unusable. Looking back, before the feng shui book, I realize my bedroom was cluttered and piled high with stuff on top of the dressers. And bookcases with books too heavy on sagging shelves. Not now, though.

I am learning to look straight at an object and try to evaluate the emotional hold it has over me. I ask what is the likelihood of someone asking me to ride a horse on a moment's notice. Or me taking up a jumprope routine. Or figure skating. I tell myself that if the opportunity truly arises then I will go get another pair. In the meantime my closet is not filled with unused and slightly moldy shoe leather! But the Stuff book says that decision-making is hard for people with these tendencies. And that it's really tiring to think about this stuff. It's true; I am exhausted.

But we are starting the new year with the vow to rid our house of clutter. We even toasted on New Year's Eve with a bottle of wine we had been "hoarding" for our entire marriage. Waiting to drink it when we got married, bought a house, had our first child.... but never got round to it. And by the time we did, although the BV 1962 George Latour private reserve was mildly drinkable (more a port than a cab sav) it had been kept past its usefulness. And that was a shame.

So we toast to a new attitude, for making space in our lives for new adventures, but not new things!

Happy New Year!

June update

I have a feeling this will be the 9-year-old's room before we get to it, but I am making progress on other fronts. I have taken to following http://www.flylady.net/ who is "your personal on-line coach to help you gain control of your house and home."
My husband is amazed at the state of the first floor but he worries it is "unsustainable." He doesn't realize that FLYlady's trick is to get folks to tidy up just 15 minutes at a time. She says you can do anything for 15 minutes. She also says, "If it's fun, it will get done." Check her out; she and her helpers are fun and have lots of great tips.

The 8-year-olds' room

Dare I attempt to declutter my son's room? We had a radical thought that we would completely empty out the room into our "swing space," (the former garage, which is fairly empty) and not put back anything that isn't age-appropriate and really fun.

Office decuttered enough, for now

This took all day. The last 5/8ths of the office. Found some cool things I'd lost for a while.

Feels good to have a clear place to work. Onward!

Step One - The Office

Friday morning found me up at 5:20 vacuuming and starting the tedious and mentally exhausting process of decluttering my office. I took a lot of magazines and paper to the recycling center, spent way too much time reading old term papers, and found an October 2005 Entrepreneur Magazine article about how decluttering your office reenergizes everything. I've cleaned up about 3/8ths of the office, as seen above. This is HARD. I'm not really throwing out everything that needs to be thrown out in all the file folders. I'll save that for deep-declutter later on. But I have only one box under the drafting table, as opposed to five before. I know that a lot of vendor information can be accessed on-line, and that should give me courage to recycle the binders and folders.

One thing that is hard is passing all clutter in the house on the way down to my office. Focusing on just one area when so many are crying out for attention is necessary, but again, for me, hard.

The good news is that the 3/8ths of my office fairly under control feel pretty inspiring.

My first project

I'm doing full disclosure here. This is my home office and it's out of control. Yikes! One of the big things I read in several of these books is the need to pare down and reduce clutter.

From Sarah Susanka: "Our lives have lots of leftover piles and patterns..., and in order to implement the blueprint for your own Not So Big Life these must also be identified and dispatched. There's an amazing amount of wasted space and time in our lives, which, when cleaned out, reveals a lot more room to work with for our life remodeling."

From Karen Kingston: "The word 'clutter' derives from the Middle English word 'clotter,' which means to coagulate -- and that's about as stuck as you can get. Clutter accumulates when energy stagnates and, likewise, energy stagnates when clutter accumulates. So the clutter begins as a symptom of what is happening with you in your life and then becomes part of the problem itself because the more of it you have, the more stagnant energy it attracts to itself."

I have a serious problem here. Hard to work when I can't find the keyboard. Today I will tackle one corner of the office and see what happens.