Stuff breeds!
July 15, 2019
Walking the dogs, I see a lot of open garage doors. Sometimes, there’s a whole living room set up in there. People hang out enjoying the breeze (or the fog). The rest of time, the garages are storage units. Once in a long while, I spot a car parked, and it might be covered with stuff too, but mostly they’re packed to the gills with boxes and piles and more piles.
It’s positively nerve-wracking to see people threading their way through the 6 inch path left between stacks piled right up to the ceiling. It looks like the whole thing is going to come tumbling down and crush them. It very nearly did, last week. The stacks of stuff atop the boat that clearly hasn’t been out on the water for quite some time because it couldn’t possibly be extracted from the garage were teetering precariously as the lady reached for something just beyond her fingertips. I didn’t want to be a creepy stranger though, since we don’t know each other, so I walked on, holding my breath for her.
It made me reflect.
That’s so much time and money sitting there. Time digging through your piles. Money re-buying things you can’t find and probably already have. Energy and psychic energy. I feel like that stuff preys on your mind. It does on mine, at least. Every time I look at something not being used, the money we paid flashes before my eyes: $100 for that bike we don’t use, $200 for that camera lens, $300 for my bike I’ve never ridden. It’s not a huge list but each thing and the associated opportunity cost makes me batty. One Frugal Girl did this to herself on purpose to train herself out of buying things, it really works!
And yet, we all have a tendency to hoard here. I’m as guilty as anyone else, with my obsession with reusing containers (and really nice note cards and really nice pens and a really good zipper pouch). Some of it stems from not having stuff when I was younger, I keep wanting to fill all the needs. Luckily, I also don’t want to feel crushed under the weight of my belongings, wasting time and money on storing things that just sit there moldering away. I want to feel free and enjoy our space. Emphasis on having space. So I embrace that feeling as much as I can.
Generally, we hold the clutter to a static volume so it’s not growing by much but that’s not good enough. Seeing what can happen if we don’t keep working at this decluttering, relentlessly, is a heck of a kick in the pants to get back on it.
I’ve been staring down (errrrr…. ignoring) my own piles in the garage and the office because a) I keep running out of time and energy and b) it’s really hard to get rid of things with a preschooler running around trying to reclaim everything. I need to tackle at least a box a week if I want to get on top of this but I’ve got to squeeze it into daycare hours.
Stress cleaning works well for me and I put it to good use last week: framed photos that I’m not ready to put up were all piled into one place, two boxes were emptied, piles of magazines were recycled, and a handful of books were set aside for donation. There are seven more boxes in the office and seven more boxes in the garage but two boxes and random floor clutter eliminated is progress!
We’re not trying to be totally minimalist. I remember someone tweeting that their house could burn down and they wouldn’t replace most of what they owned. That’s not us or how we think of comfort. We’re striving for a happy medium of having most of the things we need plus a few things we want.
Speaking of wants, S’s career break post brought up my list of wants. I don’t think it’s a secret that despite all the work I do to reduce clutter, I still crave things like a magpie. Not a thieving one. But definitely an avaricious one. It’s nice to get it out of my system because most of these wants boil down to money and having a nearly endless supply of it, set against my desire not to be found buried under my things like the worst episode of hoarders.
- This adorable Captain Marvel tutu dress. I barely ever wear dresses and I have never in my life owned a tutu but here I am, wanting one because this is so awesome. (This only comes in kid’s sizes)
- Refills for my Uni-Ball Signo 207 Retractable Gel Pen, 0.38mm Ultra-Micro Point. They don’t seem to sell refills anywhere. I hate the waste of just tossing pens when they run out of ink.
- A new ultralight laptop.
- A new backpack.
- Two beautiful brightly colored tablecloths for both the regular and expanded-with-a-leaf sizes.
- A water pitcher for serving guests so I don’t have to walk back and forth to the kitchen filling two glasses at a time over and over. I will have already put miles in cooking and serving before we sit down.
- A better organizational set of baskets for my office. I bought several baskets on sale from Michael’s dirt cheap two Christmases ago but they’re not quite enough for my needs once I gave some to JB and the dogs for their toys.
- A digital piano (which isn’t allowed until I have cleared my entire office of all unnecessary things. So maybe never.)
- All of the books: Seanan McGuire’s, Sabaa Tahir’s, Daniel Jose Older’s, Terry Pratchett’s, Cassandra Khaw’s, N.K. Jemisin’s, Nnedi Okarafor’s, Zen Cho’s. All of them. A glorious library full of books that won’t hurt my hands, a hammock, and a fabulous cushy chair in which to read.
- A group vacation with my closest friends where I’m actually on vacation.
- A three week vacation in Japan with people we enjoy and that are good with JB.
I’m working on channeling my wanting for things into only very useful things we’ll use for many years but it needs some work.
I’ve been eyeing storage solutions more and more lately, which probably means we have too much stuff. Ugh. I try really hard to be mindful about not filling up our home with junk, and if there were a way to feasibly rent small items for short amounts of time, I would totally be into that as it’d empty out quite a few of our drawers. I feel a little better comparing our basement storage to our neighbors or to friends– we’re definitely minimal-ish in comparison. And in our defense we definitely use the vast majority of our things with some regularity. Still, the level of consumerism we do engage in / accumulation of stuff we have so far is more than I’d really prefer.
In your defense, I suspect that for all but the most hard core minimalists, some kind of storage solutions are a wise choice. It helps you stay organized so you know what you’ve got and you’re more likely to use things more regularly if they’re easily accessible.
We don’t park in our garage, although our car would fit. Our garage storage is mostly houses seasonal items: patio furniture in the rainy winter, christmas tree & decorations, swamp cooler in the winter. There is indeed some junk and/or things to sell and/or give away. I also have been saving in bins my favorite baby clothes, just in case…
Our house really does limit how much we own. I could own less, for sure, but I don’t have a regular discomfort with the amount of things we own.
Is there a good rotation of your stuff? For me, the garage stuff tends to be stuck / stagnant.
I think I’d be happy with about 30% less stuff, so I’m working on that. Please tell me I should get rid of the one dog costume we own, Sera thinks it’s ridiculous and we don’t dress up as a family!
I’m mostly comfortable with what I own and am holding onto. There are some clothes/blankets I should or want to get rid of, but that’s it. Since about half of my closet is empty, it’s not out of control. Oh, and there are papers that I have to hang onto (tax, house, insurance documentation, etc.), as well as ones that I need to shred. I hate shredding papers.
On the kid side, I think we need about 1/3 fewer stuffed animals, I need to toss the play-dough, and I noticed this weekend that the broken crayon situation is starting to get out of control.
On the husband side, there’s actually a lot that I think he’d say that he needs to get rid of and even more that I wouldn’t mind seeing the back of. We’d have So Much less husband-side stuff if there was no Amazon, no eBay, and no hardware stores.
Half an empty closet sounds fabulous! Our own closet actually doesn’t have that many clothes and I’m striving to keeping it that way.
I’m totally with you on the fewer stuffed animals and broken crayons! JB becomes VERY attached to random stuffed animals really really fast, and we insist that JB use zir broken crayons but the volume is mounting up faster than I can keep up with. Maybe it’s time to figure out how to melt and mold them.
PiC has a fair number of things to get rid of as well, but he has less time in the house to do that purging so it’s a slower process.
I think I can tolerate what we own, but I love the idea of continually owning less. Simply because the less we have, the more efficient I am.
I read your post and am leaving this comment looking at two bottles of wine I’ll never ever drink and aren’t “nice” enough to gift. Hoping they’re gone by the end of the day. Same thing with a glass shelf we don’t need and a handful of other things I just put on Freecycle.
Where does this come from and why do I save it all?!
That sounds like it could be an interesting exercise; tallying up exactly where all these unwanted things came from! Then if I could figure out how to better throttle back our influx of stuff, I wouldn’t get so exhausted clearing out the excess. I know that part of the reason I have too much stuff hanging around is just how much work it takes to sort everything for donating, recycling, etc.
That’s a huge reason for many of us, I think! That’s one reason I try to hold back the influx before it even comes inside the house.
We have two of those bottles, too!! What are you doing with yours? I try to keep the rule that if I can’t remember where all my things came from, I can’t have any more of that thing (notably jewelry).
I love the water pitcher idea! Something very chic about that.
I think I’m mostly ashamed that our storage issues are due to poor organization. We’re just not using our spaces to their fullest potential. The kitchen cabinets is a project we are all dreading. There’s a lot of dead space in the closets.
We don’t have a lot of stuff, but once the landlord gave us basement space, things started creeping up. Beach umbrellas, sporting equipment, board games, my craft supplies. It’s a slippery slope indeed!
No shaming here! There’s a lot we can all do better in the way of organization. I certainly need to do better using the limited space we do have.
Omg, I love this post. Also, we named our cat after Terry Pratchett. And my husband is yearning to get some more of his books.
Terry-cat! I love it. I want ALL the Terry Pratchett books!
We don’t park in our garage, because it is Mr. Sandwich’s woodworking workshop–and he actually uses it! (Oh, and also storage.) We definitely have too much stuff, but what we lack is the energy to sort and purge. Every now and then we do a bit, but it is not enough.
Now that’s a cool reason not to park in the garage!
I have to take it one tiny bit at a time because nothing gets done in a big push around here. This is why it’s taken oh so long to get anywhere with my office!