Are you wearing steel-toed boots? Because I’m going to step all over your feet.
To be clear, I’m not talking only to crafters. I’m talking to anyone with a hobby: airplane-model-putter-togetherers, paint-by-numbersers, fly-fisherman-thingamabob-makers, knitters, scrapbookers, fishing-reelrepairers, whomever.
And also to be clear, I’m not talking only to people who have designated rooms for such hobbies.
I’m talking to you all. Even those whose unique hobbies I didn’t mention, and even those whose craft room is a corner of their living room.
And to be even clearer, I’m not saying you need a craft room, telling you how to turn a closet into a craft room, or even pointing out the horrors of a craft room and telling you to get rid of yours.
I’m talking about whatever situation you have in the house you’ve got.
Because if there’s something I can assume about the people who relate to my clutter struggles, it’s that they have hobbies. Lots of them. While I was coming up with that list of examples, I asked my followers on social media for examples of hobbies that require supplies. Oh, wow, did I ever get answers. I got hundreds of answers, and most people shared long lists of various hobbies they loved.
This is a common trait among people who struggle with clutter: they’re interesting, and they like interesting stuff.
But before we get to the steps for working through an overwhelming mess in this space, let me ask you an important question: Is your hobby actually your hobby? Is. Not was. And not hope-to-be-one-day-so-I’d-like-to-be-prepared.
Is.
We’ll dive deep in the chapter about Dreams and Decluttering, but for now I’m just asking the question. I want you to think about this, so as we discuss the realities of this space, you’ll already be thinking about whether or not you have the passion to do what needs to be done.
STEP 1: TRASH
Trash is the easiest of the easy stuff.
Grab the black trash bag and start throwing away trash. Paper scraps. Empty packaging. Candy wrappers. Focus first on surfaces, on trash in the visible places. We’re following the Visibility Rule to prioritize rooms, but also within the rooms themselves. The goal is to declutter at the speed of life, and who knows when life will happen and this decluttering project will have to be paused?
STEP 2: EASY STUFF
Start looking for easy stuff. What has an established home somewhere other than where it is? Take it there now. Move things to their decision-free homes within the room or in another part of the house. That’s easy.
STEP 3: DUH CLUTTER
Look for obvious donations: things that make you roll your eyes, shake your head, and wonder aloud why you even have them. Stick those in the Donate Box.
STEP 4: ASK THE DECLUTTERING QUESTIONS
If you start moving something that should be easy and feel a slight hesitation, go ahead and ask yourself the first decluttering question.
Decluttering Question #1: If I Needed This Item, Where Would I Look for It First?
In this room, Decluttering Question #1 is everything, and you need to ask it about any item that’s staying in this room. I’m guessing you put a lot of time into this hobby space when you first established it. You had big daydreams about all the time you’d spend in here and all the amazing things you’d create. Maybe this space was, once upon a time, an organizing project.
There’s a big difference between where you would look for something first, and where you decided it should go during a big organizing project. If you’d first look for colored paper in the accordion file you decoupaged with the wrapping paper from your wedding shower, great. Put the colored paper there.
But if you automatically open the bottom drawer of the desk when you need neon green paper, that is where neon green paper needs to go.
Because that is how the decluttering question works.
You wanted a space for your craft stuff, right? You dreamed it would stay neat and orderly, and make your supplies easy to find, right? “Easy to find” means something’s in the first place you look for it.
This was a major mind-set shift for me. I made a conscious decision to organize my spaces for how we live. I stopped putting things in super-logical, well-thought-out places, and instead put them where we look for them. Once I did this, our spaces functioned better and stayed under control longer.
That’s another plug for just decluttering instead of organizing.
The second decluttering question will come in handy in this room as well.
Decluttering Question #2: If I Needed This Item, Would It Ever Occur to Me That I Already Had One?
Sometimes (lots of times) hobby rooms become rooms of randomness. Cool stuff gets shoved in the hobby room because there isn’t another place for it in the house, or maybe your brain thinks of this as the wouldn’t-that-be-cool room instead of the scrapbooking room.
If there’s no answer to question #1, ask the second question. And like always, if there was no answer to question #1, the answer to question #2 is probably no, you wouldn’t look for it.
Maybe someone gave you everything you need to build designer birdhouses because they know you like to build things. You dumped all the parts in here because birdhouse-building is crafty. But you have no desire to build birdhouses, so you’d never look for birdhouse-building supplies.
Donate them.
Another category of things you’d never look for is maybe-I-could-use-this stuff. Stuff you collected for your jewelry-making hobby. You bought it for cheap or accepted it when a friend was decluttering her craft room even though you knew you’d probably never use it.
Question #2 exists to help you realize that even though you love making bracelets, you never go looking for S-hook clasps because you’re more of a toggle-clasp kind of bracelet maker.
STEP 5: MAKE IT FIT
It’s time to implement the Container Concept. As I’m sure you can predict, the Container Concept is really important in hobby spaces.
Step 5.1: Consolidate
Maybe putting neon green paper in the drawer where you’d look for it made you happy until you realized there were stacks of paper scattered throughout the room. You tried to put them all together, but by the third or fourth deposit, the drawer was full.
That drawer is a container. It’s the limit to how much paper can go inside. And possibly, it’s the limit to how much paper you can keep.
Limiting paper can be painful. Paper is useful, and you’ll probably use all of it eventually.
But if there is more paper than can fit in the drawer, you can’t fit it all in the drawer. Pre-deslobification process, I would have immediately started shoving paper into another drawer. Or come up with a fancy new system, like an accordion file decoupaged with wrapping paper from my wedding gifts.
But we’ve already determined the drawer is where you look first for colored paper.
The three choices I thought were my only choices before I understood the Container Concept:
1. Shove. Keep shoving. Smush and push and close the drawer as far as you can. Stop looking in that general direction unless you absolutely have to.
2. Get on the Internet to learn how organized people store colored paper. Spend money on a fancy paper-organizing system, or give up because I didn’t have money to spend.
3. Fill another drawer, and then another, and then another with colored paper. Feel discouraged because I don’t have the money for another ten-drawer contraption to store the rest. Or if I do have the money, feel discouraged because this room won’t hold another contraption, and I don’t have the money to buy a new house.
Now that I understand the Container Concept, I know my favorite paper goes in the drawer first, and any paper that doesn’t fit in the drawer goes in the Donate Box. The drawer is the container. It limits how much paper I can keep.
I’m not saying I can’t designate another drawer for paper if I really need more paper and there’s another drawer available. But if using another drawer would mean displacing scissors and glue and the hole punch, I have to stop and consider the reality of how much colored paper I actually need.
How much colored paper do I use, and how often do I use it? And am I fully aware of how much I have?
If you know you’ll use every last piece of the multiple jumbo packs you’ve found in random places, and you’ll use them up before you get the urge to grab another jumbo pack, you might need six drawers full of colored paper.
But maybe, just maybe, you don’t.
Maybe consolidating the stacks of colored paper pushed your Reality Check Button. Maybe you realized you grab a new package of colored paper every time you go to the craft store. Part of what you’re doing in the craft room (or fishing-lure room or sports-equipment-storage corner) is clearing the vagueness. You’re eliminating the vague feeling you experience in the paper aisle that makes you grab more paper because you’re not sure how much you already have at home.
That’s one of the best perks of decluttering: awareness of what you have.
You knew you had colored paper, and you even knew where you’d look for it. That’s why you flew through the two decluttering questions.
Step 5.2: Purge Down to the Limits of the Container
“Make It Fit in the Container” is where you’re stuck. You had no idea how much colored paper you had, so buying more made sense. You had no idea because colored paper was spread randomly throughout this room or cabinet or space (or your house). It wasn’t in its container.
But what about now? How do we solve this very real paper dilemma right this second? In this moment? So we feel like the room is actually decluttered when we’re done?
We face reality.
If you consistently go through four packages every single week, you need to keep the paper. Make room for it by clearing other drawers of things you don’t use.
If you have a specific project that requires four packages of paper, and it’s already on your calendar (not a vague maybe-if-that-ever-happened-I’d-be-ready project), you need to keep the paper. But it may not need a second, third, and fourth drawer, because as soon as you’re done decluttering the craft room, you’re going to create the file that needs to be printed and start printing. If that’s your situation, move the paper that won’t fit in the drawer to the printer—now.
But if, just if (and to be clear, this is probably the case for 9.989 out of 10 people who are reading this book right now) you don’t already have plans to use four full packages of colored paper over the next two weeks, stick the extra paper in the Donate Box.
Ouch. I’m mean. And hateful. And a flat-out money waster. And I have zero imagination.
Except that we’re talking about living comfortably within the house you have, and making this space usable. Usable for crafting. Which involves much more than paper.
There has to be a limit to how much paper you can keep because you need room for other supplies, and you need room to work.
That drawer is the limit, whether or not this is perfectly good paper. If that makes you mad, blame the drawer. If it makes you happy, blame me.
Prioritizing Container Space
There’s an entire chapter coming up about decluttering dreams, and in it (spoiler alert), I talk about crafting. And how, as a dreamy, creative type, I think everything creative looks fun. This is a big factor in my clutter issues.
But in this chapter let’s focus on the super-practical, essential-for-making-actual-progress stuff.
If your passion for creativity isn’t completely focused on one hobby, this room (or shelf or space) may not be big enough to store every last thing you’ve collected for the general category of “hobbies.” You’re going to have to prioritize.
Sorry.
We’ve established that the size of your house is the size of your house. If it’s important to you that bedrooms function as bedrooms, the kitchen functions as a kitchen, and the living areas function as living areas, then this space you have available is the limit to the amount of hobby-related paraphernalia you can keep.
Decide which hobbies get priority, starting with the craft/sport/ hobby you do most.
Not that you like most, but that you do most. Not that you wish you did most, but that you actually do the most. And not even the one you spent the most money on, but the one you actively experience either external or internal motivation to do—and then actually do.
It gets space in the container first. It gets priority.
Even if it’s currently spread out all over the surfaces and not put away. If it gets used, it gets a space.
But here’s where some people get confused about the Visibility Rule. Following the Visibility Rule doesn’t mean you can’t clean out a cabinet or a drawer that isn’t visible at first sight. It means your goal has to be to make visible progress. If something out in the open deserves a container but doesn’t have one, you may need to eliminate something that’s been invisible inside a container for years because you never use it.
You’ve already got a trash bag and a Donate Box ready to go. And for the vast majority of those reading, your feet are attached to your legs and ready to take things where you’d look for them first. If you run across a potato masher in the beads-and-baubles drawer, take it to the kitchen. (It could happen.)
Once you identify leather working as the hobby you do on a regular basis, you know leather-working tools (fasteners, wooden hammers, markers, and so on) deserve container space.
Consider which drawers are full of things for hobbies that deserve container space less than the leather-working tools deserve it.
You may have to acknowledge that your crochet supplies haven’t been used in a while. Or ever. Or at least not as often as your leather-working stuff.
Suddenly, the ugly yarn you bought on sale reveals itself as ugly. You knew it was iffy when you bought it, but it was such a good deal. But now that you’re viewing this space as a container, the iffy/ugly yarn is clearly less container worthy than your leather mallets.
So pull out the iffy/ugly yarn and stick it in the Donate Box. Consolidate things that are left until there’s an open drawer for your leather supplies.
Sometimes your eyes will be opened to an entire drawer or shelf full of Not Gonna Happens.
I will never tell anyone that leather working is not a good thing to do, even if leather working requires huge amounts of tools and supplies. Leather working is a perfectly wonderful hobby for anyone who actually works leather.
And that is the key: who actually works leather.
Which hobby are you actually doing? That’s the one that deserves shelf space.
OTHER RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT CRAFT ROOMS AND HOBBY SPACES
When You Only Wish You Had a Hobby Space
What if you have no hobby space but you desperately need one? Maybe you legitimately do your hobby consistently, but you have no place to put the supplies, so they sit in a corner of the dining area or on a card table in the living room. When you need to get the house ready for guests, those supplies and mid-project pieces get shoved somewhere.
Wishing for a house with a craft room doesn’t help. But viewing the house you have as a container does. If your hobby is something you do consistently, it deserves space in your home. Find that space by asking yourself what you’re storing that doesn’t deserve space.
Maybe you’re storing a collection of crystal bowls that you got for your wedding. If you have been married almost twenty years and you’ve never used those bowls, could you donate them and use that cabinet to store the supplies for the hobby you do on a regular basis?
Or are you storing six tubs of baby clothes in the hall closet even though your youngest child outgrew them a decade ago? If you kept only one tub of baby clothes (or none, but I am trying to be nice) with your very favorite baby stuff, could you store your hobby supplies in that closet?
On Maintenance
I know your real question: I can declutter this space, but how do I keep it from going back to Crazytown by next week?
I totally get it. I know how it feels to work so hard on a space and then have it look like a tornado hit it just a few days later.
One of the biggest benefits of just decluttering instead of organizing has been that re-cluttering doesn’t happen as easily or as quickly. When I organized, I still had pretty much the same amount of stuff when I finished as I did when I started. When life happened and it got out of control, the same amount of stuff was out of control, and the mess was, again, everywhere.
But when I just declutter, things are gone from the space. So when life happens and everything is everywhere, there’s still significantly less mess than before. Recovering is simply a matter of putting things away, because I have only things that will fit in the container. Really, this makes life so much simpler.