I had to develop decluttering strategies out of necessity. I couldn’t go on living the way I’d been living, with stuff (quite literally) spilling out of every cabinet door, covering every surface, and taking up every last available space in my home.
I had to dig my way out, and it was the most unnatural thing I’d ever done. If I’m left to my natural tendencies, clutter builds, and clutter stays.
I didn’t know it was clutter. I thought it was all amazingly useful stuff. I just needed a moment to remember why I’d considered it useful in the moment I brought it through my front (or side or back) door.
And that totally logical thinking was how I ended up in a place where I couldn’t function in my own home. I couldn’t even use my second largest room, and the rooms I could use were difficult to use because I had to work around all sorts of extra and unnecessary things, even though I didn’t realize they were extra and unnecessary.
You want proof I know what it’s like to deal with clutter?
When my husband and I got married, he was thirty-two and I was twenty-five. We’d each lived alone and had whatever we needed to live alone.
Our marriage meant moving into one apartment that was, honestly, pretty large for a newly married couple just starting out. If I remember correctly, it was 960 square feet.
In that 960 square feet we had three dining tables. One formal dining table was in the dining area. Another formal dining table was awkwardly shoved in the teeny-tiny breakfast nook. And the small table (the one that actually made sense for a newlywed couple to have) was in the room we used for storage. The room that had boxes piled to the ceiling.
Eighteen years later I see the ridiculousness of our table situation, but at the time it didn’t seem even a little bit strange. The apartment wasn’t our “real” house. It was temporary. Who knew what kind of home or dining-area situation our future would bring? Why in the world wouldn’t I keep all three tables until we knew what we needed in our real house? We were ready for the future and all the possibilities it could possibly bring.
Even the dining area (that fit one of the full-sized formal dining tables) was cramped. The walls were stacked waist high (at least) with more storage boxes full of totally-useful-in-the-future stuff. Or at least I assumed they were full of useful-in-the-future stuff. I didn’t remember what was inside them.
Then we moved, and the house we moved into was a real house.
As we left that first apartment, my parents hired professional movers as a gift to us. I was about four months pregnant with our first child, and I appreciated their thoughtfulness so much. Those movers had no idea what they were getting into when they agreed to pack up and move our stuff. One of the men spent the entire day in my kitchen. My teeny-tiny kitchen in the apartment where exactly zero formal dinner parties had been held. All day. Just packing dishes.
We moved into our 1,752-square-foot real home from the 960-square-foot apartment and purged huge amounts of excess that we’d never needed. And we still ended up with more stuff than space.
And then I became a stay-at-home mom. As we adjusted to living on a single income, I discovered garage sales and fell head over heels in love with them. I’d been to garage sales before, but I became obsessed. I loved having a way to go shopping for pennies, since pennies were all we could afford to spend on nonnecessities.
With the you-never-know-what-you’ll-find excitement of garage sales and the might-as-well-keep-it-if-there’s-any-chance-I-might-use-it-one-day mentality I already had, our already cluttered home grew more and more cluttered.
When we moved again, and it was time to pack up our 1,752-square-foot house, I reserved the biggest moving truck I could find, which the rental place said could fit the contents of a typical 3,000-square-foot home. We filled that truck completely—and still left behind our entire master bedroom suite, our dining set, a full-sized couch, various other furniture items, and many more boxes of stuff.
We had enough to furnish a rental house and make the house we were selling look livable.
Once that house sold, we rented another moving truck (this time for a 2,000-square-foot house) and filled up our minivan and my mother’s minivan. We brought all that stuff to our 1,400-square-foot rental house. For a year, we lived with all that stuff in that house. The two-car garage was completely full of boxes, and boxes lined every wall of our living area.
But never once did I consider getting rid of the boxes that were making our everyday life difficult. I needed that stuff for the future. Or I might need it for the future.
It was not that I didn’t know I needed to declutter. At the end of our time in our first real house and through our transition year, I started selling on eBay with the exact purpose of getting rid of stuff. Purging was my goal. But I almost immediately started buying things at garage sales so I could sell them on eBay. My purpose shifted from getting rid of stuff to making money.
It wasn’t a slippery slope. It was a landslide. A landslide so fast and violent that my most adamant request for a new home was that it have an eBay room.
You’re right; I should have known. Looking at the past, I can see my severely flawed thought processes, but at the time I couldn’t.
I did not understand that my overabundance of stuff was directly related to my inability to function well in my home. The more stuff I brought into my home, the more out of control it felt. The more out of control my home felt, the more I looked to the future as the time when I’d finally have things figured out. The more I focused on the future instead of the present, the more I justified collecting things I might need one day.
Living for now became my new goal: living in the house we have, in the city where we are, and in the moment when we’re alive.
The cycle continued and increased in force, and I felt increasingly out of control. This ultimately swirled me straight into a place called rock bottom. Rock bottom happened in the home where I live now.
At rock bottom, I stopped bringing stuff in and started getting stuff out. As I got stuff out of my house, living in it became easier. As living in my house became easier, I liked my house more. I didn’t have as much stuff tripping me, blocking my path, and falling out of cabinets on top of me.
And that was when I made a conscious choice to live in the phase of life I was in. Right then. I decided to stop assuming I knew what I’d love to already have in the future.
Living for now became my new goal: living in the house we have, in the city where we are, and in the moment when we’re alive.
This doesn’t mean forgetting the future exists. Living now means giving now preferential treatment over the future or even the past.
Living now means I need a dining table that is consistently (or at least easily) clear of stuff. I am passionate about eating together as a family around the dinner table. It’s one of my core values, and it needs to happen now. If I put that off, my kids will be gone, and the opportunity will be gone as well.
There’s a constant rotation of dishes and newspapers and school projects going onto and off of our table, but that table can’t be the permanent resting place of anything that doesn’t directly contribute to eating dinner as a family. Cute vase, napkin holder, and a salt and pepper set? Great. Printer, paper shredder, and jewelry tree? Nope.
Living now means my kids can easily get dressed for school because the only things in their drawers and closets are clothes that fit. Not clothes they outgrew two years ago or clothes they’ll grow into someday.
Living now means open floor space so my sons can wrestle. It means I can walk to my bathroom in the middle of the night without stubbing a toe. It means my daughter has space to dance around in her room.
I know these things are obvious, and I would have said they were obvious to me too. But I wasn’t living like they were obvious.
I’m telling you my story because I know how hard it is to completely change your thinking about stuff. I also know how hard it is to take advice from someone who doesn’t understand. I have stood in my own home, completely overwhelmed, crying tears of frustration and hopelessness over my inability to deal with the sheer volume of clutter.
I have trialed and I have errored and I have succeeded. I’ve used every imaginable way to get stuff out of my house, and I know what works and what doesn’t. I’ve experienced the joy of an after photo and the agony of another disaster reappearing in that same space. And I’ve decluttered again.
You can totally do this. I did.