Gettin' Rid of Stuff~the fine art of downsizing

So, started a thread on this topic as it seems to be a hobby, interest or goal of many out there, judging by the posts in the hobby thread. Hoarding is at an all time high in this country and also in other more developed countries....our possessions threaten to bury us alive.

When I was young it was a rare thing to encounter someone eccentric enough to only have a pathway through their homes and, even then, they were usually elderly and had spent a life collecting newspapers, magazines, or other singular items. Nowadays it just seems like folks hold on to pure, outright junk...mountains and mountains of it...young and old, rich and poor, folks seem to form an extreme attachment to junk of all kinds. It's like a jail, a ball and chain and a lifelong sentence of chaotic surroundings and it keeps one from having the freedom to move, to use all the space in their homes and other buildings, to feel relaxed in their own homes due to feeling overwhelmed by all this STUFF.

What say you? Do you feel like rising up against the huge tide of STUFF and shouting "NO MORE!!" ?

Today my mother and I cleaned out the back room once again. It's become a yearly thing to clear out, clean and organize all these items as these are frequently used items in our daily life~tools, cleaning supplies, small kitchen appliances, canned or otherwise stored foods, canning and cooking pots and pans too big to fit in the kitchen, etc.

Last year was the biggest clearing out of that room(I was more successful in getting her to realize what she could do without and what she actually used) and, also at that time, I took the chance to organize Mom's stuff by using cheaply bought wash pans from the dollar store that I could write upon with a Sharpie, thus identifying where all her stuff could be found on the shelves. This helped her tremendously, as she grows increasingly forgetful as she ages....as do I.

Last year's more thorough clearing out and organizing efforts made this year's cleaning a breeze, with only one small box to go to Good Will, one garden cart full to be taken up to the storage shed, and only one trash bag of items to throw away. Even with only these small changes and also re-organizing things on the shelves, it feels like we have a whole new room. More space, more order, things easily seen and accessed, etc.

LOVE it!!! Now you can see why I list this as one of my hobbies...I LOVE taking something rough, disorderly, dirty or otherwise out of whack and effecting a change to it and thus rendering it something more beautiful, useful and easy to use. It gives me such a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction and that's the reason I love it so. When a person feels pretty helpless to change many things in the chaotic world around us, changing the little things can make one feel less hopeless and discouraged about it all.

Good topic !! When I was young (20s to 40s) material things where very important to me. Kind of he who has the most toys wins.Life is short enjoy the best. I grew up in hard working middle class family, we where far from poor, but things like housing, food and clothing took up much of my parents pay check. There where many times my parents would say we can't afford that now, maybe at another time.My brief try at domestic life I partnered to one of the heirs of the Howard Johnson restaurant chains. I moved into a 5 million dollar house overloooking long Island sound in Westport CT. The house was over 10,000 square feet. It was a amazing house designed by one of the worlds most famous architects Eero Saarinen. He had just built the sears towers then the tallest building in the world. My partner was a very well known antique dealer, who handled super high end 18 century pieces. The best he kept for himself, art and furniture where insured for over 3 million .2 of us lived in this giant house, but we really only used a few rooms most of the time. In the time living there we never used the ball room, the living room only when we had company, dinning room maybe 10 times. All of our living was master bedroom and kitchen some nights relaxing in library. I now live in a house about the size of the living room in old house. no worries about paying unity bills,or up keep. White elephants are expensive to live in. Life was good in Westport , but I don't miss it, much happier in my small homes.

I marked this thread so I can come back to it. Good night!

I am very much a minimalist myself (with the exception of hoarding seeds and art supplies...useful stuff, right!?) Knick-knacks drive me absolutely nuts. Don't really get much into interior decorating either.

Having young children, I've found that friends and relatives when occasionally cleaning out their own stuff send so much junk my way, thinking I either don't have enough junk of my own or perhaps it might be useful for the kids. I "re-gift" so much stuff to Goodwill. LOL My MIL haunts certain ones, so I'll drive several cities over to find one she doesn't visit so things won't find their way back here. Just because it is on sale DOESN'T MEAN YOU HAVE TO BUY IT!

The kids' playroom is in desperate need of decluttering, but I am waiting for a good day to do it (when they're not here and I have the energy to get into it.) Ava is the first grandchild on both sides and the first great-grandchild on 3 of 4 great-grandparents. You can imagine how excessive birthdays and Christmas gifts can get.

DH is gradually chiseling away at his garage. You can walk through there now without losing a toe!

Here are some excellent strategies for decluttering your home--7 Ways to Let Go of Clutter. I have this one printed out.

I do actually plan to donate some of my art supplies to a support group for the mentally ill that one of my husband's relatives works with. They do a lot of crafts as therapy and don't have a lot of money for supplies.

Ooooo, excellent link, Journey!!!! Bookmarked that one for much perusal of the site, looks like it's right down my alley of frugal living.

journey11 said:

Just because it is on sale DOESN'T MEAN YOU HAVE TO BUY IT!

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That's one of the things my mother had to train herself on...she had lived most of her life unable to buy clothing due to just being poor and raising 9 kids, and also being controlled by my dad to the nth degree, so even when she could get clothing, he dictated the choices. After Dad had to go live in a facility, she was able to make her own decisions and she found Good Will....from then on it was love at first sight, over and over, because the clothing were cheap and she had the freedom to buy them.

Just this past year she finally took a good look at her Good Will addiction and started to limit her visits there and also trying to tell herself that, just because it's a great buy and that is a quality piece of clothing that looks great on her, she doesn't really need another pair of pants/shoes/blouse, etc. We used to tease her about renting clothing from Good Will, as she would buy some, have to clean out her closet to make them fit and then she would take what she had cleaned out to Good Will....then repeat that cycle over and over.

She's doing much better with that now...especially after she realized she wore the same handful of outfits over and over anyway and never really used all the good buys she found at GW. Never a dull moment with that woman!

in my neck of the woods, we yardsale or try to do flea markets hoping to rehome unneeded items. we have Good Will and Salvation Army stores but we try to make some of our money back before getting it over to those shops.

when we inherited the house we're in now, my FIL was a hoarder of trash. in 2008 he had gone into the hospital for about a week from a botched simple preventive procedure. my dh and a friend helped to declutter his house then and do some serious repairs to the bathroom before he returned. they pulled out tons of old newspapers, magazines, cookbooks from when my MIL was alive. most of the garbage you saw right away when you stepped into the dining room. the only place in the house sparse of anything was my FIL bedroom. lucky it had a bed, dresser with hardly any clothes in it, and a 1970's metal closet with empty hangers. when he passed in 2011 he had amassed more newspapers, and bags of aluminum cans and tons of other junk. i pulled 6 full 30 gallon trash bags of beer & soda cans out of a corner in the kitchen. i stomped them down to 2 recycling bins (i should have taken them to the metal recyclers for the $$ but i put them on the curb for the recycle truck instead). cleaning out the kitchen we found that the sink was rotting out from him storing every dish he used in the last few weeks before going to the hospital. piles beside the sink of old cast iron pans that never got washed/cleaned out.

he had an upright freezer packed so full of ice from not defrosting it. when we finally got it to defrost we found lots of garbage in there too. lucky we have a metal scrapper friend that took that away when we had it cleaned out. he had 2 washers in the house. 1 was dead the other on it's last legs. the dryer was still good but we didn't need it. the 2nd bathroom upstairs they were using as a closet but also storing more garbage in it. not only did we pull about everything including the kitchen sink from this house but we also pulled a bathroom sink and toilet!

Well, I admit we used to be pretty bad, but we are slowly improving. The house is good, other than a couple over-crowded closets. We lived in a one-room structure while we were slowly building a house. Originally, our house had no basement (on posts) and only a crawl space for an attic, so we filled the one-room structure with......trash, basically (although we called it gardening supplies).

Now it has been cleaned out and become our chicken coop. I stole these photos from my BYC page, but here is the before:


And after:

Great job, @buckabucka!

I have a garden shed to clean out. Some stuff left in there from building it. Some from trash that should be carried to the corner, but (hey, it's easier to do it all once; once in a while) and some 'Garden Supplies' that should be used on the yard and garden or tossed.

I think our grandparents and some older parents grew up during the depression and tend to keep things "just in case" more than others do. I know my daughter tosses anything not used or worn during the past year. I tended to be more like my father when it came to building materials. We have remodeled and built several things with stored materials -- my chicken coop being one example. The cedar siding was stored here for nearly 40 years waiting for the perfect reason to use it.

As with Dad, it seemed as though as soon as something was tossed it was needed, so we kept a lot of things that probably should have been thrown away. Not so much anymore. I realize that we are not likely to be doing the same types of work so I have little problem tossing the once treasured junk when I can.

Until I married, I had no idea that garages were supposed to be places for cars. I had never seen one of Dad's cars sitting comfortably in a garage. Instead, the garage was home to all those "might need someday" materials. While our garage is still a bit overly cluttered, there is room for both cars and some lawn machines, with room to get in, out, and through.

I am hoping soon to get everything out so the garage walls can be finished (we have stored the wall-board in back of the garage for 40 years) and proper storage built. (Probably not this summer anymore, sigh.) DH deserves somewhere to put -- and find -- the tools he uses without losing time to playing hide and seek looking for them.

Since the passing of my grandson, Connor, I have seen clutter in a new light. I agree it is like a ball and chain that holds both body and spirit from flying freely. People, family are important. Things are not. There are few "things" that I have that I could say I love. In that respect, I have a lot yet to get rid of even after years of decluttering room by room. Of course, some of these things are needed for sleeping, sitting, cooking, etc. They are just not loved as things, merely useful items.

Our first home we owned was a major fixer. We rented several roll off dumpsters to clean out the house, and we used a wheelbarrow and scoop shovel to accomplish most of that. It took a few more years and several dozen truckloads to the dump to get the yard cleared. Making the house livable contributed to even more demolition and repair and trips to the dump.
Nothing that was left there was worth anything, it was all junk. I don't know how people can live like that...

Twenty years and 2 kids later we had our own over accumulation, but moving cross country in one rental truck was an excellent way to declutter and reevaluate what was really necessary.

Over a decade later now the clutter has crept up on me. That was going to be my project for winter last year, but I confess I got lazy on it and let it slide.
I love neat and organized, (who doesn't?) and keeping things simple.
That's my goal for this winter, to pare down the stuff we don't use or need.

We did bring stuff home from mom and dads house when we cleaned it out, I think mostly as a way of holding on to them as much as we could, but time has a way of sifting out the meaningful from the merely sentimental and now I think I can let go.

thistlebloom said:

We did bring stuff home from mom and dads house when we cleaned it out, I think mostly as a way of holding on to them as much as we could, but time has a way of sifting out the meaningful from the merely sentimental and now I think I can let go.

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Some of the toughest stuff to declutter at the time. I'm glad you're ready to let some things go. Big question: What would your children (or grandchildren) want to have of grandparents someday. Either you use what you brought home or give it to them now. Very little of my parents things were left and even less would have been important to me.