Decluttering: Good For The Soul
You can tell a lot about someone from a quick walk through her home, or even peeking in the window of her car. We surround ourselves with things that we need, things that make us happy, and maybe a few things that we shouldn’t really have. Your Money or Your Life (Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez) recommends carefully listing and assigning a cash value to all of your possessions, an exercise that would require a week off of work for many of us to actually complete. I write this sitting in my living room, which tends to be one of the more presentable rooms in our house. My grandmother’s Emerson piano is the largest item in the room, followed by the couch I inherited from her and reupholstered a few years back. There are four chairs, plus the piano bench. We have a coffee table, a side table, and a third table topped with our Panasonic turntable (a past Father’s Day gift for Mr. Sense) and flanked by two big speakers, which we’ve never cranked all the way up because we want our neighbors to tolerate us. There are four paintings, six art prints, and twelve smaller family photos on bookshelves. Roughly three hundred books and two hundred vinyl records (I just counted one shelf and estimated from there) are distributed between an antique campaign desk, a gifted bookshelf, and some built-ins. Two small plants (plus one fake one), two table lamps, nine coasters, a fireplace grate, a trash can, three quilts, two throw pillows, three candles, three containers of incense, a metronome, a clock, a decent but smallish rug, a leather elephant statue, a glass cake stand, a Longfellow bust and five small classical musician busts, two matryoshka dolls (one traditional from my teenaged trip to Russia, and one Britney Spears novelty), a tambourine and assorted sheet music round out the room.
In the least cluttered room in our home, we have still managed to accumulate several hundred items, representing I-don’t-want-to-know-how-many dollars spent. I love this room and don’t have any plans to make major changes anytime soon, but it certainly makes me pause. Do I need eleven(!) hymnals? Where did all this stuff come from, and how is it impacting my family?
Despite the living room description above, I actually consider myself pretty ruthless when it comes to decluttering. I make frequent Goodwill runs, often bringing furniture I purchased there after college back when I’ve inherited upgrades or failed to resist local antique stores. (Note: I mostly avoid this temptation by traveling by foot or bicycle.) We Marie Kondo’d our house around the beginning of Covid lockdowns. I have a good friend who resells clothing on Poshmark, and she takes all of our hand me downs, donating the unsalable stuff. Mr. Sense has recently listed some of his college era collectibles online, making a decent profit on Magic the Gathering cards and other items that previously lived in our guest room closet. I’m a member of a local Buy Nothing Facebook group, letting us pass along useful things that are no longer needed in our household. Mr. Sense is skilled at turning our excess possessions into extra cash, and I love the light feeling in the house after decluttering without throwing things away, whether or not there’s a monetary return.
Classical wisdom on cleaning and organizing promotes a measured, sustainable approach, but that’s never really been my style. When our house is getting too full, I go on a decluttering rampage, filling up the truck with stuff bound for Goodwill. This doesn’t work for everyone, but I find it satisfying and time effective. No matter what your decluttering style is, I recommend removing the items you’re donating or discarding from the house immediately. Don’t let them pile up near the back door, tempting you to sort through and reevaluate your choices every time you walk past. Put the stuff in the car, drive it away, and don’t go home until it’s gone. Be brutally honest with yourself about the utility of the items you’re taking out, and don’t donate junk that charitable organizations will have to cart to the dump for you. If it’s actual trash, then trash it yourself.
I’m not an expert at selling through Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, but Mr. Sense has had success selling unused items online. He uses strategic pricing and quality photographs to move things along quickly, but he’s also more patient than I am and willing to deal with questions and requests politely (for this reason, he also handles all phone calls to insurance and billing companies). Turning clutter into cash is a double win, allowing us to drag back some of the sunk costs from past shopping trips.
If your tables are so covered in knick knacks that there’s nowhere to set down a drink, that hinders your ability to stick with a frugal lifestyle long term. When we surround ourselves with stuff, we become blind to it. If the shelves in your fridge are so crammed that things almost topple out when you open the door, there’s no way you can remember what you have when you’re standing in the grocery store aisle, so you come home with even more. You miss out on the joy of using up the last dab of sauce from a container. Completely using up a bottle of shampoo or jar of jam instead of abandoning it and starting on a new one part way through is a weirdly satisfying accomplishment. The other day, Mr. Sense and I purchased some personal care and cleaning supplies from a local Renew Refill store, where we brought our empty jars and plastic tubs and filled them back up, allowing us to bring home only the exact items we were out of, sans new containers to replace ones sitting in our trash cans.
Next time you’re sitting in bed, look around. How many books are sitting on your bedside table? Can you see your chair, or is it smothered with throw pillows and shirts that are missing buttons? How would it feel if your room was clean and organized, and how much easier would it be to keep it that way if you eliminated a lot of the stuff that you’ve unconsciously stacked up?
