There’s nothing like visiting people who have lived in the same house for 30 years to make you want to declutter. I came back from visiting family in December and I felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we have.
Right around the first of the year we had a rare day of sunshine and I was like, “I’m going to weed the front yard!” except I had to put something away in the craft closet first. I still don’t really know what happened but all of a sudden I had pulled everything out of the closet. Everything. And then I was bagging up things for the Goodwill (Greg hates garage sales and won’t help if I have one). The decorative vases from my reveal. Old curtains I sewed for the bedroom and will never use. Gone. My friend Joy took all my extra yarn for an after school program she runs.
Then I hit the front hall closet. Can you believe I had more throw pillows in there? We have six million throw pillows in our living room (I think they reproduce while we sleep). I don’t even need extras to recover or repurpose, we have so many.
Next I was raiding my closet, getting rid of all the shoes I never wear. I have a hard time getting rid of clothes and shoes because I buy new ones so infrequently. I’ll stop wearing an item then put it back in rotation two years later. But I think three years without a single wear means I can purge them. Gone.
Next up, books:
I used to buy around 50 books a year. Then I started working in a library and realized that I could get any book in the whole world for free and I never bought a print book again (I still buy books for my Kindle). It was liberating. And now I’ve realized that I don’t need to hang on to all of them. Just the good ones that I might loan out or reread. All those galleys from library conferences have been weeded.
When I first moved into the house I arranged my books by color because that’s what everyone on the Internet was doing. This is a great system if you don’t read your books. If your books are not decorative it’s awful. I swear they almost revoked my librarian rights over this.
Everything is ordered the way I like it now, a combination of author/gender/genre. Anais Nin sits on the shelf with Henry Miller and Proust, the way god intended.
Next on my decluttering list is the garage, but that will need to wait until it warms up. Anybody else purging? I think I might be addicted.
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