In With the New, Out With the Old
Control That Clutter
A Simple Suggestion for Better Living
Back in the 1990s, I was working my first job out of college. I had a co-worker who was in her late fifties. She and her husband were excited about buying a new house. They were empty nesters. All their kids were off to college, and the parents had their lives back. I thought my co-worker was going to say they were downsizing, but no, they were buying a bigger house. For all their stuff. Apparently they had so many belongings they could not bear to discard, the only way forward was to buy a bigger house.
That stayed with me, in that I grew up in a house full of clutter and never understood people who would voluntarily fill their homes with the detritus of a lifetime of acquisition. This is not an outside-looking-in perspective either. My parents were low-key hoarders.
When I was still doing annual Christmas visits to my parents’ house, I used to pick a project and work it just to improve livability, and frequently safety, around the house. My father is a lazy homeowner. He won’t lift a finger around the house, and it shows. He never asked me to do these projects, I just did them to try and help my parents, and to stave off holiday boredom.
One Christmas, my project was to prune all the trees on his property. Another year, I cleaned his stovetop, which was so full of spilt grease that it was a definite fire hazard. One of the more daunting projects I did in about 1990 was to clean out his basement. That was a chore.
That basement was full of crap to the point I didn’t know where to start in sorting through the appalling results of 40 years of never throwing anything away. I went to work first on the old newspapers and current-events magazines. He had news magazines dating back to the 1960s.
I bagged up all the old periodicals. My youngest sister, who was still living there full time, offered to help me drag those bags to the curb. Our dad saw what were were doing and asked what was in the bags. We told him it was those ratty old periodicals. He demanded we put them back in the basement.
My sister and I both rolled our eyes and dragged the bags back to the basement. We didn’t even unpack them, but just threw them in a corner. Dad’s assertion was that those were valuable references, and he never knew when he might need to refer to one of the articles. (What, in case he was suddenly curious about the current status of the Apollo project, the Vietnam War, or how things were going for Dick Nixon’s administration? Jumping Jehoshaphat.)
Anyway, we finished the basement cleaning. My sister took pity on me and pitched in. We got everything boxed up and stacked against the walls. That was the best we could do, given the restriction of not being able to toss anything out
She showed me some stuff even I did not know was still there. In a crawl space behind a false wall, our parents still had the crib, strollers and bassinets, and a wind-up swing, commonly called a Neglect-O-Matic, that I and my siblings used as infants. Those things were rusty, decrepit artifacts of a time before safety standards were a glimmer in Ralph Nader’s eye.
My sister told me the parents planned to give those horrible baby deathtraps to us when we had kids of our own. Neither of us was married at the time, but we were agreed no kid of ours was ever getting anywhere near one of those nightmare contraptions. Still, throwing them away was not going to happen.
I think my parents were always hoarders, and unfortunately, the U.S. Navy gave my dad some unintended implicit validation in his hoarding tendencies. When he did survival training prior to being deployed to Vietnam, his survival instructor impressed that the first rule of desert survival is to never throw anything away. The thinking there is that in a survival situation, you never know what you might need.
Dad latched onto that rule and regurgitated it like a mantra whenever anyone tried to toss anything in the trash. We got so sick of hearing about that damn “First Rule of Desert Survival” (you could hear the caps when he recited it). My sisters and I always muttered under our breath about how that was fine for remote deserts, but we lived in the suburbs.
There was no deterring our dad from a conviction, no matter how stupid. Once his mind was made up, it became gospel and anything that disagreed with that conviction was automatically wrong. We all finally just put up with it and counted the days until we would move out and leave the dragon to his hoard.
Some years later, I was talking to my grandmother on the phone. She relayed an interesting house rule she and my granddad had developed. They had a fairly small house, and did not want to be awash in the accumulated purchases of a lifetime. Their rule was that for anything new that came in, something old had to go out.
I loved that rule then, and still do. I will admit to not following it to the letter, but as a rule of thumb, it has merit. When we lived in Seattle, WA, we experimented with small-space living, opting for a studio apartment. It was mostly a success. There were a couple of inconveniences, mostly relating to poor interior layout, that made that apartment less than optimal. As far as clutter, we never really had problems with that.
Another useful tip I picked up along the way is to routinely reassess whether belongings still have a place in your home. Even something that was once useful may no longer be necessary. My approach is to consider anything that hasn’t been used in over six months has probably outlived its usefulness.
Attachment to material things can be a hard habit to break. Since getting married, we have had several major moves that necessitated getting rid of nearly all our possessions. After about four relocations where we sold off or threw away nearly everything we owned, we have broken that attachment to possessions.
It is a big step to toss all your stuff in a landfill, but also highly satisfying. It is personally validating to realize that where possessions are concerned, we own them, they do not own us. Right now, we are living in a one-bedroom apartment and could probably fit all our belongings in the bed of a pickup truck.
When we moved from Seattle, all our stuff was in the trunk of our MX-5 Miata (think bigger than a breadbox, smaller than two breadboxes). When my parents were the age I am now, they had a two-story house with a large basement, crammed top to bottom, largely with stuff that should have been thrown out years, if not decades, ago. I like this way better.
