When my family was relocating a few years ago, we needed to do the prerequisite sprucing-up-and-clearing-out drill before putting our house on the market. At that time, we had a toddler with a lot of toys and baby gear, plus our own snowballing amount of baggage that we'd toted from college to first apartment to next apartment to last apartment to first house. Instead of making the big decisions necessary to clear it out and find new homes for it, we took the quicker route of purchasing eight "junk trunks" of various sizes--big plastic bins that we could stow the stuff in and stack in the basement while the house was on the market.
The junk trunks worked--the house looked remarkably neat and tidy. We had two prospective buyers battling it out, and we sold the house above the asking price after two weeks and a day. (Mind you, this was before the real estate market crashed.) One of the realtors touring the house even took me aside and whispered, "Your closets look like something out of Real Simple magazine--you're the most organized person I've ever seen!"
But in reality, instead of having a clutter-free home, all of that stuff was just tucked away, "out of sight, out of mind." And the junk trunks came with us to our new house, the contents pretty much untouched since. That's the trouble with "deep storage" systems. Once the stuff is in, it rarely comes back out. It becomes a massive undertaking to dig through it all. Also, since you've either forgotten about the stuff or can't easily get to it, you end up buying more of the same stuff to replace it. It's a very slippery slope. So, my advice is to avoid the container stores altogether. Instead of buying more things to contain your stuff (especially big plastic things that take a toll on the environment from cradle to grave), declutter first, and then get off the shopping treadmill.
I read a lot of blog headlines every day, but this recent one from Treehugger has to be my very favorite one ever: "Family Cleans House, Finds Pet Tortoise Missing Since 1982." That's right; for three decades, a family did not deal with their stuff in storage, and one unbelievably resilient tortoise lived to tell about it. We can all collectively shake our heads at the sheer ridiculousness of it, but how many of us also thought (with tiny, nervous voices), "I wonder what's hiding in my closet?"
As I said in My Green Year in Review, this is the year I'm finding new homes for old things. It will be a spring cleaning to end all spring cleanings, with the goal of ending the year with less stuff than I have now. To keep me on track, I'm going back to two of the very best books I've ever read on organizing and decluttering, both by the same author, Cindy Glovinsky (a certified psychotherapist and professional organizer): Making Peace with the Things in Your Life and One Thing at a Time: 100 Simple Ways to Live Clutter-Free Every Day. Although I'm not yet clutterless, Cindy Glovinsky has been a godsend to me, changing the way I view acquiring things and storing them. Probably the most important lesson she taught me was to stop tearing out magazine and newspaper articles, because any of the information I think I'll need someday is available on the internet (just search the publication's online archive). She even cured me of my magazine-buying addiction--I don't subscribe to anything anymore; I get magazines from the library and read newspapers online. This has cut waaaaaay down on papers scattered around the house.
But back to the junk trunks. Glovinsky recommends purging deep storage areas first. Yes, it will be tedious and time-consuming--she even coined the term "Thing Nausea" to describe that feeling you get when you're thoroughly disgusted with all of your stuff--but I will deal with the junk trunks head-on, Thing Nausea and all, and I will conquer them. Because I'm not buying more stuff unless it's essential, and the junk trunks are just a hindrance to being truly clutter-free. I want to have lots of free space...and no hidden tortoises.
Food for thought: What's your Achilles' Heel when it comes to shopping? Shoes? Books? Toys? Can you tame the beast and stop the endless buying cycle? What's your biggest roadblock to getting your house decluttered and organized?
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