Uncluttering

The slow spread of “stuff”

/ jenfletcher / 4 Comments

It’s been a busy few days, after a mostly quiet start to our summer.  We’re starting to settle back into normal after a week of Vacation Bible School (meaning very late nights and sleeping-abnormally-late mornings for my kiddos).  As I sat on the sofa recently I looked around and got the distinct impression that things had gotten a little out of control.

I sit and write about “pursuing enough,” and around me “enough” appears to be stealthily multiplying at night.  The dining room table can’t be seen for the piles of legos and lego buckets.  The library books have escaped their basket and appear to be on every single flat surface downstairs.  My son’s steady stream of artwork and papers have crept from the kitchen counter to a small side table in the kitchen to the kitchen table to the dining room….My daughter’s goody bags from VBS have yet to be dealt with, migrating from her place at the table to the kitchen counter and back again.  The worst part, for me, is that I ruined my beautifully clean laundry room closet with one bag of random junk culled from a drawer in my son’s room (I’ll deal with this later).  That one bag will sprout tentacles and my closet will be unusable in a week; I know it.

I’ve spent my downtime this summer reading books like “Simple Country Wisdom” (charming) and “Simplicity Parenting” (amazing), and yet I currently seem to be back to drowning in the swamp of “stuff.”

Here’s the difference, though:  I now know what to do about it.

I think, before, I would spend a lot of time procrastinating about what to do and how to do it because “it’s going to take forever.”  Actually, it takes about fifteen minutes; or ten minutes, or five minutes–however long I want to devote to the problem.  I set a timer and just do it–because even five minutes of uncluttering is an improvement.  Five minutes gets all the library books rounded up and back where they belong.  Five minutes gets all the papers gathered in a single stack (although admittedly it will take another ten to go through them).  The dining table will be reclaimed eventually, ten minutes at a time.  Some things the kids will help with, and some I’ll take care of myself….but it will get done.  I just have to get up and do it.

On that note…..I guess it’s time to get to work.

My Paradox

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I moved the living room furniture last week, pushing the sofa directly in front of our bay window.  (It’s air conditioner season here, so I don’t anticipate opening the window anytime soon.)  I was completely not expecting the enthusiastic response I got from both my kids, who appeared to be positively thrilled with the new arrangement.  My daughter was actually dancing around the room.  “Why?” I finally asked.  “Why do you like the furniture this way?”

“For our nest!!” my daughter announced.  And, yes, by the next afternoon there was a pile behind the sofa, and the spot was officially dubbed their “nest.”

There are no fewer than nine blankets and six pillows back there.  The amount of stuff in that nook, which is maybe eight feet at it’s very widest point (but it’s a bay, so it narrows to about 3 1/2′), looks ridiculous.  (Actually, to be honest, it looks quite comfy.)  All the blankets and pillows are tumbled and tossed together, in a jumble of chaos where the “dividing line” between my kids’ spaces is vaguely discernable by a color change:  one side is mostly blue, one side is mostly pink.  It’s the definition of “excess.”

But….

If one of the high points of my kids’ summer is the ability to make a “nest;” to snuggle in behind the sofa, in the dappled shade of the trees that grow just outside the window, and read a book; or to just hang out together (as they often do)…..then, isn’t that a definition of simplicity?

Back to Basics

/ jenfletcher / 2 Comments

After my post about “How far we’ve come,” I was asked about how I was going to get “back to basics,” what I was going to do to move in the direction of a simpler home.  I could think, immediately, of a few things, but the more I thought about it the more I thought of….so here are some ideas.

First, there’s the obvious:  those moments where I decide that “today I’m going to tackle that drawer…..”  or shelf, or cabinet, etc.  Not an entire closet; just a bite at a time, to make sure I finish what I start.  I’ll go through each item, decide if it’s something we use or if it’s better off blessing someone else, and box or bag up what needs to leave the house.  But that’s only a bit part of the whole.  For lack of a better word, I’m going to call this a “lifestyle adjustment.”  (That sounds really snooty, doesn’t it?  I just mean that there seems to be a need to change how we think about stuff before we can conquer it.)

I also keep brown-paper grocery bags stowed away around the house.  There’s one in our closet, so the minute I try on a shirt I haven’t worn in a while and realize why I haven’t worn it in a while, I can change immediately into something different and add the shirt to the bag.  I keep one in the laundry room closet, so that once I’ve told one of the kids, “Last wearing on those shorts!” (or shirt, or whatever), I can add the item of clothing to the bag the minute it comes out of the wash.  I also have a nice basket on one of the shelves in that closet (about 9×13, and deep), where I put things destined for the thrift store.  This is, admittedly, where fast food toys go to die; but it also holds lots of other things that are preparing to move out the door.

The idea of “one-in-one-out” is gaining ground with the kids; they’ve realized that we’ll take a trip to the used book store if they have a stack of books ready to sell.  This is actually better than one in/one out, since the ratio usually ends up being something like one in/five out; but since they come home with cash they still think they’ve got the better end of the deal.  It’s also become easier with clothing:  we bought you those shoes to replace your worn out ones seems to make a lot of sense to them, and out the trashed ones go.

Finally, though….this is where the “lifestyle adjustment” begins.  I had a friend call recently from a store she was at, offering to pick up water bottles for my kids.  Stainless steel, with the kids’ names on them, on sale for 99 cents.  (99 cents!!)  And I said….no.  Because I know we already have two stainless steel water bottles, one for each kid, plus a Hello Kitty water bottle my daughter kept at school, plus two nice plastic water bottles….you get the idea.  I know we don’t need any more water bottles; regardless of how cool or how cheap (or how thoughtful my friend was).  The reality is, we don’t need a lot of things.  But I have to change my lifestyle; my mindset; my heart about what is a “need” and what is a “want”…..and maybe, at some point, admit where purchasing a “want” might be okay.  I have to change our buying habits; and we weren’t big spenders to begin with.

That’s the hardest part of the process:  the heart change that has to take place to say, “Thank you, Lord, for the abundant blessings you have given me, and now I will be content with that.”  Even better, to say “Thank you, Lord….what would you like me to give away today?  May I be content with less.”

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My first time being asked to write a guest post! The Sort-It blog is great for organizing advice….especially when the organizer answers your questions personally. 😉

Sort It's avatarSort It ~ Professional Organizing for the Toronto Area

I have been following fellow blogger Jen at Pursuing “Enough” for a few months now. She writes candidly about her battle with stuff, and all the fun things that contribute to it, like her kids. After a few comments back and forth on a post I wrote back in February (Can’t Touch This), I asked Jen to share her experience of putting that advice into practice. So, here we go:

I am learning that just because I am on a quest to simplify our family’s life, it doesn’t mean that anyone else is going to go along with it easily.  My son, especially, has such a tenderhearted, sentimental nature; it’s extremely hard—seemingly almost painful—for him to get rid of things.  When he was three, it was precious and charming:  “Mommy!  We can’t get rid of that book!  It has baby remembers all over it!”  Once he hit eight…

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How far we’ve come…..

/ jenfletcher / 2 Comments

I’ve made all my snobby pronouncements about how people waste time on the internet:  too much Facebook, too much Twitter, too much Angry Birds, etc.  I can sit on my high horse and make those comments because I’m rarely spending time on them.  Checking in on Facebook once a day hardly takes over my life, and I’m not on Twitter at all.  I’ve even (gasp!!) never actually played Angry Birds.  Maybe if I did I’d really like it…..but I haven’t bothered to try it yet.

So now I’ll ‘fess up to how I waste my time online.  (And I can really, really waste some time with this.)

I look at houses.

It started out of necessity:  every time we’d move and be, literally, house shopping, I’d hop online and look at houses; sorting which might be a possibility and which we could rule out.  Even after a move, though, and even now when we’re done moving (knock on wood), I love to look at houses.  When I’m driving the kids to school, or coming home from the grocery store, seeing a new “For Sale” sign in a yard prompts an immediate thought of Oh!  I’ll have to look that one up!  The Realtor.com app on my phone should be disabled, and instead I downloaded another local real estate app.  (Because some listings have more photos, that’s why.)  I can spend an embarrassingly long time scrolling through “Nearby Homes For Sale.”  When it was a hundred degrees last summer, I humored myself by looking at houses in Maine.

I have absolutely no pangs of discontent as I look; I’m not dealing with envy or jealousy, or frustration with our own home.  (I like this house so much that my response might be something like, that’s a cool house, but I’d rather have mine.)  I’m not desiring “more” or “better.”  I just like to look at houses.

What’s fun, on occasion, is to pull the map over to where our first home was; to zoom in on our old neighborhood and click to see homes for sale.  Looking through those photos, all those little identical ranch homes…it really does take me back to where we were, years ago.  And I’m torn about the change in our standard of living.

Our first house had three bedrooms and one bath, which would have provided our (then non-existent) kids with their own bedrooms; though I suppose one bath could have made for some occasional discomfort.  It had a living room and a nice-sized eat-in kitchen and a one-car garage.  Laundry hook-ups were in the kitchen.  What more, really, even now, do we need?  Admittedly, jobs dictated moves, but I wonder if we’d stayed in that town how long we could have lasted in that home; how long we could have made do with what we had and made it work–probably pretty well, actually.  At what point would we have been crowded and uncomfortable, with two kids in that little house?  Would we have just sent them outside more often?  At what point would I have been completely frustrated with a one-car garage?  When would I have decided that huddling in a hallway listening to tornado sirens wasn’t enough, and I wanted a basement, now?  I truly don’t think we would have stayed there forever.

My husband actually mentioned our first home recently (commenting that we would have had that house paid off by now), and I asked him if he thought we would have stayed put, if jobs hadn’t interfered.  He smiled and pointed out that I would have found some classic Craftsman bungalow closer to “downtown” and we would have ended up there instead.  (Sigh.  So true.)

I look around three moves later, though, to see the accumulation of the fourteen years of stuff after that first house, stuff that has grown and expanded to fill the space offered, and I do wonder how to get back to what we need.  To peel back the layers of excess and get down to the basic needs of running a home.  Not a bare, spartan home, but not an extravagant home, either:  a comfortable, peaceful home, where people have what they need and aren’t buried by any more.

/ jenfletcher / 2 Comments

I thought this was the most amazingly beautiful description of what we should be striving for in our lives…what the end goal of all this “simplifying” really is. I hope you appreciate it as much as I did.

Janelle's avatarMy Men and Me

For years I have tried to live out a simple life. To shake off the unnecessary, the excess. To sift through the stuff, to purge. This is a daily challenge, I have found. The journey of a lifetime. Often I have strayed off the narrow path of enough onto the paved highway of too much.

What is becoming clearer to me, is that there is more to a simple life than the making of one. That the process of reduction is not the life itself. There is a beyond.

Because after the simplifying, the sifting, the making smaller … there is something left. There is that which was deemed important and valuable and necessary. And the step beyond, the beauty of simplicity, the living of the simple life … is the caring for that which has been kept.

What is left is named treasure and the…

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Hidden Clutter

/ jenfletcher / 2 Comments

My daughter’s room looks pristine.  If you stand in her doorway and survey the scene, you see a clean floor, appropriately “decorated” dressers and tables, and a made bed.  (No joke!  The six-year-old is a near-faithful bed-maker.)  I’ve complimented her numerous times on how clean her room is, especially compared to how she kept her previous room; which, at nearly half the size of her current room, was admittedly much harder to keep clean.

And then I helped her look for her shoes one morning.

It was yet another Sunday morning “I can’t find my….” moment, and since we had plenty of time before we had to leave for church, I was pretty mellow about the “I can’t find my pretty shoes” comment.  She looked in various places, and then I headed upstairs to help look, too.  I checked her closet….not there.  I checked in the corner, next to her chest of drawers…not there.  I checked under her bed…HOLY WOW!!

If they were there, she would never find them amidst all that stuff.  (If she went in looking for them, we might never find her, either.)

That roused my curiosity, so I started opening drawers.  It became quickly apparent that her clean room was a beautiful facade for overwhelming amounts of stuff stashed in all her drawers (and under the aforementioned bed).

Honestly, I’m not worried about it.  She’s a pro at going through things with me, and perfectly willing to get rid of stuff that she doesn’t use or love.  It fascinated me, though, how quietly things creep in.  You would never in a million years guess what was lurking in her room just by looking in her doorway.  I wonder how long it would have taken for the disaster to become obvious, to begin its crawl outside of its containment.  I’m glad I discovered it when I did, before it truly got out of hand.

And now that I think about it….do I have any cabinets that would embarrass me if someone opened them?  Do I have a drawer that is a few items short of disaster?  Is there a closet behind closed doors that’s waiting to pounce?  (I’m proud to announce that my laundry room closet has remained clean since April 13th, thanks to a note I put on a shelf:  “Cleaned April 13th.  Do you REALLY want to clean it again?”)

A big thank-you to my daughter for forcing me to think about the difficult stuff…..

Simplicity vs. Responsibility

/ jenfletcher / 1 Comment

I recall a conversation I had with another mom during a sweltering swimming lesson one miserable summer day.  We were discussing our children’s jobs around the house, the things they did to help out, and I commented that the habit we were working on that summer was loading the dishwasher.  Each meal, each snack, the kids were responsible for taking care of their own dishes—which meant I had better be on top of emptying the dishwasher.

“Why can’t they do it?” she asked.

“They could, but most of it is too high up for them to reach.  It would involve climbing on a chair to put things away, so I take care of that part for them, right now.  That’ll be a new habit for another summer,” I joked.

“Don’t they have their own plates?” she asked, looking genuinely confused.

“Well….we have a drawer with their cups,” I admitted.  “But other than that, we all use the same stuff.”

“Oh, gosh, you need to get them their own stuff, plastic stuff that doesn’t break, so they can learn to take care of it.  Then it really is their responsibility to load and unload their dishes and their cups.”

I really chewed on that one for a while.  I absolutely saw her point of teaching responsibility, of kids caring for their own things.  But at what expense?  An entire extra set of plates and cups?  Was I willing to sacrifice simplicity, and accept a potentially huge amount of clutter, to teach that lesson right now?  Would the gain, the lesson learned, be worth it?

I finally decided the answer was no.  Extra plates?  Bowls?  Cups?  Where on earth would we put it all?  As the kids grow up, as they get taller and more able to reach the upper cabinets, we can move on to dishwasher emptying.  Right now, we can focus on loading:  loading only one set of dishes.

“Put that away!”

/ jenfletcher / 3 Comments

How many times a day do we say that to our kids?  Put that away…clean that up…pick up your room….

But what if they don’t know where to put it?  What if they know where to put it, but they can’t fit it in because there’s too much other stuff?  What if an item just doesn’t have a home–especially new items, birthday gifts and such?  If we require them to do their part in keeping a clean house, we need to be setting an example in love and helping them be able to keep a clean house.

We’re so inundated with stuff that I think the first step is to pare down.  (See my previous “sock post” for a good example of what happens when you don’t!)  Go through the game cabinet or shelf with your kids; find out their favorites that should stay there, their not-so-favorites that maybe could go in a more out-of-the-way spot, and the ones they don’t care about that can just go.  (Maybe they’ll have so many they don’t care about that you could keep all the games in one cabinet–that would be my goal.)  We weed through our books on a regualar basis; I spread them out all over the floor and have the kids pick out their favorites, the ones they absolutely want to keep.  Pick your five favorites….pick three more you’d like….pick three more you think you want to keep.  We work through until we have a stash they are willing to give away.  (It helps that we take them to a used book store, so the more they give away, the more cash they’re getting in return.)  I’ve been known to spread out all my sons Hot Wheels in a giant parking lot before asking him to pass some on; I think seeing the sheer amount of cars, all lined up, helps emphasize to him that wow, there really are a lot of cars there.

I also think it’s important to go alongside your kids for awhile; show them what you mean by “pick up” and “put away.”  Set an example in what you do, and help them (for a time) in what they do.  It takes some time now, but eventually they’ll get it.  [An aside:  As I type this, my daughter just informed her friend, “Wait!  I’m not done putting this game away yet!”  Clearly they can be taught. 🙂 ]

Finally, and I think most important, is that everything needs to have a home.  No one can put something “away” if it doesn’t have a place to be put away.  This can be as simple as “my favorite teddy bear and blanket live on my bed,” or it can be shelves and tubs arranged to hold all their goods.  We have a shelf for kids’ books in our living room, but each child also has a bookshelf in their room; there’s really no excuse for books to not be put away in this house.  If every item has a place where it belongs, it’s so much easier for everyone in the house; not just the kids.

Keep in mind:  “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”  (Proverbs 22:6)

HOW many?

/ jenfletcher / 2 Comments

My son was getting ready for church, and couldn’t find any white socks.  As he finished his breakfast, I had a running commentary in the back of my head; something along the lines of, What do you mean you don’t have any white socks?  I just washed a load of whites after our trip.  I remember washing all your white socks.  How can you possibly not have any white socks?   Thankfully, I kept it to myself.  (Well, I might have said it out loud a little bit.)

Finally, I asked him to go check the basement.  They are constantly playing “gymnastics” down there, and invariably socks get removed, never to return upstairs.  I thought a basement search might turn up a missing pair.

The minute I said the word “basement,” his eyes got big.  “Oh, yeah,” he said, and then, with a slight British accent (please don’t ask why), “I forgot about Blanket’s sock machine!!”

He returned from downstairs with fourteen pairs of socks spilling out of his arms.  Not fourteen socks, mind you, but FOURTEEN PAIRS!!

Twenty-eight socks, now sitting on top of my washing machine, challenging me to see how even the mundane “stuff” in our lives so quickly multiplies and becomes overwhelming.  It’s sneaky….one day you have a perfectly reasonable amount of (fill in the blank), and then one day you look up, and you have twenty-eight of them–or another ridiculous number.  It seems to happen so slowly, so gradually, until that moment when it hits you:  How on earth did I end up with so many socks/magazines/food storage containers/insert your item of choice here?

In this case, not all were his; the bounty was fairly evenly divided between him and his sister.  But even seven pairs of socks seemed excessive when I realized that my daughter’s sock drawer was already full.  (Apparently girls have cuter socks that are much more difficult to let go of.)  🙂

That’s my new challenge to myself:  to look around and do a “number check.”  How many of (this) do I really need?  How many do I really use?  Would my excess be better off blessing someone else?  Is it time to pass this on?

Maybe I’ll start with our books…. (Ack!)