The Art of Decluttering

Most likely, at the top of the list of every new retiree is cleaning out closets and an overall house decluttering.  At least, they are definitely on my to-do list.  Like my mother, I am not a fan of clutter.  I don't like a whole lot of knick-knacks (dust collectors I've always called them) and being in a clean, non-cluttered environment is important to my emotional well-being.  But a misconception that a lot of us "anti clutterers" have is that the solution to having a decluttered home is to be highly organized.  Not necessarily true.  How many of us have stacks of neatly organized storage containers full of things we neither use nor want?  As I was cleaning and decluttering my front foyer closet this week, I realized that I had two large storage containers full of baseball caps and had no idea why I had decided to keep them at the time I had stored them.  It occurred to me that before I did any type of cleaning and organizing, I had to discard.  Unless it was a baseball cap near and dear to someone's heart, like my son's Mickey Mouse cap with autographs of all of the Disney characters, or by all means any White Sox cap, off to Goodwill they went!  

I recently purchased a digital copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:  The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo to use as inspiration as I embark on my decluttering project.  One suggestion from that book that I found extremely helpful was to go into the project with the mindset of organizing/decluttering not by space but by category.  How many times have we organized an office supply drawer in our kitchen filled with pens, pencils, paper clips, etc. only to find yet another set of office supplies in the office or den?  Years ago, my husband and I decided to keep some of our kids' toys that were still in great shape for use by our future grands.  I realized as I was cleaning the walk-in closet in my son's bedroom (now an office/guest room) that we had been storing some of those toys in there as well as some in the closet in our basement.  With the old mindset of organizing/decluttering one space at a time, it would be likely that I would organize toys neatly in the bedroom walk-in closet and then again in the basement closet.  With the new mindset of organizing/decluttering by category, I organized all of the toys only into the basement closet after I decluttered both closets.  By doing that, it helps with putting things away after the decluttering process is completed.  If there is a toy out, it gets put away into the basement closet.  No question.

Another point the book makes is that half of the cluttering problem is "can't throw it away" and the other half is "can't put it away."  After going through the process of throwing away (which isn't a problem for me), then it's easy to "put away" if there is only one place to put things.  Unfortunately, if your spouse is not part of the decluttering process, you will have to get them into the same mindset.  My husband tends to lay things down where it's convenient for him to grab.  This habit circumvents the whole mindset of one specific place for every object and makes it impossible to have a tidy house. Part of the project is moving him along into a different mindset.  

So far, after a week, I have finished clothes, toys and books.  Not too bad.  Next is office supplies and eventually I will spend a considerable amount of time on pictures - that's a whole other topic.  I'm a big believer in "work smart-not hard" and I definitely don't want to spend a good amount of my retirement years organizing, cleaning and re-organizing!