What do you do with unwanted stuff? Decluttering after holidays is an annual pain
Here we go again. We gather up our holiday stuff and pack it back up into the bins we’d emptied in December. Then we need someplace to put it.
Where did all that paraphernalia come from? Gee thanks, Santa.
As usual, we face our annual conundrum. There are too many things for the space we have in which to store or display them.
But I took those bins out of that space, right over there! I know I did.
Where did the empty space go? I’m convinced our home has a grinchy gremlin who immediately fills up any vacant gap, no matter where it is.
Besides, stuff always expands beyond the space allocated for it. Just ask anybody who had an empty closet or kitchen drawer last summer.
The post-holiday squeeze inevitably leads to a predictable January.
Call it what you will. Organizing. Decluttering. Downsizing. It boils down to getting rid of a bunch of stuff you probably shouldn’t have bought, don’t want, don’t need or should have ditched years ago.
Maybe you got something as a gift, but upon opening it, you had to hide your instinctive flinch and grimace, then smile and say, “Why, thank you! It’s just what I wanted.”
No matter what label you slap on the box of tasks ahead of you, it’s a lot of tough, grubby work — with a lot of darting around the house, flapping like a demented chicken.
As my friend Lynn Diehl said on Facebook on Dec. 5, “The book sorting, organizing and reducing are not going well. This whole ‘rethinking what we need and what we don’t’ is much like a diet. The first pounds you lose are the easiest. After that, the work begins.”
She hastened to explain that “it’s not as if we had a hoarder house, but just years of keeping items that we didn’t need or use. I started with our closet. Shoes! So many shoes. After that, it was one room after another.”
And the decisions? Mercy me, yes. One after another after another, ad nauseum.
If you’re like me, and decision-making of this sort is on a par with root canals, IRS audits or unexpectedly confronting an angry rattlesnake, eliminating things from our households can produce paralyzing agony.
For many of us, making decisions and procrastination are spirit cousins.
Why do we put ourselves through it? Life hands us all kinds of stuff, along with all kinds of reasons to divest ourselves of unnecessaries and unwanteds.
Some decluttering prompts are more melancholy than others, from empty nesting or a death in the family to moving or just wanting to stop paying more each year on storage-unit rent than the stuff we’re storing inside the unit is worth.
Maybe we just want to walk into a room and not cringe because it’ll never be tidy unless we eliminate half the stuff that’s in it.
Once those painful decisions are made and the rejects are assembled, some people sell their unwanteds through garage sales, Ebay or various social media marketplaces. Others offer the goods for free on localized e-sites or donate them to thrift stores.
The more desperate or time-crunched divesters haul their stuff to the side of the road and slap a “free” sign on it all. Or haul it to the dump.
There is hope, however, People apparently have also come up with some wildly, amusingly creative ways to declutter (concepts that may need to be adapted during a pandemic).
For instance, a meme from Home and Life popped up in social media recently. It was labeled “Best. Decluttering. Tip. Ever.”
The meme explained, “My husband and I play a game. Whenever we go over to someone’s house, we bring something we have decluttered and secretly hide it in their house in plain sight. Somewhere that it makes sense for it to be. Books on the bookshelf, mugs in the cupboard, etc. We’ve gotten rid of so much stuff and only one person ever noticed. … Our families are nowhere near minimalists. … We are easily entertained.”
Another clever idea requires a gathering of friends. (Yes, we’ll be able to do that again someday, really we will.)
More than three decades ago, when our friends Jerry and Susan Juhl were paring down their possessions before they left their Cambria home to move to Northern California, they employed this clever idea.
They gift wrapped items they didn’t want. At the end of a going-away party they threw for themselves, they gave those “gifts” to their guests.
The deal was, each of us had to take at least one souvenir of the event and their friendship, we absolutely could not leave it at their house or on their property. We could exchange gifts with other people, but we had to do it later, elsewhere.
My gift from the Juhls? A handful of empty eyeglass cases.
You guessed it: I’m still using a couple of them.
Downsizing? Organizing? No matter what month it is, decluttering is so obviously not my strong suit.
