Tag Archives: Clutter

Craigslist Lament

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The Shabby Chic table: Sold for $50.

  So, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated this blog and I thought I better get to it. This is the time of year when I feel most like doing nothing; just laying around in bed eating bonbons all day or looking at boats on Yachtworld.com ( a personal weakness that borders on addiction).  But since I don’t eat bonbons anyhow, and I am supposed to be using this blog as the proverbial fire under the hind end, I’ve actually been making progress at home, even if not on the blog.  See?  It’s working!

When I last posted, I was commenting on the sheer number of pieces of furniture we’ve collected over the course of a 29 year marriage. I’m coming to terms with disposing of some of those pieces and now I feel the urge to comment about the use of Craigslist as a tool for selling unnecessary items.  To be more precise, I feel the urge to complain about my Craigslist experience.

The promise of Craiglist, that of easy, free posting of unwanted items which will soon be sold to people just waiting to buy, is a fantasy. At least the second part is a fantasy. Yes, the posting is free, and fairly easy, even if it does take some time. But the part about people waiting to buy said items really must exist only in my rather too-vivid imagination.  To date I have spent around 4 hours photographing and posting items on Craigslist and I have sold exactly one item, a little white Victorian table, for $50, which is $25 less than what I listed it for. That amount of work has earned me $12.50/hour and 1.5 square feet of floor space.  I think the only reason the table sold is that I used the term ‘Shabby Chic’ in the title.

We’ve had a number of emails asking if this item or that is still available, and then when I email back that it is available….. NOTHING! What is wrong with these people? Or maybe they don’t actually want the item, only to know if we still have it, like they need to be reassured that it will be there whenever they are ready.Or perhaps they email only so they can laugh as they expertly dash our hopes of an easy sale.  Or maybe they are  lonely people who email others just for the joy of getting an email back.

I wonder if the problem is deeper than that, however. I wonder if our sales problem lies more within a change that appears to be happening across the country, if not across all western nations. I wonder if the problem we’re having with selling our ‘stuff’ to others is because overall, people are getting tired of accumulating all that stuff in the first place. It’s no accident that there are so many books on downsizing, clearing clutter, etc. and that there is a movement to build smaller houses. It seems like collectively we have already ridden the crest of the wave that allowed us to collect and sell lots of ‘things’. I wish there were data that compared the relative ‘success’ of a garage sale now to one held 10 years ago.

And although many people do not have the extra cash now that they did 10 years ago, this ‘buying less’ mentality is not limited to the cash-strapped masses. CnnMoney published an article this month stating that even the wealthiest people in the U.S. (defined as those making more than $130,000/year) will be buying fewer gifts this Christmas. Maybe I’m not defined as ‘wealthy’, but I can assure you I am among those who will buy less. Patagonia recently announced they are starting a new campaign to get people to buy fewer things, focusing on buying better quality and making those things last. Why, that’s downright UN-AMERICAN! Frankly, it looks like just a smart marketing strategy since, according to a recent New York Times article  people appear to be holding onto things longer across the board; making them last; repairing rather than tossing things and replacing them. Our mothers and grandmothers could give us a lot of advice about this.

Putting two and two together leads me to believe that his evolution of values we are experiencing means that eventually there will be fewer items for sale on Craigslist. So you’d think that people would be rushing to buy our things in anticipation of the times of scarcity! Don’t these people prepare for the future? Maybe I should re-title my listings: THE END TIMES ARE UPON US! BUY THIS NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. ALSO: SHABBY CHIC!!!  I’ve heard that the more exclamation points a listing has, the more people pay attention.  No? Okay. But if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to have a garage sale in December.  Cash only, you pick up at our Lakewood location. Haggling cheerfully accepted.

 

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Organizing My Kitchen: Getting Rid of Clutter!

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Just because I’ve posted about the concepts of living in a ‘tiny house‘ and ‘visualizing your life‘ doesn’t mean I’m not doing the work! This plan is all about the work of organizing my house so we can live on board a sailboat. I’ve started in the kitchen and I’d like to share with you the ‘before’ photos of my cabinets. Mothers and grandmothers everywhere are shuddering bleakly as I open the dark recesses of my kitchen cabinets to the curious public. But, hey, whatever it takes to keep me focused and on-task. I ask only that you be kind in your comments. I’ve been living this way for years and have only now understood how I’ve created my own stress. It’s a significant blow to the ego and I need time to recover.

getting rid of clutter

It looks like I need help organizing my house!

Looking at the first photo, on the left, you will see a cabinet that is being used as a bookcase, a medicine cabinet, and I don’t know what else is on the top shelf.  Down below there is a basket of miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t have another home, some jars of home made jam and salsa, and way in the back, my box of cookie cutters, which I use approximately every decade.

Now lets turn around to get a load of the glassware cabinet, which is supposed to ‘add’ to the decor of the kitchen. Martha Steward I am not. (Although I could be if I had her staff.) On the top shelf are champagne glasses we use on Christmas day only. They are too tall for the shelf so you can see only their red bottoms.  Then there is the lovely teapot given to me by my daughter several Christmases ago and our good glassware.  On the bottom is more of our glassware, some cups (hanging) that I never use but like anyhow, and our tea boxes. There is also a tea canister with the word ‘Paris’ on it. Very chic, to be sure.

Organizing the kitchen

Organizing the kitchen will make me happy!

The cabinets below the glassware were equally ill-used. Heavy corning ware was stored with the waffle iron, crock pot, hand blender, and rice cooker, among other miscellaneous kitchen-related ‘stuff”. The snap-ware was jumbled in a basket. Suffice to say that whoever did the dishes on any given day used this cabinet as a catch-all for things that had no other place.

Clearly the only solution was to dump everything on the floor and start over.

I was ruthless when clearing these cabinets out. I completely emptied them, tossing things in the garbage or Goodwill box as I went. Peter Walsh was right. The garbage can IS my friend.  Out-of-date medicine? Gone! Broken binder with recipes printed out on computer paper with the little perforations on each side? Trashed! (For those of you too young to remember, computer paper used to come in one long sheet, with perforations on each side and at top and bottom. This kind of paper came along right after mimeograph sheets, which also no longer exist.) Stacks of dishes I found on the top shelf? Half in the staging area in the garage, half stored neatly in an appropriate cabinet. I tell you, I was without ruth!

Astute readers caught the illogical use of this cabinet for medicines. What you didn’t know is that the medicine chest in the main bathroom stood literally empty. I know, I know. Don’t hassle me with your logic, okay? I’m baring my soul here.

I got side tracked for a couple of hours while I searched for materials and then constructed another shelf for the medicine cabinet, but in the end, all the medication and first aid stuff fit very nicely, with room to spare. Between the two sets of cabinets I got rid of two large boxes of stuff and filled a huge trashbag. Misson accomplished!

The next question was how to restock the cabinets in a more organized way. This is where The Book comes in.  Because of internet information overload, I’ve chosen to stick with Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff.  There are many books out there, but I’m happy with this one and don’t want to clutter up my mind with extraneous information. So, in the chapter on kitchen organizing, Peter talks about the ‘magic triangle’ concept. I was familiar with the concept, but not in terms of organizing, only in terms of working. So when he said that the things you use most often need to be inside the triangle and the things you use least need to be way outside of it, that helped enormously with decision-making here.

The first set of cabinets is just outside my work triangle, so things I use but not very often can live there. I also needed a place to store all the canned goods I’ve been making this year, and it’s been a handy place for the cookbooks I do use.  At the bottom will go kitchen gadgets that I use rarely but still enough to keep them, like the waffle iron and the heavy casserole dishes.  We’re not living on a boat yet. You can see the results in this ‘after’ photo. I am determined to keep those voids empty! In the end there was plenty of room for the little red toolbox, which we keep handy with basic tools for quick jobs. Potatoes and onions and the like will be stored in the basket.

Clutter free and logical, too!

The second set of cabinets said goodbye to the crystal glassware, which was moved to another space. I had to put the cute teapot in the Goodwill box, with a slight sigh of pain, because we have an electric tea kettle we use all the time, several times per day. The teapot is pretty, but I can’t take it on the boat, and I never use it anymore. Gone, too, is the ‘Paris’ canister. Clearing this cabinet out gave me room to store the large pasta bowl that has lived above the refrigerator for 10 years. I use it infrequently now that we’re gluten-free, but it also serves as a good salad bowl. And I like the way it looks.

organizing kitchen cabinets

The organized cabinet.

This cabinet is not being put to its best use yet, but at least it’s cleared of clutter. I may put a door on one side and store my baking supplies here because this area offers much more counter top workspace than the area I generally use. This would also create more food storage space in the kitchen, a constant irritation. I’m going to save that for phase 2 of the kitchen reorganization.

The lower cabinets are now holding only the things we use frequently and need easy access to. Of course being easily accessible also means they will be easy to put away, a constant challenge in my family. The snap-ware is all organized and on one shelf, although Mike made a valid point that we likely could get rid of some of it. That could happen.

This organized cabinet is with arm's reach of the work triangle.

Mission accomplished in this cabinet.

Mission accomplised! With room for the Vitamix.

So we’re off and running with this whole ‘staying organized at home thing’! The hardest part so far is going to be finishing with one room before I go on to the other. Can you say “Attention Deficit Disorder”? I have a new mantra: “Must finish what I start. Must finish what I start. Must finish what I start”.  I might be losing that battle because I started on the closet in the family room already, and the kitchen organizing is still underway. I’ll do the walk of shame later, I promise.

 

Pretending To Be Small

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Reading in the cabin of our tiny house, S/V MoonriseThere is a ‘small house’ movement afoot in this country. It’s incredible. Creative, brave people, mostly young people who will change this world, are leading the way living purposeful and fulfilling lives as they redefine the ‘American Dream’. You know that dream: the one about home ownership that turns out to be a nightmare for so many. I’m glad I’m alive to see this happen. These are people who are changing the rules that define ‘success’ in our country. Take a look at these sites if you want to get a taste of what is in store for the future of home ownership in this country: TinyHouseBlog.com, Tumbleweedhouses.com, TinyHouseLiving.com, ThisTinyHouse.com.

This is part of a larger movement to live more simply, with less ‘stuff’; like what you have to do when you live on a boat. In a way, it’s literally a counter-culture attitude that is 180 degrees from what constitutes ‘normal’ in our country. These people live in small spaces, with few things to weigh them down. I’ll bet they don’t shop till they drop, either. Sorry, Wall Street. It’s never going to be the way it was before. We all know it. Some of us are just better at saying it out loud than others.

We don’t live in a tiny house. We live in a 3000 square foot rambler built in 1964. It was the definition of the word ‘fixer’ when we moved in 11 years ago.  The only thing tiny about this house is the size of the closets. People just didn’t have the same level of stuff in 1964 that we have now. I’m pretty sure there were no Walmarts or Dollar Stores on every corner back then. If part of our plan is to rent out the house and live on a boat, we have a LOT of stuff that needs dumping first if we don’t want to spend money on some huge, ridiculous storage space. Which we don’t.

To that end, it helps to pretend that we’re going to be living in a tiny house. And this is true in more ways than you think. A boat is basically a tiny, floating house. Also, when we move to our final home, wherever that is, that house is going to be much smaller than this one, although the closets will definitely be larger.  Finally, although we plan to rent our house furnished,  we’ll want to store selected personal possessions in our attic while we’re away.  So we’ll pretend that the attic is a tiny house and that’s all the stuff we can keep.

In preparation for The Great Purging, I’ve been reading Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. Apparently this guy has had a TV show on which he helped people de-clutter their lives. Who knew? It’s not a bad book, really. As self-help books go, it has some meat to it. One of his main ideas is to focus on the life you want to lead, not on what he calls ‘the clutter’. And he gets into the emotional holds that ‘stuff’ has on people and how they get stuck in these emotional contracts with their possessions. As a psychotherapist, I can appreciate that. His idea is that every time you are confused about whether you should get rid of something, you should ask yourself whether that object helps you get closer to the vision of the life you want to lead. Pithy stuff. Halfway through the book I could envision myself tossing those old college yearbooks into the Goodwill box. Holy crap, Batman!

So with that in mind, I’ve created a staging area in (where else?) the garage. One corner is for stuff that is leaving this house forever, one way or another. One corner is for stuff that will fit in the tiny house in the attic. It will be packed and labeled. And one corner for stuff that my kids need to make a decision about, unless they want me to make the decision for them (said in the sternest possible ‘mother’ tone).

I enter this Great Purging with fear and loathing, but also with hope. I fear the moment when I will have to release the hold some sentimental item has on me. I loathe the fact that I have to spend all this time and energy sweeping things out of my life in order to create space both emotional and physical. And I hope that all those people who say that this process will give me a profound feeling of freedom and peace are completely correct.  Otherwise, this is really going to suck because we have some cool stuff and we’ve had a lot of it for a long, long time.