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Decluttering

Decluttered and recluttered

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PF bloggers hither, thither, and yon offer as a current gem of instant wisdom that when you buy a new clothing item, you should rid your closet of one, too.
😀

Did them one better today, I did. Actually, I did ’em 6.14 better.

This is the time of year when I like to make a run on Talbot’s, one of the very few clothing stores that sells pants that fit around my capacious rear end without leaving six extra inches of fabric around the waist. Talbot’s actually has two major sales each year, one after Christmas and one in the dog days of the summer. The summer sale, however is N.A., because their buyers’ taste in warm-weather togs is incomprehensible: runs to polka-dots and pastels. But their fall and winter clothes are always classic, handsomely tailored, well made, and fully worth whatever price you pay for them.

Because Talbot’s has moved out of the central city, the choice for the likes of moi was to journey to Scottsdale or to the far northwest valley. Decided to head to the north and west, because SDXB agreed to meet me at the nearby fancy grocery store for a cuppa. After leaving him, I dropped by Chico’s and B’Gauze before hitting Talbot’s (all in the same strip shopping center). Found nothing en route.

Talbot’s was having a 40% sale off already marked-down merchandise, plus an additional 40% off the cheapest item you purchased (“cheap” is a relative term in a joint like this). So, this brought the prices down to almost within reason. w00t! I got TWO blouses, TWO pairs of pants (one washable wool, one washable velour) that look like they were tailored for my bizarre figure, two knit pullovers, and a nifty knit vest: SEVEN highly serviceable and reasonably good-looking items. The bill was bracing, but only about half as bracing as it would have been had I purchased the stuff at presale prices.

Well, my New Year’s resolution is to start looking less like a slob and more like a normal human being.

I’ve fallen into the habit of wearing dungarees to the office…and just about anyplace else I happen to wander. This is partly because our office is isolated and inhabited solely by graduate students, and so there’s really no need to wear anything other than blue jeans, and partly because of my general depression: there’s no one in my life to care what I look like, so why should I care?

Gotta quit that.

All my jeans and easy-wash no-iron tops have resided in the master bedroom closet. Dressier clothing has been stashed in the closet of a bedroom that serves as the TV room, with the result that when I’m racing to get out the door, I grab whatever comes to hand from my bedroom closet: generally unironed jeans and a top that grows shabbier with each laundering. Occasionally I show up on campus in my decrepit gardening shoes, having forgotten to change to newer Danskos, a circumstance that I suppose ought to embarrass me.

So this afternoon when I staggered in the door bearing the weighty haul of the afternoon’s hunt, I went straight to work: dragged every piece of clothing out of the bedroom closet and threw out every stitch that was tired, ugly, or didn’t fit. Then I headed for the TV room and emptied that closet, too: tossed out another mound of old, dusty, tired, unsightly, and ill-fitting costumes from that cache. Then I transferred the jeans, the gardening clothes, and the swimming coverups to the TV room closet and filed the grown-up clothes in the bedroom closet!

And resolved that henceforth the jeans will be worn only around the house and maybe to Costco or the grocery store. Socially acceptable outfits will be worn to the university, to meetings, and to upscale malls where shopgirls won’t wait on you if you look like you’re one of the Clampitts.

I kept track of the ejected stuff: four pairs of jeans, three pairs of better slacks, two knit tops, eleven better tops, eight dresses or skirt/top separates, one sweatshirt, three better skirts, eight miscellaneous items, one sweater, and one pair of shoes, for a total of 43 items. Figuring according to the late successful yard-sale prices, that’s a potential $344 worth of resale clothing: about $20 more than I paid for today’s finds.

Hm. Should I try to yard-sale all this junk? Craig’s List, maybe? Naaahhhh…. Come Monday, off it all goes to St. Vincent de Paul.

But consider that: 43 is to 7 as 6.14 is to 1. (I think.) For every one new item I dragged into the house, I’m dragging more than six off to the charity. The used-clothing value of the outgoing stuff exceeds the retail price of the spiffy new loot.
Decluttering on steroids!

Yard sale adventures

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It’s twenty after five and I’m done in…and I didn’t do much of the work.

VickyC is still trying to shovel out the mountains of clothing and other personal effects left after her mom passed last April. She’s already sold over $1,500 worth of clothing on consignment. But bags and bags of perfectly fine clothing—some of it very attractive—were rejected by the consigner. So, she decided to throw a yard sale. Another of her friends and I offered to help out and to bring some of our own yard-salable stuff to the big event.

And what a yard sale she’s got going! We convened at her central-city home right at 7:00 a.m. One of her house-mates put up the yard sale signs on his way to work, and shortly customers started to show up.

In addition to hundreds of clothing items and mountains of towels, sheets, and bedding, she offered several pieces of furniture, including a Thomasville coffee table and a handsome red upholstered love seat. I brought the security cameras M’hijito had installed to record activity in the backyard during the late great swimming pool vandalism adventures, plus some old stereo components and a few pieces of kitsch. A male friend contributed two electric guitars and an amplifier.

People will buy the darnedest things…and not buy the darnedest things. The clothing, as expected, sold well, even though there was so much of it we had no hope of hanging it up or even of spreading it out in any way to display it effectively. Buyers just pawed through stacks and bags of stuff, apparently undisturbed by the absence of merchandising flare. Someone paid $100 for one of the guitars, but no one would pay $75 for the love seat, which was clean and in nearly new condition. It took all day to unload the coffee table. Someone bought two of the stereo components, neither of which was the receiver. The cameras, hard disk, and electronic stuff to connect them to a TV set were stolen.

VickyC collected over $300 today and probably will sell more tomorrow, provided it’s not raining. Rain wasn’t predicted until Sunday, but gray clouds lowered overhead all day and it wouldn’t be surprising if we got rain by tomorrow.I collected $21 and change, and VickyC gave me a lamp that I coveted for M’hijito’s house as consolation for the theft of the electronic goods.

Staging this yard sale was an enormous amount of work, especially for the proprietor. We hangers-on didn’t do much, other than help drag a few tables around and spread out the loot, and then drag it all back into a secure area when VickyC was ready to close for the afternoon. Was it worth it?

Really: is a yard sale worth the amount of work it requires?

Only, IMHO, if you have a lot of stuff to get rid of and you can be pretty certain it’s the sort of stuff that will sell. Around here, that means clothing, children’s toys, tools, low-end cookware, and (sometimes) small household items. And by a lot, I mean a lot:a houseful of stuff left by a deceased relative, or everything you own when you decide to not to rent a truck or pay a moving company to decamp to another state.

Given the time and effort it takes to put together even a fairly small yard sale, I don’t think it’s worth the effort unless you can make at least $300. We held the sale open from 7 in the morning till around 2:00 p.m.—seven hours—and VickyC had put in many, many hours more than that. I’d estimate she put in at least 20 hours, bare minimum. That meant she earned about $15 an hour, not a bad wage.

In my case, however, if you count VickyC’s $15 asking price for the lamp as a fair trade for the $800 worth of security camera equipment that was ripped off (I hoped to get about $30 for the stuff, at yard-sale rates), then I came away with $36 for the seven hours of my time at the sale plus another hour spent gathering my junk, cleaning it up, tagging it, and hauling it downtown. That’s $4.50 an hour…a far cry from the $60 an hour my time commands on the freelance market.

So, no: in ordinary circumstances, I doubt if yard-saling is worth your time. Financially, I would have been better off to have spent today marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk or writing the proposed CE Desk book. Had I donated my junk to Goodwill, the deduction from my income taxes would have been worth more than my yard-sale proceeds. It was a choice people-watching opportunity, and I enjoyed spending the time with my friend. But beyond that, I don’t see it as a particularly efficient way to generate sidestream income.

Stuff tsunami

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Spent all of yesterday afternoon at a little party helping a friend go through her deceased mom’s clothing. Some of it. The challenge: decide which pieces, in about ten huge bagsful, should go to the consignment store and which should be yard-saled or sent to Goodwill. Press, fold, and box the consignment-worthy stuff; bag the yard-sale stuff.My friend has already earned enough to take a nice vacation by consigning earlier rafts of the mom’s clothes, and she still has many bags and boxes of stuff left to go. So far, she’s made $1,500 selling clothing through consignment. I’ll bet she’ll tote another $800 worth to the store today.

Mom was a lively gal, very funny and charming. She LOVED clothes, and shopping for clothes was her main source of entertainment. Mother and daughter often shopped together. Most of the stuff they bought wasn’t very expensive—Mom worked at WalMart. But she had a real flair, and quite a lot of it is very cute. She was a sucker for sales, and so much of it was bought at deep discount.

The result was that her apartment was chuckablock full of stuff, stuff, and MORE stuff. The clothing alone, as you can imagine from the prices it’s fetching, was enough to stock a boutique. Then there were the mountains of perfumed bathing supplies, makeup, and various bric-a-brac.

Well, she always looked nice.

As a confirmed cheapskate, this habit amazes me. She was far from wealthy. The only reason she finally got out of a cheap rental in a less-than-ideal part of town and into a little condo was that near the end of her life she inherited a small sum of money. I find myself wondering how much better she could have lived—or even IF she could have lived better—had she bought about a sixth of that amount of clothing over the years and done something else with the money.

I don’t know whether she paid for the stuff in cash or ran a tab on a credit card. Either way: she ended up with money out of pocket and a vast clothing collection in house. Many pockets, we might say, with little or nothing to put in them.

What would have happened if she had put, say, $200 a month in savings instead of into pants, tops, skirts, loungewear, and dresses?

Would it have mattered? She suffered diabetes and failing kidneys. Saving $2,400 a year wouldn’t have extended her life, and it’s hard to imagine that the occasional plump bank statement would have done much to make her life better. If buying clothes made her happy, why not? She supported herself adequately and didn’t depend on anyone else financially.

The only downside, of course, is that the clothing collection poses a huge burden for her two daughters, each of whom has spent uncountable hours trying to deal with a Himalayan range of outfits. Yesterday three women spent five hours sorting through bag after bag after bag of stuff. Even after we kiped the things we wanted, we still filled four big baskets to overflowing for consignment and repacked a half-dozen big black yard bags with yard-sale stuff. And that was only a tiny part of the job my friend faces. On the other hand, going through all the stuff reminded us of her mom, a great old gal who should never be forgotten.

She lives on, in her clothes.
🙂

Decluttering for fun and profit

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I’m more and more intrigued with the idea of focusing the yard’s landscaping on two or three limited outdoor living spaces and letting the rest go dormant. Why consume water and energy on elaborate plantings that you never see and that never directly benefit you?

Matter of fact, my yard lends itself to this proposed new philosophy. The large front courtyard, enclosed by a thick screen of shrubbery blocking the view of Dave’s Marina, Used Car Lot, and Weed Arboretum, makes a nice place to sit in the evenings and functions as a welcoming front entry. The back porch is a wonderful outdoor dining room when the weather is nice, which is all of autumn, winter, and spring. And the covered deck to the west, with its climbing roses and shady trees, is a lovely green bower in which to enjoy a cup of coffee and read the morning paper at pretty much any time of year.

Thinking of exterior space as living space renders about a third of my large lot redundant. The chunk of real estate to the west of the driveway, which hosts a water-intensive (and dying) ash tree, wads of asparagus ferns, nine large shrubs, three desert morning glories the size of giant squids, a pointless lantana, a struggling Meyer lemon, a mountain laurel, a bougainvillea, a sickly cactus garden, and a feral bougainvillea, does nothing for the quality of my life. Or for anyone else except Gerardo, who gets hired now and again to beat back the jungle. The narrow strip along the east wall has only one function: to grow three desert birds of paradise and three yellow cassia until they block the public sidewalk, at which point they enrich Gerardo a bit more. These plants do nothing other than to add to Gerardo’s income: they provide no privacy, they bear no edible fruit, and they’re not visible from any part of the house that I inhabit.

So: in front, west of the driveway, all the shrubs go except three cassia along the west lot line. Out with the ugly morning glory mats. Move some of the irrigation drippers over to give the lemon tree extra water and shut off the rest. Out with the moribund ash tree! Replace it with one of the infant vitex trees, potted babes of the pretty tree in back, which someday will become a nice xeriscapic shade tree (possibly not in my lifetime, but someday). Out with the water-intensive asparagus ferns. Boug stays. Mountain laurel stays. Meyer lemon stays. Turn off the water to everything else.

In back, remove three unthriving, unseen, and unappreciated roses. Turn off the water to those beds.

Remove all the pointless shrubs along the east exterior side wall. Turn off the water.

Prune the trees and shrubs that form the visual barrier between my front windows and Dave’s pig sty. Cut off the water to all these extremely xeriscapic weeds. They should do just fine without being watered all the time.

I think of getting rid of the overgrown and redundant plantings as a variety of decluttering, one that should work to frugal effect. It will shut off the watering system to a third or a half of the yard.

Will the plan save money? Dunno. It stands to reason that turning off a third of the watering system would cut my bill by 33%, but it’s not that simple.Part of the city water bill goes to pay for trash pickup and sewer service.Some of the water, of course, is consumed by dish- and clothes-washing and by bathing. In the heat of summer, all the potted plants clustered on the deck and back porch have to be watered every single day, or they will die. The 18,000-gallon pool also draws a fair amount of water, particularly in summer, when it loses two or three inches a week to evaporation. The time I wandered off and left the hose running in the pool, almost overflowing the darn thing, did not help matters.

Let’s say it saves 25% on the water bill. My highest bill this year (so far) was $208. My lowest bill last winter was $63; at that time almost none of the exterior plantings got any water, nor did the pool need refilling. Assuming the base cost of water, sewer, and trash pickup is $63, the summertime cost of watering the yard and potted plants must be around $145 (i.e., $208 – $63). Twenty-five percent of the hot-weather exterior water bill would be $36.25, a modest but respectable saving that will grow as the city jacks up the cost of water.

In addition to closing down all the flora that doesn’t bear food, cast significant shade, or contribute to livable space, I’m also putting timers on the hose bibs. These will shut the water off after a specified time, obviating another pool overflow fiasco.

This is stage one of a larger project to cut the costs of living in the house, hopefully to the point where I can stay in my home during retirement.

Tomorrow I plan to call the air-conditioning company and ask them to install a programmable thermostat, and also to find out if they can restore the rusted-out swamp cooler so it will run next summer without my having to replace it. A new swamp cooler costs as much as a new refrigeration unit. While a swamp cooler runs much cheaper than a regular air-conditioner, it would take several years to pay for itself in savings. The one I put on my old house made my allergies kick up so badly it gave me excruciating headaches. Coolers at other people’s houses haven’t had that effect, but since Proserpine said she and Satan never used this one because it gave her headaches, I’m not springing to install a new one.

I’m also going to find out if it’s possible to shut off the central air conditioning on summer nights and run only a room air conditioner in the bedroom. If doing so wouldn’t cause any harm (I’ve been told that closing off a single room in summer is counterproductive, and so this could be, too), then surely cooling just one room instead of ten (twelve, if you count the bathrooms as “rooms”) would save a ton of money.

This winter I’m going to buy space heaters and heat only the room I’m sitting in. I hope to avoid running the central heating altogether, or at least limit its use to the few days when temperatures are close to freezing and it’s raining, too. Even on cold nights, the sun usually warms the house to tolerable levels by ten in the morning. Cassie has a natural fur coat, and I can wear sweatshirts.

It will be interesting to see if these strategies work to bring down the cost of running the house. If they don’t, I will not be able to stay here after my job ends.

Saved from my own fecklessness

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This weekend the fates conspired to keep me from spending money.

A week or two ago, while running around town with a friend who was looking for a particular combination of furniture, I came across some dining room chairs that exactly fit the description of the fantasy chairs I imagined would go with the table I bought four years ago. My mother’s kind of Shakery looking chairs work fine with this table, but I’ve always believed that a set of wheatback chairs with wicker seats would be just the ticket. When I got the table, I thought it would be fairly easy to find such a thing, but no! Months and years have gone by, and I’ve never spotted exactly what I wanted.

Until I came across these. They looked much like the one in the picture here, only in a nice medium walnut finish, not painted black; and the design is a little more polished. Perfect: $315 apiece, marked down for a moving sale.

Ohhkay….six of those would come to $1,890, plus 8.3% government gouge equals $2,046. A bit stiff, especially since I’d drained my diddle-it-away savings to buy the sideboard I’ve also been craving for the past several years. Four of them would cost $1,362. And there was some degree of hurry: the store is moving to a part of town that’s a long way from where I live, into an upscale area way too rich for my blood. I hardly ever go there; with the cost of gas where it is, I’m unlikely to venture out in that direction, even to get something I really want. Besides, the sales guy indicated the chairs weren’t about to sit around his floor for long.

So I dropped by on Friday and asked if I could buy just one on approval, to see how it would look with the set. No problem. Schlep this home, and…

Yeah, it looked really, really gorgeous with the table: like they were made to go together. But…

But the dining room is separated from the family room by a step up: the dining room is a slightly sunken room, so you make one step down from the dining area into it. Satan and Proserpine, the previous homeowners, took out the infelicitous wrought-iron railing that further delineated the spaces, creating a broad open area where nothing interferes with the sight line. The family room is the nicest and prettiest room in the house. When I sit at my accustomed spot at the table, I can look across the table into this lovely room with its big fireplace, skylights, Arcadia door, and handsome, simple furniture. I really like enjoying the view of the most pleasant room in my home.

Well, the chair backs are high enough that when you sit at the table, what you see is not the room but the back of the chair across the table! Nice chairs, but not what I want to gaze at while I’m dining alone. My mother’s chairs are low enough that they don’t intrude.

Saved from diddling away $2050 on unnecessary furniture! Back to the store the chair went.

Onward to more unnecessary objects: At Pier One, I recently bought some new dishes, my old set being scratched up and very tired. They’re mostly bright yellow, with blue trim here and there. To go with them, I wanted a set of cobalt blue placemats.

Think anyone, anywhere carries cobalt blue or navy blue placemats?

N-o-o-o. Not a chance!!!!!

After driving from pillar to post in search of a mat to go with the dishes, I finally found the perfect thing at Sur la Table. They had five. I needed eight. The saleslady called the catalog to order me three more: no way. She now suggests I drive halfway across the city to their other store to pick up the other three mats. I decide not.

While I’m walking around The Great Indoors, a repository of some of the most hideous products of the School of Ugly Design available anywhere, it occurs to me that one doesn’t really need table mats. Why use a placemat on a table whose surface is made of reclaimed European warehouse flooring, two-inch-thick slabs of polymerized pine with layer after layer after layer of dark wax rubbed into it? The thing is impermeable! A little water or wine spilled on it will wipe right up.I have a perfectly fine table cloth that can be used for guests.Why do I need placemats at all?

I don’t. Do you?

One less thing to spend money on. One less thing to have to wash and iron and put away.

We have a lot of STUFF in our lives that we think we need because we’ve always had them and our parents always had them and so that must just be the way things are done. Do you find that’s so? What’s in your home that you don’t really need?

Declutter while you can

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Yesterday evening Cassie and I walked past a down-at-the-heels house in the neighborhood, its paint peeling, its roof tired, and its lawn going to weeds. At one time, the owners had a lovely, bountiful vegetable garden-someone who lived there loved to putter in the yard. Traces of their handiwork persist: the now feral vegetable patch overgrowing with weeds and bermudagrass, a trellis with a grapevine still producing lush bunches of deep purple grapes, big grapefruit trees strong and green from years of fertilizing and canny tending.

Rare among Southwesterners, these people never fenced their backyard, so you can see everything. The gardener’s old wheelbarrow lies on its side next to the house, its bottom rusted through. Mildewing frost cloths and decrepit shade curtains clutter the back porch.

At first I thought the house had been abandoned, its owners carted off to the nursing home or at least departed to cooler climes for the summer. But last night someone was home, the lights on so you could see inside the family room.

A Case Study in Clutter

What a mess in there! The place is stacked with junk: something that looked like an old exercise machine or an upended table and piles of clutter and trash that should have been thrown out years ago. Until the elderly occupant, unaware of our presence, closed the blinds on the kitchen door, you could see that room was chuckablock full of junk, too.

When we rounded the corner where the house stands, we found a car in the driveway and the garage door open. There was, after all, room for a single vehicle to fit in among the junk in the two-car garage, and so, since the driver hadn’t put the car inside, it’s possible the woman in the kitchen was a caretaker and not the homeowner. What a tangle in the garage! The place was stacked several feet out from the walls with tools, containers of household chemicals, and general junk. Someone had conceived the brilliant idea of using the pull rope for the retractable attic ladder as a device to hang bags full of old plastic grocery bags-and they must have stored a 30-year supply there! Great balloons of plastic bags stuffed with more plastic bags hung from the attic ladder rope, blocking the way to the kitchen door.

Amazing.

Don’t do this to your relatives.When you croak over — which could be any day now, no matter what your age — someone else will have to come into your house and clean out the mess. Have a little mercy. There’s no need to keep your megacollection of toy cars, hub caps, old clocks, plastic flowers, and multifarious sets of dishes with you at all times. Or every plastic bag you ever dragged home from the supermarket.

It is not frugal, not thrifty, to keep and stash every piece of junk you’ve ever managed to acquire, no matter how great a bargain it was when you got your hands on it. To the contrary: the constant acquisition of stuff drains your wealth. While you’re still healthy enough to take care of it, it burdens you with a clutter of junk to have to clean and store. When you’re too old to keep on dusting and scrubbing, it leaves you living in squalor amid stacks of mouldering debris.

The garage you paid for is meant to store your car, not trash. The space inside your house, for which you also paid dearly, is for you to live in, not to collect dust on trinkets and trash

If my neighbor had called an estate sale company and unloaded every piece of clutter that she wasn’t using, she could have had a nice chunk of cash to brighten her old age. At the very least, it would have paid for a weekend in Laughlin, Nevada

A true frugalist lives simply. And that simple lifestyle does the frugalist and her heirs a great favor: less junk to take care of means more time to enjoy healthier pursuits.

Principles of Decluttering

Here are the rules I try to live by:

  1. If I haven’t used it in a year, it goes to charity or gets sold.
  2. Nothing sits on a tabletop or counter unless it has a use.
  3. One use may be decorative, but this should be kept to a minimum: just enough to soften a stark look.
  4. I try to put things away when I’m done using them.
  5. Everything should have a place, and the “place” should be inside a drawer or a cabinet.
  6. The walls are festooned with as little stuff as possible, and what’s on the walls is the best quality artwork or crafts I can afford. Except in my office, I don’t clutter the walls with family photos.
  7. I discard empty containers, with few exceptions.
  8. It took some doing, but I finally trained myself to quit collecting old jars, boxes, cans, and fancy clothing-store bags simply because maybe someday they might come in handy. Nine and a half times out of ten, they don’t.
  9. If I find I’m not using a handy-dandy old bottle, out it goes.
  10. I do keep plastic bags, because I have two uses for them: wrapping garbage and picking up after the dog.
  11. But if I didn’t have these uses, I’d use canvas shopping bags or ask for paper bags at the store, to keep that filmy, infinitely lasting plastic out of the landfills.
  12. Instead of stuffing bags to be reused inside a plastic grocery bag hung on a nail, I use a couple of Kleenex-box-like bag holders, scored at Costco. Much neater.
  13. I have one set of dishware, not sets for everyday use and sets for entertaining and my grandmother’s Lenox from Tiffany’s. It’s a decent set of stoneware in a timeless style, which I eat from every day and which I feel comfortable using to serve guests. Ditto the glasses. Ditto the silverware.
  14. I own one set of sheets, one set of towels per bathroom, one set of kitchen towels. When they’re dirty, I wash them and put them back on the bed or into the bathroom.

Simplicity Makes Your Life Better — Long-term

It’s so much easier to clean house when you don’t have to pick up a lot of tchochkies, dust each of them, and dust around them! The less junk you acquire, the less work it is to care for your living environment.

From the vantage point of some maturity, it’s easy to see that developing habits of simplicity — decluttering your life early on and keeping it decluttered — will serve you well as you age. Not only will you save a great deal of cash over the years by not collecting junk that you rarely or never use, the easier it is to take care of your home, the longer you’re likely to be able to stay in your home. If cleaning around your stacks of junk is a major project, at some point along the line you will decide the heck with it. And it won’t be long afterwards that your kids will decide you can’t take care of yourself and move you to the old-folkerie…or worse, in with them!

1 Comment left on iWeb site

Anonymou

Hi, Vicky

At age 50, my spouse and I moved into a new home.I gave away 35 boxes of stuff to Goodwill.It felt so good that I’ve continued to go through the spaces of my new home with a critical eye.I frequently ask myself, have I used this in the last year?No.It’s gone.From experience, I know my daughter and son-in-law will appreciate this.

When my mother-in-law died three years ago, my husband and I cleared out her home in three days.We were able to do this because she had already disposed of all the unessential stuff from her life.

In fact, a couple years prior, my husband spent a few days with her (in another state) and helped her go through her house with the goal of eliminating stuff.They trashed stuff, they kept what Mom still needed, they gave stuff away, they boxed a few things for my husband to bring home, and they had a yard sale.

I believe they made a meaningful experience out of the process.Stuff helped them remember and relive the past.It also helped them consider the present and the future and what Mom was going to need in her last years.Certainly not the collection of mouse Christmas tree ornaments or the collection of 50’s era Hummel, which she worried would disappear with the inevitable strangers she would employ in her home.She wanted to be sure that we would keep the Hummel (with their historiical, sentimental, and real value) in the family.

And yes, Mom pocketed some cash.Further, she felt good about giving away things to people who would enjoy them.But most of all, she maintained control.She made the decisions about her own stuff and about how she would live out her future.

Mom left Hungary during WWII with one small suitcase.Perhaps it is with this perspective that at 80 she was able to make decisions about discarding stuff.I believe, though, that she relieved herself of the burdens associated with keeping stuff.

You offer helpful suggestions for people considering the usefulness of their stuff.Today we have various avenues for unloading stuff.We can give it to fmaily, friends, and/or charities.My friend puts it on the curb with a FREE sign on it.We can use Ebay to send stuff all over the world.My husband has amazingly good luck selling online.We have craigslist.

I personally don’t want to be burdened with all this stuff.I’m all for spreading mine around

Saturday, July 26, 2008 – 09:50 AM