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Can we talk about your clutter problem?

Do you have objects in your life in your house that you would categorize as clutter? Probably you do. I know I do. Most people think of most of their partners stuff as clutter. And we’re all trying to cut back. Decluttering sometimes feels like our national pastime.

HGTV has multiple shows devoted to the pleasures and virtues of minimalism. They want you to know that you should throw out most of your stuff and replace it all with “the right stuff.” Or if you prefer your Marie Kondo straight from the source her show is on Netflix.

But I want to ask you this. DO you actually have a clutter problem? Seriously.

I’ve talked in the past about how to manage clutter in your life with design. And that’s all well and good. But today, I want to talk about this from another angle. 

First, is the so-called clutter in your life, actually a problem you want to solve? 

And if – and only if – it is a problem, what is step one to solving it?

Ask: Is your clutter actually a problem? 

Only you can answer this question for yourself and your family. Does clutter cause you stress? Is it making your home and the life you live in it less enjoyable?

If not, no problem. If it does, then think about getting to a place where you have less stuff than whatever level makes you feel crowded and overtaxed.  

Step Zero: make a plan … to plan

I’m shamelessly stealing this from Kendra Adachi – aka The Lazy Genius – when she recently laid out the steps to finish any project. Decluttering is always a project, by the way.

Step one is to make date with yourself to … think about the project. Not even to actually start on it. Just to think about what it is and how you’ll accomplish it and what matters about it to you.

So … you can do this right now. Put it on your mental – or better yet – your actual calendar. When will it be. After dinner later this week? A weekend morning? Lunch hour? Pick a time any time.

Then … I asked myself …

So, if clutter is a problem, how can the Master Plan Method help you? Because the master plan method can help you do just about anything. Let’s try applying it here!

Dream away your clutter

(I do not dream of labor)

Look you’re never going to make it go away if you don’t have a powerful reason to try.

So focus on the purpose of your decluttering.

Identifying the “why” behind decluttering is crucial to the process, as it will help determine the end goal and keep motivation high.

Discover

categorizing clutter before starting a project.

Distill

Think about an aesthetic goal around your items and then try to align your stuff with this goal. 

Is there stuff you’re hanging on to because you bought it for an event? Or you were gifted it by someone else and it’s not your taste, but you didn’t want to hurt their feelings? 

Or perhaps it’s something you’ve purchased yourself for an earlier version of yourself. And now you are being held in place by stuff or you’ve set them aside in a disaster room of boxes, but you can’t get them out of your house.

Draft

This is where the rubber meets the road. And it might be where you start to actually get your hands dirty or pull some things out of their containers and look at them.

Develop

And hey … don’t beat yourself up about having things you identify as clutter in your life right now.

This is your permission slip to forgive yourself.

We live in America. We live cluttered, chaotic lives. And we will accumulate some clutter. Give yourself a little grace. And pick a time to make a plan … to get yourself to a level of clutter that you and everyone in your household can live with.

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • Why we feel so bad about our clutter. 
  • How to reframe decluttering and the items that fill your life and home. 
  • Ways to apply master plan thinking to almost any project…even decluttering.   

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Do you have objects in your life in your house that you would categorize as clutter? Probably you do. I know I do. And this is a hot button issue for my clients and my ready to remodel students as well. decluttering sometimes feels like our national pastime, or problem, and HGTV has multiple shows devoted to the topic or if you prefer your Marie Kondo straight from the source her shows on Netflix, I’ve talked in the past about how to manage clutter in your life with design. And that’s all well and good. 

But today, I want to talk about this from another angle. First, is the so-called clutter in your life, actually a problem you want to solve? And if and only if it is, what is step one, to solving it. Hey there, welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes and helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 1608. And this episode is for everyone. 

You don’t need to be planning changes to the architecture of your home to find this useful. Maybe you just listen to this podcast because you’d like to hear me natter on about mid-century stuff. You might live in an apartment, a dorm, and a house that’s not mid-century, you probably still do have things in your life that you want to get rid of. I’m not saying you should. I’m not saying you must, I’m saying you probably want to. Or perhaps you’re a future ready to remodel student just waiting for your moment to jump on board and join the program. 

Well, first off, let me just say that right now is a perfect moment because we just kicked off a new member on the ReMod Squad. And we’re going to be doing extra Office Hours calls bi weekly instead of that’s every two weeks, not twice a week instead of monthly for the next couple of months. And I would love to have you come join the party. The first call will be on the first Monday of next month, March 4. So do this decluttering mental exercise and then you know, join ready to remodel hop on over to mid mod dash midwest.com/ready If you’re ready to get started. 

But if you are not a person who wants to DIY your home improvement plans, if you’re perhaps someone who might be hiring an architect, perhaps mid Midwest, to plan your home update on your behalf. This is still a really effective episode and exercise. This is something you can do yourself and that an architect cannot do for you. I can’t declutter your house. But putting your hands on all your things, realizing that some of them are not needed, hurray, maybe you don’t need more storage, or that some of them are absolutely essential to your life. 

And in fact, you might need to create a project specific room in your house for one of these types of objects has been tucked away out of sight out of mind for too long, and deserves to be front and center in your daily life, the selling room, the woodworking room, a library. If that’s you, then Hi. Great to meet you. I’m going to be talking about the way we apply our masterplan philosophy to everything you could ever do in this episode. And if you’re thinking of working with mid Midwest, then now is a great time to get started. 

We’re still early in 2024. And the design things that you do now have a chance of getting done this year. So it’s time to start setting your master plans in motion. Reach out today. And let’s have a conversation, no pressure, I would expect you to agree to anything. But if you’re wondering how a masterplan could benefit your home, your family your life, let’s schedule an appointment to chat about your house, walk your fingers over to mid mod dash midwest.com/services and tap on the Apply to work with us button. 

And one more link I need to say out loud is the show notes for today’s episode will be available with a transcript of everything I’m about to say to you on the website at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1608. 

So let’s get into talking about clutter. Now, I’m not going to use this episode to tell you, you should get rid of all your clutter, or even that you should categorize your possessions as clutter, even the ones you have a lot of. So if you were hoping you could use this episode to play around your spouse and have me tell them they need to get rid of their collections. Sorry, this isn’t that. 

Now, you may want to get less stuff in your life. And if so I’ll throw out right away a few methodologies you might use if you’re trying to persuade yourself to let some things go. There are a number of philosophies around the concept of decluttering. There’s a room by room method where you gather all the types of things, the tools, the cooking equipment, that’s probably in the kitchen, all the clothing in the bedrooms, get the stuff out of storage and bring all the clothes to one room, then break it down by categories by person in the household by size by Hobby by season. 

This can be a useful way to persuade other people or to persuade yourself to let go of things that you might not miss or that you don’t need because you’ve got multiples of them. If you worry that you need to hang on to something because you might miss it later or you might need it later. Another method you can easily use to allay that fear is to put things into a container and set them aside for an amount of time, an era a period a season. 

People do this by setting all the hangers in their closet backwards and then turning them forward as they were an item of clothing at the end of the year. If there’s something still turned backwards it means you have been touched in a year, you can also put things literally away in a box, and just decide whether you miss it. Do you still need things you haven’t thought of in a year? But examples like that don’t always connect to reality. That’s the sort of thing that pops up on Home Improvement advice blogs, or on HGTV type decluttering shows. 

But some of those clothing might be for special occasions, a wedding outfit, a Dirty Jobs outfit, and not all of us have the cash to constantly replace specialty items. So hanging on to them can make a lot of sense, I don’t think you need to get rid of anything you don’t want to. My recommendation is not that you have less stuff than your neighbor. That stuff than the minimalist people in homes you

see on TV, who by the way, can probably shell out cash to replace any item they’ve once owned, and gotten rid of if they need it. Instead, I do encourage you to have less stuff than whatever amount of stuff makes you feel crowded and overtaxed. That’s really, to me what clutter means it’s having more than you need, and having it exist in a state of disorganization that bothers you, or you know, the other people in your household, it’s absolutely possible that sometimes when you have too much stuff to fit in your house, you might feel you need more space to contain the objects and tools, and facilitations and clothing of your hobbies. 

Sometimes you can choose to get rid of those objects, and suddenly you’re granted more space. So this is a question that I hit on. Often when I’m talking to people about remodeling, about their space about what they need. One thing that often comes up is more storage. I don’t make it my business to judge whether people do or do not need more storage. I think it’s a separate question. Whether the space you needed is just configuring what you have in a better way, or perhaps having more to put things into one thing I think you can always do more easily than adding on though is to reorganize, reconfigure the space you have to work better. And that is absolutely something that can design can do for you. 

But today, I said we were going to talk about clutter. And so I want to talk about the psychology of having things and getting rid of things from two directions. The first is to ask yourself what your personal moral value of clutter is. And I want you to mostly let go of it. And the second is how to practically approach having less stuff than you yourself want. But let’s talk about that. decluttering having less stuff can be a good thing, if it is for you for your mental clarity, your happiness, your sense of ready to start on new things. 

But decluttering is not necessarily a moral good in the world. And it’s certainly not more important than other ways to make a difference in the world. When people describe having too much clutter, too much stuff. There’s a lot of moral outrage attached to that concept. And Americans love to beat ourselves up and to beat each other up for how much we accumulate. But whenever this happens, whenever there’s a moral outrage around something, I get suspicious, it reminds me of recycling. 

Look, I recycle. And I hope you do too. It feels like a kick in the guts to planet earth to throw things right into the trash. But even as I walk, wash out my yogurt containers and put them in the bin, I often reflect on the idea that the concept of recycling was introduced by the plastic industry in the 1970s as a marketing smokescreen to cover up the fact that they had created a new material and introduced it into our consumer economy, which had no endpoint and it was creating huge new problems. Unlike the glass milk bottles, which can be rinsed and reused, or metal containers, which could be scrapped and repurposed plastic was and is fundamentally single use. That was true then, and it’s still true now. 

Even when something is made from recycled plastic, it’s not the same quality of plastic that it was before. It can only be downcycled. Glass can be cleaned and melted down and turned into more glass of equal quality metal for the most part the same. And that’s that’s where people steal copper wires out of buildings, for example. But plastic in its first incarnation is not the same thing ever again, once it’s reused, and it can be reused at best. Only once.

Knowing all of this completely marketing executives in the plastic industry decided to put about the idea that they would gather back our plastic items and repurpose them, and that it was our consumer responsibility to gather those items and help them to do it. Well. Municipalities got on board. And for decades, we’ve all been participating in this scheme, which has been effectively fruitless. less than 10% of all plastics produced have ever been recycled. I don’t say this to get you down, but I’m going to give another example. 

Similarly, the concept of the carbon footprint, the idea of how much non renewable resources you meet your neighbor individuals use in our lifetime and is based on our daily choices is useful is a helpful metric we should pay attention to and it was first introduced actually not by marketing executives but by hopefully environmental activists.

And in this case, it was hijacked and very heavily pushed in the early 2000s. By the marketing firm hired by British Petroleum, you might know them as BP, the idea they wanted to get into our heads was just the same as plastic recycling, the carbon footprint calculator that they released and propagated everywhere was meant to make you feel that your energy consumption was your fault, and the fault of your neighbors, and that we should all pay attention to that and feel guilty about ourselves rather than looking for the man behind the curtain. Big Oil, big corporate interests. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, Google it. 

But okay, this is an episode about clutter, not about carbon footprints or plastic recycling. If you’re shrugging your shoulders at me, you already knew this. Good for you. If you did not know this, Hi, welcome to the revolution. But I want to talk about the idea of the moral outrage around clutter, we have too much stuff, it’s all our fault feel bad about it, that cycle of feeling bad about it is never helpful. And similarly to plastic.

All the stuff we have in our homes, much of a plastic, we have a certain amount of consumer choice. Sure, we all make personal choices. But we also live in a capitalistic society where we have to live our daily busy lives. We have to we choose do we want to buy the stuff for all sorts of reasons of convenience, practicality, efficiency, psychology, preference, personal expression, love and affection for ourselves and for other people, our animals? 

And then those things add up in our houses. So what’s the point of this first diversion, don’t beat yourself up. This is not an episode about berating yourself, holding your hands tighter becoming a better person, and divesting yourself of all extra stuff. No, it’s an episode about finding balance you matching up yourself to what you want.

And then dealing with things to the extent that you want to deal with them and moving forward. So the second direction I want to come from is if you want to have less stuff than you have, you need a helpful way to think about that as a project. Because getting rid of stuff is a project. It’s partly part of our daily lives. But it’s not what you’re going to do every Monday morning before you get out of the house. 

So when we think about projects, I think about the lazy genius. And as I was preparing to record this, I thought as I often do about a recent lazy genius podcast episode just dropped in the last couple of weeks by Kendra Adichie, she was talking about how to encourage yourself to complete a project. I love her so much. And this is nothing new, nothing she hasn’t said before. But it felt so profound that as I was listening to her, I had to stop and take notes while I was walking Roxy, which is how I often respond to podcasts that I listened to in the morning.

Now I’m going to cover her points very lightly here, because if you want to know more, and if you’d just like some of her kind, big sister energy added on top of Dare I say my own, go check it out. It’s her episode number 353. In it, she lays out four ways to recognize something that is a project rather than a daily part of your life. 

And then seven steps you can follow to make a project actually happen. I want to focus on that. Because the first step is just to identify a time, not when you will do a project. But when you will make a plan for how to do that project. Remember, the first step is not to do the thing. The first step is not even to make a plan. The first step is to realistically identify in your head, when you will have a little bit of leisure or a little bit of open space or you will make some to think about that project. This is what I loved so much that made me stop and laugh out loud. And then make a note, which is to acknowledge that we don’t make realistic time and space to do unusual things in our lives. And yes, decluttering is unusual. 

You don’t usually wake up in the morning and declutter a little bit before you get your whole family out the door to start the day. So it’s to give yourself the credit to say it’s not even that you need to make time to do it. On Saturday, I will Declutter.

Instead, it’s on Saturday, I will sit down with a cup of coffee for 15 minutes. And think about what decluttering means and how I’m going to go about this project. And what the end point of that project is. So I’ll know I’ve finished it and more. If you fail to plan you plan to fail. And if you fail to put time on a calendar to calm down and make a plan, you plan to fail. I love this so much. I needed to hear it and you probably need to hear it too. This is absolutely true times a billion about by the way, your remodeling plans. 

You won’t remodel without a plan and you won’t plan your remodel without a plan of when you’re going to plan. So do yourself a favor and set some times on the calendar. Make some holes in your weekly routine when you could think about when you’ll look at your big picture. So you need to make a date with yourself to declutter. It’s not just a matter of feeling bad or tripping on something and having too much stuff and then just getting rid of it somehow. Instead, give yourself a little grace and make a date with yourself and possibly someone else to think about how decluttering effects you know seriously. 

Right now I am not saying this to you and philosophical way. I’m asking you, when, if you’re listening to this episode with intensity, you’re thinking you want to declutter?

When are you going to make a date with yourself in the near future, to think about the decluttering that’s been on your mind, clearing kitchen cabinets, making extra space in the garage to pull a car back in now that winter is over, paring down special project tools for hobby who no longer really pursue getting rid of clothes, you don’t put the kids in anymore, whatever it is for you. When will you make a date with yourself? Not to do it.

But just to think about it is they’re thinking about it right now. You’re listening to this podcast. But you’re also just listening and multitasking driving to work walking the dog doing the dishes? I mean, what are you doing? Actually,

I would love to know, if you want to send me a DM on Instagram and tell me what it is you do while you listen to the podcast? I would be delighted I promise I’ll answer. So I may be giving you ideas for what to declutter, and when, but it’s not your time, unless it is grab your tablet, your phone or piece of paper and figure out when you’re going to make those things happen. Then, when you do that, when you sit down to think about it to start your time, I have a think since I’ve hopefully gotten you into the habit of thinking about your life. In terms of the master plan method, we can apply the Master Plan method to decluttering. 

Now, I won’t say you can actually apply the Master Plan method to everything in your life large and small. To a large and small comprehensive project of decluttering. Even but you know what? Let’s try it. Here’s the short version, I’m gonna go this is spontaneous dream, can you apply dream to a decluttering project?

You absolutely can. In fact, you should. You must.

If you don’t know what you your, your life needs, you won’t take it on. So you need to want to do it or you’ll get lost in the middle. And at the end, you won’t really have made any difference. You’ll just have moved things around. How will you know what your decluttering project has been? If you don’t identify your why what you’re trying to do? So? Well, it might be because you’ve got too much stuff. But that’s pretty generic. Let’s dig a little deeper. Do you have things now that you feel bad about not using which is preventing you from starting on other projects with new equipment? 

Do you have too many things that are taking up space that’s preventing you from doing other tasks. I had a lovely chat recently with a prospective masterplan client just a few weeks ago, who were struggling because their kids are getting a little older. They’re in a transitional moment from elementary school craft kind of projects to preteens who want to do homework and have their friends over. And they have a space right in their main living area that they’ve dedicated to kid Art Craft Room, but it’s feeling inactivated, it’s dark, it needs more natural light, it also needs organization, it probably needs some transition from child art supplies to teen art supplies. 

And at the same time, they’re thinking about the transitions in their house overall, how activities are gonna move from one space to another. So they’ll have space in their life, not just have little kids under their eye, right around the corner from the kitchen. But have teens getting to have some private separate area, perhaps in the basement to go downstairs have private conversations, watch movies, their parents don’t want to hear, have fun, not in their parents line of vision. This is huge. And this is foundational, a very strong motivation for why they want to make changes right now. 

Yes, the inevitable changes of their kids growing up, but also their desire to support and protect their kids lives. And to encourage them to grow into from curious creative children into enthusiastic, independent teens. That’s really important. And having that y can drive a lot of design decisions that can help you choose to put in time effort, remodel, declutter, whatever it is. This is truly powerful dream thinking.

And I don’t know that this couple I was talking to had this in their minds exactly that way. But to me, that’s what struck me about what they were asking. If we decide to go forward on their project together. I will confirm this with them, of course as their why but to me, it feels like a fundamental reason to make changes to their house and to begin, perhaps by decluttering, some of those youthful art supplies. So that kind of why behind your plans. 

I’d love to know what you have. So when you’re thinking of I want to declutter. It’s not just the Marie Kondo energy, it’s what you want to do with the space what you want to do with less stuff with easier to put your hands on stuff what the clutter is holding you back from. Okay, so that was dream we did it. How about discover? Yeah, I can see this being useful. Before You Dig into a project, you need to know what project you’re digging into. Take a little stock, where is there clutter adrift in your house? Where is it piling up? How long has it been going on? For what types of things feel like the biggest burden to you and your partner or into your kids if they’re old enough to be involved? 

Does anyone else have the experience of being a teen or pre teen and deciding you’re going to organize your room and pulling literally everything you own out of the drawers onto the floor so you could see it all and then I don’t know it got dark or my blood sugar dropped or I just look Did it and went, Oh, crap. Now I have made a huge mess in my room. And I have no desire anymore to organize or purge or even to put it all back where it was.

Is this just me? Tell me I’m not alone. I’ve talked to other people who’ve done this, actually. So are you one of them. This is what you do not want to do on a whole home scale. What’s overwhelming in a teenager’s room will break your brain if you do it in your house. Don’t do that in your house. So take a little moment to apply the discovery phase to decluttering. B breaking into categories and think about where and what kinds of clutter extra stuff you’re really dealing with. Now to distill is on the face a bit perhaps less useful. 

Again, I can make a case for it. Going back to high school, yes, I was on the debate team. So here’s how I would think about distill in the context of extra stuff in your house. Like I was saying earlier, we sometimes accumulate things mindlessly or based on a case by case urgent need, and that can be helpful to think about an aesthetic goal around that. So where in your life right now? Are you Where would you like to be, there might be stuff you’re hanging on to because you bought it for an event, you were gifted it by someone else, it’s not your taste, you didn’t want to hurt their feelings, and you didn’t have that thing. So you just started using it. 

But perhaps it doesn’t personally perfectly intersect with your taste your life. But perhaps it’s something you’ve purchased yourself. You’ve got an earlier version of yourself being held in place by clutter. Perhaps you have those things and you’ve set them aside in a disaster room of boxes, but you can’t get them out of your house. Before these things or remnants of your life before you got together with your partner or when you were a student or before parenthood.

Give a little thought to the the taste the style of the things in your house. And I don’t just mean their aesthetic, but their purpose. Perhaps this can help you set a vision for what kind of things you need in your house and more easily identify what does and what does not belong. 

Now this isn’t for everyone, it’s not going to help you sort things physically out of your kitchen that are after their expiration date, for example, but it can help you think about the big picture. Not the why, but the what of the things you have in your house. And of course, draft can be easily manipulated to fit a decluttering project.

This is where the rubber meets the road. And it might be where you start to actually get your hands dirty. Or pull some things out of their containers and look at them, we can turn to Marie Kondo host of her own Netflix shelter show now and ask her the universal question. Does it spark joy? It’s a particularly useful question for her if I remember correctly, because yes, of course, I went through a marie kondo phase. To get all the clutter in one category together and look at them together. I always think of this as the cheat code that she used.

Yes, her fundamental vision was Does it spark joy. But when you actually see 12 umbrellas all wound up neatly next to each other. Some of them in colors you don’t like or with weird product logos on them. You don’t have to ask yourself whether six of those spark joy, you can just get rid of them, drop them straight into the goodwill bag. 

So maybe you have to come to a little bit of self evaluation about the last few. But pulling everything of the same type in is actually her. I don’t need to ask about joy move. And you can use this on yourself to to naturally help yourself let go of some of the things with great mental ease.

For developing, I don’t know if there’s going to be a masterplan vision for clutter. I’m not going to tell you that once you remove some of the excess stuff from your life, you can set your intentions and then become the type of person who never accumulates and access again. Yeah, pull the other one. But here’s the bottom line. This is your permission slip to forgive yourself.

We live in America, we live cluttered, chaotic lives, we will accumulate some clutter. But taking this approach, giving yourself a little grace. And then a big picture plan to get yourself to a level of clutter that you and everyone in your household can live with is a really wonderful restorative thing to do for yourself. So what are you going to think about getting rid of? And more importantly, when not? Are you going to do it? But when are you going to make time to make a plan for how you reduce a little bit of the clutter in your life. And by the way, by clutter? I mean the things that you yourself, don’t want to hang on to anymore.

All right, so here’s a little pep talk to get you moving on whatever is going on in your life. Whether your plans are to Yes, pick a time in the near future, to think about your decluttering project or any other project. Or to get moving on your bigger picture home plans. I want you to know that now is the right time to start. Everything that it’s important to you can do better with a bigger planning horizon. 

So whether your plans are for de cluttering in the next week, the next month or the next year. Or more specifically, whether your home improvement plans are for something you can do this week, this month, this year or in the next couple of years. The sooner you start giving a little bit of time to the planning to the thinking to the asking yourself why, the better off you’ll be.

The theme in my life so many times lately has been that the bigger stretch of time I have between thinking about an action and taking it, the better off I am, the more I enjoy that action. The less recriminations I give myself about it, the more competently I go into it, the better. So I want you to just feel empowered to take action right now, even if that action is just making a date with yourself to think about what you’re doing and why it’s so powerful to begin something. 

And beginning doesn’t need to mean making a hole in the wall, or even taking out everything from the drawers in order to categorize them. Beginning begins with a plan. So now is the right time to start. And I hope you feel like you can make a difference. On the let’s take action this weekend front. Making a date with yourself to plan a de clutter time is absolutely worthwhile. But we’re also starting to get into the time of year when it’s possible to do outdoor projects. And because last week, I talked to you about the fun you can have by painting something, particularly painting your front door. I also want to make sure that when you’re painting your front door, you’re thinking about painting the storm door to match. 

Now, not everybody has a storm door. But here in the Midwest, they’re very common, particularly on older mid-century homes. If you’re planning a replacement project to put in a brand new air sealed high insulation efficiency, mid-century style front door, you may find you don’t even need one. But if you’re dealing with an original front door that may have sat a little unevenly on its pins, that may little little bit of air move in and out around it. 

A storm door can be a marvelous thing to create an air seal at the edge of your house. It can also be really pleasant to leave your front door standing open so that your dog your toddlers, or you can glance out at people passing by on the street. But the downside of the storm door is it cuts down on the clear area to show off your charmingly shaped original mid-century or modern update front door. And then it makes the color field of that paint your front door your favorite color, happiness smaller. 

So fix the problem. Paint all the visible parts of the storm door everything that’s not glass, the same color as the door itself. The glance from the street version will be that you have a whole door of the same color rather than a front door and your favorite orange, yellow or green. And then a white gray or black outline around it, cutting down that square footage. If you feel anxious about painting a storm door, it’s not an expensive object. Take a deep breath and make your house your own. Paint your storm door the same color as your front door and you won’t regret it. I promise. 

Clutter and decluttering are such personal issues. I know you have opinions about where you should be in the world. But I hope that today’s episode has given you a little grace to think about what you actually want to do about this. If you’re looking for more advice on how to shape your home around the clutter or collections that you have, then check out episode 308 design tips to help you fight clutter which talks about the tools and strategies and moves I use for my clients to help them contain the objects in their lives in a way they would like to. 

One more reminder, today is the perfect time to join us inside of ready to remodel before we kick off our next ReMod Squad. If that’s you, I hope I’m going to see you at the Monday office scholars call next week and if not well and keep on listening. Good modern modeler. You’re doing great regardless how much or little clutter you have in your life.

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