Tag: decluttering

Decluttering doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

19 min readThis decluttering episode is not about perfectionism. It is about best fit storage solutions. About planning realistic storage with a little bit of squish. Real-world answers that fit you and your approach to the stuff in your life.

That said, a solid declutter is a great “step zero” for a remodel plan—especially one focused on storage solutions.

I’ve talked about clutter and decluttering before on the podcast. If you feel inspired after listening, check out these past episodes… 

  • Episode 206 – Exploring various ways of thinking about decluttering.
  • Episode 308 – Looking at how your existing house layout affects clutter accumulation and storage problems.
  • Episode 1608-Step-by-step advice for completing a project from Kendra Adachi, The Lazy Genius.

I love Kendra Adachi’s work and have recommended her a number of times. Her messages of matching your activities to your energy level, to letting go of things that don’t serve you and of being kind to yourself resonate with me. I recently found Tracy McCubbin’s book, Making Space, Clutter Free: The Last Book on Decluttering You’ll Ever Need and her work resonated in a similar way. 

Clutter is not random. The storage stuff in our homes carries meaning and emotion behind it, and trying to get rid of things can be a challenge if you aren’t acknowledging why they are important to you. When looking at the psychological barriers to letting go Tracy names the “clutter blocks” we all experience…

  • Your stuff is keeping you in the past. Objects become physical manifestations of memories, making it hard to let go of children’s artwork, outdated clothing from past versions of your life, or tools for hobbies you no longer pursue.
  • Shopping to feel happy. Purchasing items as an activity brings temporary joy, but things pile up unused.
  • Stuff as a visual to-do list. Unfinished projects, paperwork, and unreturned items become to-do lists in pile form.
  • Fantasy items for a fantasy life. Keeping gear, clothing, or equipment for a life you aren’t actually leading.
  • Feeling like you aren’t“worth” your good stuff. Storing designer clothes, unlit candles, or good china away out of fear of damaging them, rather than using and enjoying them today.
  • Being trapped with other people’s stuff. Holding onto family heirlooms or estate items out of an “Antiques Roadshow mentality” over their unknown monetary or sentimental value.
  • The sunk cost fallacy. Punishing yourself by keeping clothes that don’t fit or tools you don’t enjoy simply because you paid good money for them.

Now, we might not experience every one of these blocks. But most of us experience more than one. And we don’t need to resolve them all before we being to improve our storage options. Everyone’s goal isn’t a minimalist, magazine tidy home. Most of us just want orderly spaces that work for us and our families, so we aren’t tripping over shoes every time we walk through the door.   

Parkinson’s Law tells us that work expands to fit the available time for its completion—and the same is true of clutter; we tend to fill up our living areas with all the stuff they will hold. Because we do tend to fill out spaces, you’ll probably have to purge at least a bit before you organize. You can’t successfully organize pure clutter. So, I think Tracy’s method might be helpful as an initial step. 

While you don’t need to get rid of everything you own, we don’t want to do is design a house or big enough to hold everything you would keep if you never asked yourself if the things you’re keeping really mattered. It’s not a good use of your time, money, and energy to just create space for things instead of space for living. And to be perfectly frank, if budget is an object, if you are worried about whether you can afford all the things you want to have in your remodel, one of the most expensive things you can do in a remodel is add new square footage. Expanding the footprint of your house in any way to push out an addition, to grow the volume of the house, is more expensive than anything you would do to change things up inside the house. Not necessarily one-to-one. 

But clutter isn’t just about you or your stuff…the design of your house influences how clutter accumulates and how objects pile up. If there isn’t a right, accessible place in the house to put things away, your stuff will always just explode out of an ill-suited spot back into clutter. Even if you’ve done a really thorough purge.

I’m going to encourage you to think of decluttering not as a virtuous activity, but as one step in the process of designing a remodel that fits your life and budget. Maybe add this to your Discover step. And as you’re looking at all of the things that are accumulated in your house that need better storage solutions, remember to ask yourself why those things are adding up? What meaning do they have? What emotion is lurking behind and underneath them? And does knowing that help you put them in a better place or get rid of them entirely? 

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Before I say a single word about decluttering before a remodel, I want to make one thing clear. This is not an episode about perfectionism. This is not an episode about determination and purging every unnecessary object from your life. This is about best fit solutions. This is about planning realistic storage with a little bit of squish. Real-world answers that fit you and your whole family and your approach to the stuff in your life. 

That said, a solid declutter is a great step zero for a remodel plan, especially one focused on storage solutions. So today we’re going to talk about the objects in our lives and why we’re hanging on to them. Yeah, you and me both. And if knowing why we are hanging on to them makes it a little easier to let some go. 

Hey there. Welcome back to Mid-Mod Rebodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2602. Now, um, as I said last week, this whole season is going to be connected to the idea of great mid-century storage solutions for your home. 

And I wrote a free PDF guide that goes with the season at large and will walk you through the process of taking a master plan approach to storage in your life. What is important for you, for your family and your personal preferences, what’s going on with the house that you have, what your taste has to say about this, and then how to seek out solutions and boil them into your actual plan of action. It’s also linked to a handy Pinterest board that I’ve been creating in real time to go along with this season and I’ll continue to add to. And I think it’s just a great place to get started. 

So grab that from the show notes page at midmodest.com slash 2602, or you can go directly to grab it from midmodest.com slash storage. Okay. Um here’s the thing. When you are planning solutions to storage, you’ve got to seek out clutter. And we want to solve our storage problems at the source. 

So anywhere you have a tendency to accumulate clutter in your house may indicate a lack of sufficient storage or a lack of the correct storage. And it’s important to know which problem of those two, lack of sufficient or lack of correct, you are trying to solve before you solve it. Taking a quick thought experiment stroll or a physical stroll around your house can highlight where your storage needs are most prominent by identifying where there are piles of things, or an object out of place, or where a drawer is ajar because you needed to fold everything up perfectly before it all fit in there. 

Now, you can organize and tidy these extra objects, but if there’s not just a place in the house to put something away, but an easy and accessible, a right place in the house to put everything away, the storage will also always just explode back into clutter. So as I said at the top of the episode, I am going to advise you to look for a sweet spot in paring down your collections to size your proper storage. Um, I’ve already done an entire episode. 

I’m gonna do a little rundown on the episodes I’ve done in the past about decluttering. And they are all helpful. And getting rid of some things is a good idea. But I’m not pushing you towards some sort of Spartan minimalism here. I’m not telling you that you should hark back to the traumatic 90s diet culture of my youth or whatever crazy diet culture we’re in today and think about like using your willpower and a light summer flu to suddenly drop two pant sizes and get rid of all your other pants, and then you’ll be a perfect person for the rest of your life. That is not a long-lasting solution to pants, and it’s not a long-lasting solution to stuff. 

So instead, we want to fit storage solutions with a little bit of squish for your everyday life. And we want to think about storage throughout the rest of the season in such a way that you don’t have to take step 12 extra steps and cross a room to put something where it goes. Um, you shouldn’t have to neatly organize every drawer before all the things that belong in it fit into it. And the storage solutions that are important for you also need to work for every member of your household and be easy to follow by all the members of your household. 

So, um with all that said, let’s talk about how to properly think about extra stuff or just all the stuff that you have. I’ve talked about this since the very beginning. In the second season, episode 206. I talked about various ways of thinking about decluttering. And going back to that episode, I was reminded that there is this uh law of efficiency in work planning. Parkinson’s law says that work will expand to a fit the available time for its completion. And this is absolutely true of clutter and stuff and collections in our spaces. 

We tend to fill up our homes, our living areas, with all the stuff that they will hold. So when we’re thinking about organizing, when we’re thinking about planning for storage, we’ve got to purge before we organize. You can’t organize pure clutter. And if we’re going to uh probably the most famous name in getting rid of extra stuff from the last several decades will point to Marie Kondo, um touching every object in your life, judging whether or not it brings you, well, it sparks you joy, if I remember correctly. Um a Marie Kondo purge of your things can be lovely. I did it myself in the, oh, I think in the 2010s. And lo and behold, I have I have accumulated more objects since then. It’s not a permanent solution, but her objects, her methods can really help. 

I have also talked about how the design of your house being an influence on how clutter accumulates and how objects pile up. So if you’re curious about that, on what the existing layout of your house might be doing to affect the way that you’ve got storage problems, um episode 308 from the third season might be a really good jumping off point. 

And this kind of gets to that discovery process I was talking about last week, where you follow yourself around the house mentally, watching for where you’re setting things down. As I put it in that episode, this is particularly useful if you’ve been having a rough week so far or a bit of a rough go of it. You may, however, this this experiment may already be in progress. Where are there piles in your house? Take stock and now work on them. In that episode, I also talk a little bit about apartment therapy, which was a blog from the heyday of the blogging era with some great advice on it that resulted in a book written by its uh the blogger, Maxwell Ryan. He uh, among other things, had a lot of great small-paced storage solutions because he was a New Yorker and he was talking about primarily New York-based apartments and how to make them more beautiful, more warm, more colorful, but also better filled with storage. 

And he was most interested in solving the solution at the entry point to the apartment. He recommended something called a landing strip, which was a place to filter out clutter at the door, a place for shoes, for coats, for bags, for keys, a defined area where all of those things could be set down at the one entry point of the house. Now, your mid-century house may not have one entry point, and it may be harder than just having a hook for keys and a hook for one coat on the door, uh on the wall by the door, when you’ve got kids and multiple adults and a bunch of people all using the space together. But it’s still a useful place to jump off. 

And then about 10 seasons ago, uh episode 1608, I got into advice for decluttering from one of my favorite podcasters, uh, Kendra Adachi, whose podcast, The Lazy Genius, had a great episode on step-by-step advice for how to complete a project, any project, but specifically excellent advice for decluttering. So you might want to check out that framework for taking on a declutter project. 

But looking forward, I wanted to share in this season on storage a maybe more holistic approach to understanding the objects that we hang on to. I came across this book several years ago, and I’ve been wanting to talk about the podcast ever since, uh, called Making Space, Clutter Free, Making Space Clutter Free by Tracy McCubbin. This was published in 2019, and it deals with the underlying psychological issues of our stuff. Tracy is a house organizer professionally, and so she shares a bunch of examples of people she’s worked with and what was sort of holding them up from getting rid of their stuff. But I’m gonna give you some of the specifics in a moment, but I really think this idea of why we hang on to stuff is important. 

And just trying to get rid of things can be so challenging if you aren’t acknowledging why they’re important to you. Marie Condo also tried to get to this with her whole hold on to it, does it spark joy? If not, let it go, thank it for its service and send it out of your life. That’s great, but this is like, I don’t know, going to therapy for your things. If you don’t ask why, do you really know what you’re doing? Do you really care to do it all the way? In my job as a residential architect, I haven’t seen quite so much of the intimate insides of people’s storage as the author Tracy McCubbin has, but I really do validate some of the psychological sources of stuff that she highlights in her, as she describes them, clutter blocks. 

Um, I’m gonna go into more or less detail on some of these, which seem more or less relevant to me based on the things I see coming up again, again, and for my mid-century house clients, but I think each of these may ring a bell for you. The first clutter block is that your stuff is keeping you in the past. When the objects around you aren’t just things, but they are physical manifestations of your memories, it can feel really hard to let those things go without feeling like you’re losing the past too. 

And so this kind of hanging onto stuff covers a lot of children’s artwork or old outgrown things that you can’t get rid of. Old outdated clothing from past versions of your life, an old job or a different body type, or weather activities you don’t encounter anymore, um, dishes, or maybe even a whole room, formal dining setup for a type of hosting you don’t do anymore. Tools, craft supplies, etc., for a hobby you don’t have as much time for these days. 

Um, that last one, hey, fellow ADHD friends, are you holding on to the detritus from your past dozen hyperfixations in your house? How many of those are you coming back around for? Because maybe only some of them really need to stick. After she’s identified what a psychological block is and what kind of stuff this generally manifests as, she has what she describes as a bridge, which is how you sort of get beyond it, let it go. And the bridge for this one is to just recognize this for what it is and you take its power. Then you can keep one or two items that hold a good memory for you and let the rest of them go. This might fall into the category of like take a photograph of your stuff and then give it away. I don’t know. That always feels a little cheesy to me. 

But basically, if you find that you’re hanging on to things as an aid memoir, that’s not an efficient use of the your one wild and precious life or the storage in your house. Um, is that the second color block she calls up is that your stuff tells you who you are, that you’re shopping to feel happy. You’re you’re letting purchasing as an activity um give you joy, and then things pile up and they never even get used. This, to me, it’s funny. She wrote this book in 2019, and I was like, oh, this is what we did in the pandemic. We ordered stuff from the internet and waited for it to come, and it was like how time passed. 

That’s what I did in the pandemic. I tried to keep it to sort of I’m expecting one item of clothing or craft supply, or, oh, and it’s new fabric for the masks I’m sewing, and it’s coming in the mail, and I’m tracking it. It’s a new book. I’m following it across the country to me. Uh yeah, in those really weird days of the shutdown, I definitely did that. 

And I think we all can be guilty of a little bit of shopping to keep ourselves happy, but the bridge in this case is just look for other sources of dopamine. It’s also absolutely possible that sometimes you keep stuff because it’s the things you’re avoiding: uh paperwork, mail, unfinished projects, unreturned items, these kind of become a to-do list in pile form. Uh, and sadly, she has no magic bullet for this. She’s just like, look, you’ve got to go deal with your visible to-do lists. If you personally are a person who keeps your to-do list in pile form in plain sight, or perhaps even more obnoxiously, if you live with someone who needs to keep their to-do lists as piles, um, this sounds like my parents’ source of constant disagreement. 

My mom wants like a less cluttery house, and my dad needs to leave something on the steps so that he’ll remember to take it out with him next time, except then sometimes he doesn’t. Um raise your hand if this feels like someone you live with and love, or someone you are and you know it’s annoying your loved ones. This might be just the sort of thing that a storage solution needs to be created where yes, you can have a visible to-do list, you can have a pile of papers to be answered or objects to be moved to another space, but it can’t be in the main traffic areas. It can’t be blocking someone else’s access to their daily life. 

It’s gotta be we’ve gotta make a we’ve got to make a storage solution for that. Um, the fourth cutter block is fantasy stuff for your fantasy life, collections of clothing for trips you haven’t taken, crafts you don’t know how to do yet, equipment for cooking you don’t actually take on, exercise gear you don’t use. Basically, if you’ve got a bunch of the stuff in your life for a life you don’t lead, then the bridge to that is to focus on action instead of acquisition. Meaning maybe you start using the things you’ve been storing up, or maybe you let them go and focus on the hobbies you actually have right now. 

One interesting clutter block that can create a need for more room in your house than you really need is feeling like you’re not worth your good stuff, um, which might mean keeping, even displaying the good versions of things you never use. Designer clothes you store in a closet but don’t want to damage by wearing. A collection of unlit candles, unused bath salts, pleasant treats for the future that you just never get through. The good china on a shelf that never sees a dinner. 

The bridge for this is use it. Now you don’t need two sets of everything in your life. Now, sure, you don’t want to do yard work in your favorite new clothes, but you can let yourself use the good stuff today and appreciate it in the moment. I will say I’m about to get to the sixth one, which is also gonna feel related to this, but sometimes there is a sentimental reason to keep um some of the good stuff more on display than in use, but also I think whenever you’re keep finding yourself keeping multiple collections of something, you’ve got the daily use stuff and the stuff you almost never use. 

Ask yourself, do those really need to be two separate objects? Um the sixth uh clutter block is being trapped with other people’s stuff. This often looks like family heirlooms. Um, and it can be really hard for people to get rid of these because they’re like, what in my what if it was valuable? What if it was secretly really special? I’ve been told this was really precious once. Um Trace McGevin calls this the antiques roadshow mentality. 

People really worry that family items have an unknown monetary value, and they’re sure they have a sentimental value, so they can’t be gotten rid of. But again, like letting yourself use the good stuff, you should have stuff you like. Now, for us mid-century lovers, it might well be that the stuff you like is considered an antique. It might even have come from your grandparents or an estate sale, but only keep it if you like it. If you have multiple sets of china from previous generations, boxes of unsorted memorabilia, unlabeled photographs, and things from past family members, unused rooms filled with vintage furniture that’s in someone else’s style. 

This is a hard one. And particularly, I’m I’m in a sandwich generation. I’m not sandwiching myself, uh, which for which I’m grateful, but you know, I I have things in my home that belonged to my grandparents that my parents took on when they cleared out their house and didn’t have a place for. At some point, I will have many things in my life that belong or belonged to my parents, and I won’t want to get rid of that all right away. But keeping every possession of a past loved one doesn’t help you remember their life. It’s keeping you frozen in yours. 

So choose one or two things that really remind you of them, or one or two dozen things that really remind you of them, and let the rest go. And the seventh clutter block is the stuff you keep paying for in your mind. You paid good money for that and now you don’t want to let it go. This is the sunk cost fallacy of clutter. Yes, it sucks that you paid more for it than you got fun out of it, but don’t punish yourself by keeping it around. Let it go. 

This also catches a different psychological angle on the same things. Clothes you don’t fit anymore, exercise equipment you don’t use, tools and craft supplies you don’t enjoy. So, what do you do when you’ve touched all of these or any of these seven clutter blocks and realized, oh, this really this is me. This is why I have a basement full of stuff I don’t touch, never use, but it’s taking up all of my available out-of-the-way storage space. Well, it’s time for a perch. You sing the song from Frozen and you let it go. 

You can resell things if that feels like a fun project, but don’t let making that into a task stop you from getting rid of things. So if it’s easier to just give it away, if that’s faster and lets you live your life, do that. Here’s the biggest takeaway from this book, Making Space Clutter Free for me. Clutter is not random. Clutter, storage stuff has meaning. It has emotion behind it. You bought or were given that thing. You set a thing down on that surface and left it there. Why? Are you tapped on emotionally? Are you trying to remind yourself of something or out of space to put that away because the space to put it away is filled up with lurking emotional boulders? What’s up with that storage problem? 

So, sure, you can get out the big black trash bag energy and work yourself into an adrenaline spike and just get rid of a bunch of things. But will that really solve the problem at the source? No. So here’s what I want to leave you with. Let’s try to take the shame out of our stuff. My own example is that I am a natural minimalist in terms of clothing and a lot of food and lifestyle needs. I love routine. I do the same thing over and over again. I like to eat the same dinner every night. I certainly like to eat the same breakfast every morning. I wear the same clothes again and again and again through each season. The capsule wardrobe idea speaks to me. In fact, I effectively do it without really thinking about it. 

But my storage Achilles heel is never being able to let go of something that could potentially be used in a future house or craft project. And I come by this honestly, because there is stuff in my garage right now that I’ve never touched, and I don’t even know what it was for. Um, but it was just in case tools or supplies saved by my grandfather, cleared out of his house when he died more than 15 years ago, um, put into a storage unit for my parents, by my parents, um, which was then got cleared out and decommissioned when they moved and dumped on me. 

We had a yard sale out of my garage and a bunch of stuff that didn’t sell, is still in there. My dad has 44 acres of his own property to keep stuff on, and Lord help me, he’s got stuff in my garage, and when he’s not around anymore, all of things in his barn and garage and basement will become my responsibility as well. 

Long story short, I am not standing up on my high horse to tell you that I have all the answers to solving a clutter or a storage problem. Um, I’m not telling you this to give you a sense that you should or will get rid of your stuff, but I do want to open a possibility. Because what we don’t want to do is design a house or storage big enough to hold everything you would keep if you never asked yourself if the things you were keeping really mattered. That’s not a good use of your time, money, and energy to create space. 

And to be perfectly frank, if budget is an object, if you are worried about whether you can afford all the things you want to have in your remodel, one of the most expensive things you can do in a remodel is adding in new square footage, expanding the footprint of your house in any way to push out an addition, um to grow the volume of the house, basically. That’s more expensive than anything you would do to change things up inside the house. Not necessarily one-to-one. 

There’s probably some cheap, quick and dirty addition you could do that’s less expensive than a full, beautiful, perfect jewel box remodel of an interior space. But as a rule of thumb, it’s better to keep your house at the size that it is now and then do what we can with it. And if that means shifting activities, downgrading them so we don’t have to make your daily life worse, but we can move some storage out of daily life spaces into less important spaces. We can move, um, we can improve on some of your basement spaces, for example, if you’ve got it, if we can condense some storage space from all of the basement to some of the basement. One way or another, we can keep your whole remodel a little bit more surgical and precise if we’re not trying to fit it around every object you’ve ever accumulated in your whole life. 

But I also will end where I began by saying that I’m not recommending that you purge every unused daily object from your life. I’m not advocating for perfect minimalism. I don’t even think it’s necessary. We want to acknowledge and support your natural predilections. We want to study the way you and the way everyone else in your household accumulates things on a repeating cycle, and we want to create space that contains and supports all of that effectively. 

So, hopefully you may have found some category of things pop to your mind as I talked about these various clutter blocks and what causes people to feel hung up on hanging on to a particular type of thing that will let you let something go. Um, if you want to know more about it, the I only was quoting from sort of the first third of this book on making space clutter-free. And I think I would go ahead and recommend it. 

As you’re looking at all of the things that are accumulated in your house that need better storage solutions, remember to ask yourself why those things are adding up? What meaning do they have? What emotion is lurking behind and underneath them? And does knowing that help you put them in a better place or get rid of them entirely? 

I will link to all those previous decluttering episodes of the Mid Modern Model podcast that I mentioned on the show notes page, as well as putting all the information about this book if you’d like to go get it, describes itself as the last book on decluttering you’ll ever need. And I say bet, but I still think it’s a good one. And um, and yeah, I also think you might have a good time reading through my free resource on storage solutions for mid-century houses. All of that is going to be at the show notes page, midmod-midwest.com/2602. 

And I will be back next week to talk to you about vintage versus modern storage styles, um, both aesthetically and sort of procedurally, and how you can make the most of storage solutions in your home, whether it is a perfect time capsule that you’re trying to tune up, or whether it is already sort of flipped and you’re reinfusing it with a modernist uh mid century aesthetic. Uh, more on storage solutions here for the rest of the season. Catch you next week, mid mod remodeler.