I'm dreaming of...

...a totally organized house.

Maybe I'm OCD on top of everything else, but I can't stand the clutter and random single socks and piles of papers in my home.

I dream of the junk man coming to take away random crap I find in the basement or the dreaded "spare room."

I long for a clean work surface upon which to write and clear my thoughts.

I wish for bigger closets to contain my shoe collection. (oops.) There's no room in a closet for my boots so often they're strewn across the bedroom floor, like I'm a messy teenager again. Where's my Duran Duran poster, while I'm at it?

What's keeping me from getting it done?  Partly it's because there's just too much stuff... stuff I may refer to on occasion or stuff I may use once a year. Or stuff that is sentimental. Stuff from my Grandma, my great aunt, my childhood -- stuff I'd let myself feel guilty for getting rid of, but I just can't keep it all. I have letters that I wrote to my parents when I lived abroad. I have all the cards my mom received from friends and family upon my birth. What do I do with this growing collection of stuff, no matter how cool it is to see? What if I find that missing sock?

Would my happiness of a cleaned out house outweigh the guilt? 

I often think, in my sometimes-depressive state, what happens when I die? Who would be stuck cleaning up all this stuff?  I don't want anyone to be stuck with it. At that point, it will all end up getting trashed anyway so why not trash it now?

Have you cleaned out and simplified?

p.s. I'm also dreaming of a time when I ask fewer questions on my blog.

Comments

[Peeved Michelle]

Seriously, what do you do with the boots? I have three pairs of tall boots now and there really is no good storage solution.

I started out the year being very good about clutter and getting rid of things. Now, my house is a mess. Tomorrow, I am going on a decluttering rampage because we are having people over on Christmas Eve.

[lg]

I have 10+ pairs of tall boots (it's an addiction really . . . 4 of them are basic black riding boots . . . 2 of which are new this year) and read that you're supposed to take them to a cobbler at the end of the season, get them stuffed, and get boots trees or some such shit. Yeah, whatever, they usually get shoved into a big bin in March even though I have plenty of room in my closet. But, the downside of a massive closet is that the more space you have, the more shit you accumulate. And I don't even go anywhere!

Speaking of bins, I like to throw things into big bins and stick a label on them. Store them in the basement and you've de-cluttered, organized, and not actually gotten rid of anything. No fuss, no stress, no guilt -- just stacks of neatly labeled bins.

I am allergic to clutter and often throw away things that matter to people -- or things they were still using. Whoops. My dad was like that, too. We're annoying but, guess what? Our houses are always ready for company and I know where everything is!

(My big move helped me unload stuff BIG TIME. It helps to have someone with you -- maybe your mom. You can "ooh" and "ahh" and reminisce as you pull stuff out and decide what to keep.)

[Kristin]

Embrace the shoe addiction cause it ain't going away.

Tackle one tiny spot and make it clean. Start some bins fer sure. A save, a maybe save and a recycle bin. Then you can go back to the maybe save and move more to the recycle...

I do have an entire box of our letters and holy cow were we so un-PC! I may need to burn them lest we get sued for being totally nasty biatches.

[joanne]

Put all the mementoes into a regular box and then put it near a leaky pipe and forget about it. That's what happened to my box of old letters and whatnot. It was in my storage unit in my apartment. Rarely went into it and one day discovered a pipe had been leaking into the unit for months. Whole box ruined (among other things). Took away my decision making.