As part of my 2018 Project, I am spending a lot of time organizing and decluttering. Figuring out what to keep and what to let go of has brought to light the different ideas my husband and I have on what the house should look like and what level of clutter or "stuff" is acceptable and/or tolerable. It is just another area of cohabitation married couples must face.
The home my husband was living in when we met had less than 1200 sq. ft. He told me that after his divorce from his first wife, he went through the entire house and got rid of a ton of stuff he considered to be useless junk cluttering up the space. He said he liked living with open space because it made things feel bigger. When we started dating, his house definitely had a bit of the bachelor flavor in that there were piles of paperwork here and there and a pile of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor, but generally speaking, he still did not have a ton of stuff. As I moved in after the wedding, we did have to clean out closets and cabinets to make room for some of my things, but I did not spend a lot of time trying to infuse my decorating personality into the house as we knew we wouldn't be living there long. As soon as we sold my house and found a larger house with acreage to buy, we would be moving.
Fast forward three years and we have been living in that larger house for about two of them. I have slowly been unpacking and decorating, and while I focused on getting essentials like cookware, dishes, towels, and the like unpacked quickly, boxes of books and décor were pushed to the side because I didn't really know what to do with the stuff at the time. J was overwhelmed with the quantity of stuff I had that came out of the storage buildings and he continues to struggle with feeling like I have too much stuff. He would like our house to have a clean, rustic/country/western feel, with a room maybe having one large piece of nature photography on the walls and nothing else. He doesn't like a lot of knick-knacks sitting around and doesn't care for a lot of plants or flower arrangements serving as filler. I truly do admire and appreciate this aesthetic, but I don't want things to be quite this austere.
In contrast, I grew up in a home where decorating was one of my mom's hobbies and joys. Always a big thrifter and lover of old things, she decorated our home in a warm, welcoming, cluttered style. Little vignettes abound all over, comprised of lots of lovely, pretty things. Family heirlooms, whether large pie safes and wardrobes or a small porcelain trinket that belonged to her grandmother, are scattered throughout. Since I grew up in this environment, I find it very comforting but also a little overwhelming. My mom was a teacher, so she would use her time off in the summers to give the house a good scrub down. She also cleans by rearranging and redecorating for each season. While I like some aspects of my mom's decorating style, the intensive cleaning required to maintain it with a work schedule that doesn't afford me the summers off, has always kept me from drifting too far in that direction. However, encouragement from my mom when I was single had me buying and decorating with more than I should. I went antiquing a lot and came home with lots of little treasures. I think I felt this sense of guilt for not wanting/trying to do things more like her and I wanted to please her. Unfortunately, I've struggled with defining my own personal tolerance for clutter for a long time due to both guilt and sentimentality. I consider my childhood to be pretty idyllic and I really wanted to create that atmosphere in my own home. I guess I thought trying to decorate like my mom would create that, but all I seem to have found is a continual struggle to keep up with the bare minimum of housework along with my job, R's activities, and the outside chores around our place. It just feels like it is all too much.
Now, if you were to ask me which housecleaning chore I dislike the most, it would hands-down be dusting. And dusting is even LESS fun when you have a lot of knick-knacks and trinkets sitting around. Left to my own devices, I keep things pretty simple and choose to display a few collectibles here and there, mostly on wall shelves or tabletops, that can be dusted relatively quickly with the swipe of a Swiffer duster. I do like a plant or floral arrangement here or there and I like to bring in some pretty texture, whether it be a burlap runner or an embroidered dish towel. But, I want everything to be easily accessible for cleaning and I want to be able to quickly run the vacuum over the floor without having to move a bunch of stuff. I also want to keep flat surfaces from becoming collecting grounds for stacks of mail, paperwork, and other things. I freely admit I am just as bad as anyone for piling things on the kitchen bar but it drives me bonkers. And I really do see the value in J's love of negative space for making things seem less cluttered.
Another important factor to consider is frequency of use. How often things are used can be an indicator of whether they are worthy of taking up space. I think this is an area in which I can improve upon things. I know there are items in my kitchen drawers and cabinets that I do not use often enough to justify keeping and there are probably some duplicates of things, as well. How many sets of BBQ tools do you really need anyway? I am also thinking about the dishes we got when we got married. Currently, they are carefully displayed in our china cabinet along with pieces of vintage Fiesta and some other bric-a-brac, but everything is so layered that when it came a time when I normally would pull them out (aka Christmas lunch), the mere thought of navigating the puzzle to do so put me off and I pulled out our everyday Fiesta dishes instead. So, I started wondering about that. The dishes aren't fancy, high-priced china, but they are white and have a nice design. And, we did actually use them while living in J's house because I had nowhere else to store them and the Fiesta was in storage. But after eliminating the Fiesta mugs and thinking about storage space in our cabinets, I wonder if we should eliminate a set of dishes. Does it make sense to keep something only "for good" such that you never actually use it? More pondering to be done on this issue.
As I am working through the decluttering portion of my 2018 Project, I am beginning to let go of the guilt for not decorating my house per the standards or expectations of others. I don't have to turn the house topsy-turvy in decorating for each season; rather, I can keep one tub of things for each season to sprinkle throughout and let go of the rest, and I don't even have to do that much if I don't want to. And I am learning that I don't have to keep material possessions based on sentimentality. I can let go of some things and still be okay. In short, I believe I am starting to come around more to J's way of thinking on clutter or at the very least, I am on a good track to meet him somewhere in the middle at a level of clutter tolerance we both can live with.
What about you? What is your level of clutter tolerance?
The home my husband was living in when we met had less than 1200 sq. ft. He told me that after his divorce from his first wife, he went through the entire house and got rid of a ton of stuff he considered to be useless junk cluttering up the space. He said he liked living with open space because it made things feel bigger. When we started dating, his house definitely had a bit of the bachelor flavor in that there were piles of paperwork here and there and a pile of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor, but generally speaking, he still did not have a ton of stuff. As I moved in after the wedding, we did have to clean out closets and cabinets to make room for some of my things, but I did not spend a lot of time trying to infuse my decorating personality into the house as we knew we wouldn't be living there long. As soon as we sold my house and found a larger house with acreage to buy, we would be moving.
Fast forward three years and we have been living in that larger house for about two of them. I have slowly been unpacking and decorating, and while I focused on getting essentials like cookware, dishes, towels, and the like unpacked quickly, boxes of books and décor were pushed to the side because I didn't really know what to do with the stuff at the time. J was overwhelmed with the quantity of stuff I had that came out of the storage buildings and he continues to struggle with feeling like I have too much stuff. He would like our house to have a clean, rustic/country/western feel, with a room maybe having one large piece of nature photography on the walls and nothing else. He doesn't like a lot of knick-knacks sitting around and doesn't care for a lot of plants or flower arrangements serving as filler. I truly do admire and appreciate this aesthetic, but I don't want things to be quite this austere.
In contrast, I grew up in a home where decorating was one of my mom's hobbies and joys. Always a big thrifter and lover of old things, she decorated our home in a warm, welcoming, cluttered style. Little vignettes abound all over, comprised of lots of lovely, pretty things. Family heirlooms, whether large pie safes and wardrobes or a small porcelain trinket that belonged to her grandmother, are scattered throughout. Since I grew up in this environment, I find it very comforting but also a little overwhelming. My mom was a teacher, so she would use her time off in the summers to give the house a good scrub down. She also cleans by rearranging and redecorating for each season. While I like some aspects of my mom's decorating style, the intensive cleaning required to maintain it with a work schedule that doesn't afford me the summers off, has always kept me from drifting too far in that direction. However, encouragement from my mom when I was single had me buying and decorating with more than I should. I went antiquing a lot and came home with lots of little treasures. I think I felt this sense of guilt for not wanting/trying to do things more like her and I wanted to please her. Unfortunately, I've struggled with defining my own personal tolerance for clutter for a long time due to both guilt and sentimentality. I consider my childhood to be pretty idyllic and I really wanted to create that atmosphere in my own home. I guess I thought trying to decorate like my mom would create that, but all I seem to have found is a continual struggle to keep up with the bare minimum of housework along with my job, R's activities, and the outside chores around our place. It just feels like it is all too much.
Now, if you were to ask me which housecleaning chore I dislike the most, it would hands-down be dusting. And dusting is even LESS fun when you have a lot of knick-knacks and trinkets sitting around. Left to my own devices, I keep things pretty simple and choose to display a few collectibles here and there, mostly on wall shelves or tabletops, that can be dusted relatively quickly with the swipe of a Swiffer duster. I do like a plant or floral arrangement here or there and I like to bring in some pretty texture, whether it be a burlap runner or an embroidered dish towel. But, I want everything to be easily accessible for cleaning and I want to be able to quickly run the vacuum over the floor without having to move a bunch of stuff. I also want to keep flat surfaces from becoming collecting grounds for stacks of mail, paperwork, and other things. I freely admit I am just as bad as anyone for piling things on the kitchen bar but it drives me bonkers. And I really do see the value in J's love of negative space for making things seem less cluttered.
Another important factor to consider is frequency of use. How often things are used can be an indicator of whether they are worthy of taking up space. I think this is an area in which I can improve upon things. I know there are items in my kitchen drawers and cabinets that I do not use often enough to justify keeping and there are probably some duplicates of things, as well. How many sets of BBQ tools do you really need anyway? I am also thinking about the dishes we got when we got married. Currently, they are carefully displayed in our china cabinet along with pieces of vintage Fiesta and some other bric-a-brac, but everything is so layered that when it came a time when I normally would pull them out (aka Christmas lunch), the mere thought of navigating the puzzle to do so put me off and I pulled out our everyday Fiesta dishes instead. So, I started wondering about that. The dishes aren't fancy, high-priced china, but they are white and have a nice design. And, we did actually use them while living in J's house because I had nowhere else to store them and the Fiesta was in storage. But after eliminating the Fiesta mugs and thinking about storage space in our cabinets, I wonder if we should eliminate a set of dishes. Does it make sense to keep something only "for good" such that you never actually use it? More pondering to be done on this issue.
As I am working through the decluttering portion of my 2018 Project, I am beginning to let go of the guilt for not decorating my house per the standards or expectations of others. I don't have to turn the house topsy-turvy in decorating for each season; rather, I can keep one tub of things for each season to sprinkle throughout and let go of the rest, and I don't even have to do that much if I don't want to. And I am learning that I don't have to keep material possessions based on sentimentality. I can let go of some things and still be okay. In short, I believe I am starting to come around more to J's way of thinking on clutter or at the very least, I am on a good track to meet him somewhere in the middle at a level of clutter tolerance we both can live with.
What about you? What is your level of clutter tolerance?
