This post is a first followup to Post #1667, Döstädning and the problem of small stuff. In this post, I describe how I mostly-muddled-through getting rid of a roomful of miscellaneous stuff.
Background
Döstädning, or Swedish death cleaning, is the practice of reducing your possessions, as you age, so as not to burden your children or spouse (with getting rid of your stuff) after your death.
It was popularized in the U.S. by the 2018 book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, by Magareta Magnusson. The main value of the book lies in its perspective, written by a woman whose age is somewhere between 80 and 100 years.
Really, the core value of the book is in acknowledging the need to reduce your possessions in an orderly fashion as you get old.
As opposed to, say, having strangers fill a couple of dumpsters with the remains of your life, after they’ve shuffled you off to the nursing home.
So far, I’ve found that it’s easy to get rid of things of value, if you give them away. (Duh.) Maybe not ideal, but a great way to get started getting rid of stuff. At the minimum, you’re not faced with the ugly decision about what to scrap or throw away. Every item disposed of generates some smiles.
Then I got to all the small stuff. The miscellaneous this-and-that, epitomized by the coffee cans of mixed hardware in the garage. And there, things came to a halt. Half a year ago. As described in Post #1667 cited above.
This is how I dealt with a room full of miscellaneous stuff.
Much advice on de-cluttering is to help you decide on what stuff to get rid of, and what to keep.
That’s not what this post is about. This post assumes you’ve already identified a large collection of items that you’d like to get rid of.
To be clear, this is about getting rid of mixed everyday objects. Left-overs from hobbies I used to have, or maybe phobias I used to feed. Power tools. Electronic devices.
Not priceless antiques or items of sentimental value, that’s the point. Just the various types of stuff I have collected over my lifetime and now happen to own and no longer want.
Over the past half-year, I’ve been filling one room of my house with items of that nature. Things I didn’t want to keep, with no particular place for them to be housed. For much of the last week I spent a few hours a day, working my way through that stuff. To the point where that room is livable again.
The process boiled down to this:
- Put like with like.
- Put stuff back where it belongs.
- Identify all the ways you can get rid of stuff (trash, recycle, give away, sell, …)
- Sort items into piles corresponding to those ways.
- Do a garbage collection.
- Adjust your frame of mind.
- Perform your final sort and disposal
- Respect the junk drawer.
I think this is mostly self-explanatory.
Items 1 and 2 alone took care of about half the clutter, at the cost of a lot of walking around and putting stuff away. You go through a few hours of that, you understand why stuff didn’t get put away in the first place. If you are habitually more organized than I, you’ll do less of this than I did.
Item 3 resulted in a long list that was the hierarchy of ways I could get rid of stuff. Overkill, but on a complex task, I like to get my thinking straight. It’s pretty much your standard approach of re-using an item if possible, recycling it if not.
Item 5 is not quite self-explanatory. Garbage collection means both getting rid of stuff that is destined for weekly trash/recycling, and then neatening up what’s still left in the room. You get a clearer view of what’s left.
Items 6 and 7 are the hard part, for me. This consists of tasks such as:
- Device euthanasia, e.g., stripping memory card and battery out of an obsolete camera.
- Throwing away some perfectly good __________ .
- Device disposal where recycling of metals is not assured.
But ultimately, success at this “disposal” step depends on having a ruthless frame of mind. You do your best to put still-usable items to further use. And at some point, you put what’s left in the trash. If you aren’t ready to do that last step, well, you’ve doomed yourself to living with a bunch of trash, that’s all.
Item 8: Respect the junk drawer.
You need to know when to stop. I took my guidance from the junk drawer.
Everybody has (at least) one. I would say that nobody is particularly proud of theirs, but that would not explain the literal thousands of pictures of junk drawers, available on the Internet. A small sample of which is shown above.
My point is, the ubiquity of the junk drawer in American homes means that it serves a necessary function in industrialized society. At the minimum, it houses household objects that a) have occasional utility, or b) are sometimes required, but c) do not clearly belong to some much larger “clan” within their household.
Everybody seems to think of a junk drawer as something akin to “the leftovers”. And, of course, there might be straight-up trash in a junk drawer. Phones that no longer work. Dead flashlights. Dead batteries, for that matter.
But the core function — the place to put the stuff you can’t throw out, but that otherwise has no place — that’s a normal, possibly necessary attribute of modern living.
You have to respect that the junk drawer serves a legitimate function. The task of de-junking your life is not to eliminate the junk drawer, but merely to decide on how large it will be. It’s inefficient to live in a sea of disorganized possessions. It’s also inefficient to try to remove all disorder from a household.
In my case, when I got down to the point where everything was off the floor, and the residual had been confined to a few small shelves, I was done.
For this round, anyway. Time to move on.
Conclusion
I’d love to conclude with some sort of silver bullet for clutter. But I’ve got nothing of the sort. For me, this was a dull, grinding, difficult, amorphous process. Everything is a special case.
No Marie Kondo “sparking joy” here. I’m nowhere near that point in this process. I’m still clearing the decks. Perhaps at some future date I can get down to the point where I’m only keeping things that spark joy.
For example, my shop vac does not spark joy. My shop vac takes up space in the garage, and gets used for a couple of clean-up emergencies a year. Does it make my heart leap with joy to see it? Hell no. But if I own a house, I need to keep one around.
So this was not an exercise in philosophy. I started with a room full of stuff, and a determination that all that stuff needs to go somewhere else. And I just kept after, rationally, a few hours a day, it until the stuff had been reduced to a tolerable level.
You figure out all the ways you can move mass out of that room. All the feasible destinations. Order those ways by the value they create. For each individual object, you attempt to get rid of it in the highest-valued-way possible.
And if all else fails, chuck it in the trash.
