Yesterday's challenge was to help a friend, and it just so happened that we were scheduled to pay someone a visit who had indicated she was facing a daunting decluttering project. Since I have been told that I’m very organized (as well as totally OCD but hey, I choose to view the glass as half full …) it seemed only natural that I offer to assist.
“Stuff” is fascinating to me. Every week I DVR “Hoarders” and “Hoarding: Buried Alive” and marvel at the new levels of nastiness some people manage to live with. There was the woman who stored her own feces in trash bags. And the home where they found flattened cat carcasses under piles of garbage. These shows are like a gruesome car accident you just can’t help gawking at. And the fact that they invite camera crews to depict their “lifestyle” on national television makes it that much more fascinating.
Of course there are varying levels of clutter. Most people’s messes wouldn’t sell much ad time on TV, so it’s easy to watch “Hoarders” and say, “I’m not that bad” as you head out to another tag sale. (“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is the hoarder’s common rationalization – equivalent to the alcoholic’s “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”)
But most homes are not piled floor to ceiling with “stuff” that leaves only enough room for a narrow walkway. Most people do not keep their own feces or cat carcasses. (For this, we can all be grateful.) But pretty much everyone has some dirty little clutter secret. Kids’ art projects, old magazine collections, recipes, dolls, you name it. “Collecting” can turn to “clutter” in the blink of an eye. Many hoarders claim they “just don’t know” how the mess got so bad. And the more years you’ve lived somewhere, the bigger the “collection” can get.
Which brings me back to my friend’s house, which I’d say is fairly typical in the degree of clutter that has accumulated. She and her husband have lived there for over 20 years, so a lot of the stuff stored in closets, wedged onto shelves and tossed into the basement and garage is mutual. Right off the bat, we determined that those areas should be off-limits since he was not a willing participant in our decluttering mission. And since we had a limited amount of time, we decided to focus on a utility/pantry/laundry area where there was a wide variety of items ranging from detergents to miscellaneous bowls to dozens of boxes of pasta, rice and crackers, all arranged haphazardly on a couple of wire shelves and on the surfaces of the washer and dryer.
Moving methodically from top to bottom, left to right, we unearthed packages of dry goods from as far back as 2006, parts of appliances that she no longer owned, and enough plastic bags to store food for a decade. (Or feces or dead cats, if one were so inclined.) It took about an hour to reclaim an area that had taken years to get to its present condition. But the best part was that while deciding what to toss, what to keep and what to give away, we also got a chance to talk. About the past, about the present, about organizing not only our “stuff” but our lives. We laughed, we cried, we dreamed and we reminisced. In the end, there was a neat and tidy utility area and a greatly enhanced friendship. Who knew decluttering could be so awesome?
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