I may have bought that book once. If it is the book I'm thinking of, I returned it when (a) I realized that buying three books on clearing your clutter was probably counter-productive and (b) I hit the chapter on feng shui-ing your colon.

If someone does buy it, please let me know if it contains that chapter, because it's stayed with me for about four years now.

My best friend has somewhat of a cluttering issue (she freely admits she'll probably end her life on the local news as the crazy spinster lady for whom they had to send in a Bobcat to retrieve the body), and she just read that Feng Shui book. (Being of somewhat demure constitution and upbringing, she skipped the colon chapter.) It actually spoke to her on a pretty deep level, and I've seen her taking some concrete action since she finished it. Not sure how long it'll take, and she still isn't letting anyone (not even her boyfriend) into her apartment, but for now I'm encouraged.

As I am currently in the middle of Moving Hell, which involves clearing out an apartment that we two packrats have inhabited for ten solid years, this whole issue speaks to me, as well. (If anyone wants to take a look at my list of Xena/Buffy/Babylon 5/Farscape-related stuff, or if you live in the New Haven area and would like to see my list of unclaimed Freecycle items, please e-me directly. :})

I loved it.

Her previous book, Creating Sacred Spaces, was the one that got me started down the path to clear desks.

It was odd: her advice was the same as I'd been given by others, for many years previously. It amounted to "a place for everything and everything in its place". But when she said it, it was a whole lot easier to do.

And it *stays* effective, too.

I gave up on Feng Shui when I found out it absolutely forbids having spider plants in your home at all (they're too pointy or something). Without my spiders, I would have no living plants at all, since they appear to be the only things I can keep alive.

I don't so much have clutter as an open landfill in my living room. Unfortunately I can't bulldoze dirt over it and make a park.

Oh yeah, I remember the colon chapter.

I seem to remember liking the book and achieving some forward progress before our move.

I haven't seen the book since - I can't find it in all the piles of stuff.

I've got rid of several cubic meters of clutter these past few weeks without any book. And yes, it feels good.
Well, it did until I realised I had at least as much to get rid of still.

Fung shooey and colons? That sounds suspiciously like an invitation to the Dragon of Unhappiness.

Xopher (4): Have you tried philodendra? Those are the only plants I've ever kept alive and healthy* for extended periods of time. I used to think they were basically unkillable, until I managed to kill three in two years. But the one I have now is thriving.

*The spider plant didn't die, but it was pretty sickly by the time I gave up on it.

Reinder @ #6, Amen. I can see the surface of my home desk for the first time in ages, but there's still a lot of stuff to go. The daunting part of it is all the accumulated financial statements which ideally should be shredded. My little bitty shredder hides when it sees that task moving toward it.

My cats love to rip apart spider plants, so they often get presents from people who have too many spider plants...

The only plant that survives well at my place is a Schlumbergera. Amazing plant, not only has it survived everything that I, the cats and my roommates have put it through for 20 years, it blooms twice a year, and tries to take up all the available space on the windowsill.

My favorite houseplants are the ones that get described as "thrives on neglect!" The three varieties I've found most indestructible over the years are the aforementioned spider plants, peace lilies (Spathiphyllum), and cane begonias, aka angel wing begonias.

And the spider plants and peace lilies also help remove indoor pollutants from the air, according to NASA.

Mary Aileen: My philo grew very long, long vines. Then the leaves fell off it and it died. The spider plants are fine as long as you don't water them too often, which isn't a problem for me. I let them turn brown, then water them, and they live!

OT but hillarious:

http://io9.com/347041/evolution-explains-why-lolcats-control-your-mind

My favorite houseplant is crassula mesembryanthemopsis, which I don't think has a common name, but I'd call it "south african jade pebble plant". It sits on my windowsill in a pot smaller than a Pringles jar and I water it once every couple of months when I remember, and it has little grey-green bits that stick up out of the pebbles in the pot which match the amethyst geode nearby, but which glow with the depth of life instead of the sparkle of crystal. Every once in awhile I glance over and it's flowering. It demands nothing, no repotting, no watering, but it looks kinda happy anyway.

I'm decluttering, and every bit that goes increases happiness and ease of work; the absolute key thing that helped me was getting enough bookcases and filing cabinets.

We did a lot of decluttering and Freecycling of things when we moved countries. Really, an international move is like a deep breath. It makes you stop and realise how much crap you have.

One year, for her birthday, I gave my mother a decluttered home office. It took a week, from watching what she did in there and where, through giving away some of the old furniture and getting stuff that worked for her, to prescribing a reasonable regime of tidiness. The real space to reform, of course, was the space between her ears. The room has been pleasant and usable for 7 years so far, so I guess I did it right.

We still have the same schlumbergera we started with 15 years ago. They need stress conditions to bloom.

It isn't just physical stuff we hoard and clutter with. Packratting just as much information as I am junk and the brain also needs a cleaning.

It sounds as though the book may be using the feng shui woo more as a hook than anything serious, and the serious message is for cluttery people to get rid of stuff.

Am I right?

I have to wonder if I'm the only person who finds a complete lack of any clutter as disturbing as too much clutter.

For me, things are obligations.

When I was little, I took the Velveteen Rabbit too seriously, and felt that it was my obligation to truly love every toy I owned, lest it feel lonely or abandoned.

These days, things are obligations that I want to get rid of. I'm pretty ruthless about giving away things I don't use, that someone else could use.

This conception of things as obligations seems to fall in line with the feng shui conception of clutter as stuck energy. In Getting Things Done terminology, every item represents an open loop, something that I have to think about, decide about, do something about. Every time I see something, I go off into worry, or guilt, or anxiety, because of what that thing represents. It's exhausting. Getting rid of the thing means that I close that loop, and never have to think of it again.

My boyfriend tends to hang onto things that are objectively useful, but that he never uses. We have, for example, toted around a portable black and white battery powered TV through three apartments and a house, and have never once used it or needed to use it. It works perfectly well; it just never leaves the closet.

My problems are more of lacking a system of organization. Paperwork, for example: there are records you should keep and things you should shred at various intervals, and I'm terrible at knowing which is which and at actually doing the filing or shredding. I don't have a proper filing cabinet (and those cost money). I don't have a staging ground to sort through the mail daily. Moreover, I don't have a schedule to tell me when to shred things. So things just pile up.

I and my boyfriend are both utter products of our parents in these matters. Both of us are struggling to improve. Change is a slow process, though -- habits of years take time to overcome.

Stories about hoarders and garbage houses frighten me, rather than making me feel better about my own normal and sane mess. I feel like I could so easily slip over into that place, if I'm not vigilant. Reading those "Previously on Making Light" links made me want to go home and start throwing things away, just to avoid such a fate.

abi #15:

I really wish I could do that to my mother's kitchen. I was appalled, when I visited at Thanksgiving, at the lack of counter space because she was using it for storage of random piles of cookbooks, potholders, and strange little jars. Oh, yes, and seasonal cutenesses.

I almost got to the point today of thinking craft stores should be outlawed, from the points of view of clutter and real-ness. I'd gone into Michael's in (futile) search of some reasonably thin-edged decorative gold frames, and damn near visually drowned in acres of kitsch, and the raw materials for producing it. (I'm sorry, but miniature wooden birdhouses with turrets have no purpose but to be painted with ickiness.)

Last year I finished the room above our garage, built two built-in floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall bookcases, two built-in work desks with pigeonholes, file drawers and work shelves, and even some under-window shelves the cats can sit on, all thinking this will allow us to declutter the rest of the house.

So much for THAT. It did centralize all our books, but then my wife brought in MORE books,
co-opted both desks and turned the entire room into a workroom/study/computer room for HER! Now the room is sprinkled with boxes and stacks of books, and while all my books are in one set of bookshelves, the other (larger one) is sadly still waiting organization...

xeger @ 18,
no. no you are definitely not the only one.
Sterile Ikea homes with spotless futons and unsmudged glass coffeetables scare me somewhat. or the people who keep their furniture in plastic permanent-like. I think it must be a symptom of an altogether different mental distress.

Have to say, though, as a child I knew someone who lived in a garbage house (until it was gutted by fire!). Having seen it, I am as disturbed by real hoarding and 'clutter'. At least "things" cant lurch out of the 'clean empty space' like they can out of the 'piles of old clothesrags, pop bottles and junk'.

#19, Caroline -

Yes, about the Velveteen Rabbit, absolutely. As a child, I could bring myself to tears with guilt for not loving or playing with certain toys the way they "deserved." I haven't quite reached the point where getting rid of things is a relief, but I'm getting there.

Filing cabinet - I got my two-drawer cabinet by asking for it for Christmas. Buying a single two-drawer cabinet when you really need a four-drawer does fail the "buy real" test in a way. If you need a four-drawer cabinet, the two-drawer isn't "real," but I think that if you buy a good quality one, the improvement in your papers could potentially be worth the cost of having to buy a second and stack them.

In other words, I think buying a filing cabinet resides firmly at the conflict between "buy real" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," and I come down favoring getting something good over something real, in this case at least.

RMKoske #23:

Two two-drawer cabinets make a desk, or in my current situation, a printer table. Why stack?

Caroline,

My mother is on the road to "My Mother Is Insane" land, and it has proven a great incentive for me to get rid of stuff.

In general:

What has helped me:
-realizing how freeing it is to not having stuff hanging around, reproaching me for not using it.
-bookmooch.com - Trade books you don't want for new-to-you books!
-GTD system - taking care of (certain) things is an obligation I don't want.
-Discardia - a celebration of freeing yourself from clutter.

(I have just decided that I am not going to learn to juggle anytime soon; the book and beanbags will be offered to friends, then put up on mooch.)

joann @ 24... Two two-drawer cabinets make a desk, or in my current situation, a printer table.

That sounds like my home office. Yes, the desk's top is bolted to the bookshelf unit that provides it support.

xeger @18: A teacher once told me of seeing the office of one of the classic Swiss designers (I forget which one; it had been someone brought to Canada to work on the 1967 Expo) which sounded like that — clean desk, clean tables, blank walls.

What it said to me, was that the real work was getting done somewhere else, probably by someone else.

For those of us with teeny weeny shredders who can't stand up to our big hefty to-shred piles: at home shredding services, or drop off shredding services. Best $35 I've ever spent in my life. EVER. Check local listings!

#19, Caroline, Financial paperwork?
I resorted to an accordion folder - cheap plastic thing from Target. Bills to be paid go in the front with the checkbook (with the stamps!), paid bills go chronologically in the other slots: utilities in one, bank & credit cars statements in another. End of the year tax stuff gets its own slot.

This has saved my hide more than once! I can grab it and pay bills anywhere (even at cons), and the chronological system makes it so I can find stuff at the cost of an hour or so. This was a great improvement over not paying bills on time, and never being able to find paid bills.

Anyway, I think it worked for me because the system was so 'stupid' - just putting stuff in, in the order it came in. All my more complicated systems died due to guilty neglect. So! There's hope!

(And yeah, eventually the accordion file gets full, but there are these banker's boxes, see...)

Serge #26:

And that looks like my husband's old setup in the last house: one end of a door in a bookcase, the other end over a file drawer, with the back held up by a short bookcase that had no place else to go. I'd had something similar, but with the entire middle supported by file cabinets; I do all my actual work on an antique draw-leaf table I bought 20 years ago in Niles CA for half a song.

I also found a way to sort out my books. I asked myself; were there a slow-moving disaster, like a flood, which book would I put in the car first?

Then I moved that book to a different bookshelf in a spot where I would see it often. And then, I iterated. (Bless you Mike Ford!)

Funny how all those books that I kept because I ought to, or because I'd get to that someday, or because it's a good reference, never made it to this bookshelf. Why do I have books that make me unhappy? I thought to myself.

Over time, I've found it easier to subtract the books that make me feel meh. And this provided a template for giving away any number of things.

It's not the keeping of things that I loved that harmed me, it was the loving of things that harmed me that kept them close.

The one thing to be said for Ikea stuff, is that at least it all breaks down into pieces I could move by myself.

Wow. Discardia sounds remarkably like Solstice Destuffing. Here I was thinking I'd invented it myself.

It works pretty well, in that I get rid of major stuff. Not so good with the financial papers, but I do have the accordion file thing going. Kind of. Well, it was going until I dumped the last 2 years together while desperately trying to find my misplaced diver's certification card.

Sigh... why do I try?

Pamela #32:

Minor nit: surely that's an equinox, not a solstice?

I bought and read both of those books. I credit Karen Kingston with my newfound ability not to go apeshit crazy because I live with a tidy person now.

I'm still a packrat, and I still have unopened boxes from the move two and a half years ago, but I think I'm more organized and controlled about my hoarding than I used to be.

Now if only I could get his mother to read them, and then maybe she'd quit giving us stuff we don't want but feel guilty about getting rid of because we know she'll ask about it...

(The author addresses this a little, but doesn't really have any answers other than "Get rid of the stuff you don't want, including the people who keep giving it to you" and that's not really an option in the current circumstances...)

A couple of months ago, I recently committed that hallmark of suburban living, and rented storage space. Now, my wife and I and one cat occupy nearly 2000 square feet, and you would think that would be enough.

Nope. You actually need two houses. One for the people, and one for your stuff. Law of nature.

My wife didn't want to do it, but once I actually bit the bullet (paying for it out of own funds instead of our commingled accounts), she likes it.

I got into a fight of sorts with my mother over Christmas. My job was to clean out my room, after almost six years of not living there in a meaningful way. In the past, I'd had meltdowns because I couldn't throw away anything-- it would either be useful, be meaningful, or be personified-- and people kept giving me stuff. Being Christmas, I had just gotten gifts, so while some were good (grow light for plants, new discman) some were very bad (Pirates III night-light). And I made the mistake of using the word 'crap'.
It was one of those fights where it's really just going over the same thing you thought you'd fought about and put away. I felt awful immediately after.

And now I have two boxes of things I don't actually want but which are potentially useful, personified, or things I really, really wanted when I was younger. Books are staying at family-home for now, pending a gigantic sorting and garage sale.

Xeger, I think the too-clean vs cluttered line is different for everyone. It's kind of like germs-- on one hand, you have someone who sterilizes everything and doesn't tolerate people who don't use bleach wipes as napkins, and on the other, you have someone with mold crawling up the living room walls who says it's okay because it's not in the kitchen. There's a happy middle for everyone, but it's not the same middle.

#24, joann
Two two-drawer cabinets make a desk, or in my current situation, a printer table. Why stack?

Good point. I was mostly thinking about a case where someone had determined that they needed a four-drawer cabinet and couldn't afford the investment. If you want a four-drawer cabinet, you don't plan on being clever with two two-drawer cabinets, and thus plan to stack them.

About filing in general - I've recently come to the conclusion (after failing at filing "the right way" for years) that as long as you can lay your hands on the important stuff in a reasonable amount of time, how you do it is unimportant.

I've got a traditional A-Z arrangement, with the super-important stuff* filed under my name or under hubby's name. The rest of the A-Z I maintain sort of, but the bills and financial records tend to end up sorted by chronology. I've been filing things by month at the front of a drawer, with the expectation that I'll weed them out and then file the bills under the right A-Z category once a year. It never happens, and I'm giving up. Starting this year, I'll be tossing all the old stuff into yearly folders and putting them in a bankers box in the closet. I'll never need to grab that stuff with less than a day's notice. Yearly folders will be sufficient.

*Stuff that really should be in a safe-deposit box, in other words.

xeger @18, not at all. I've seen too many people who define books, or books-already-read, as clutter to trust zero-clutter (as distinct from less-clutter) advocates.

pocketeer @22, my distinction between "clutter" and "trash" definitely defines "rags and pop bottles" as trash, rather than clutter.

joann 33: Yes, I think she's exactly inverted solstices and equinoxes. Cool idea though.

Looks like Kingston will be releasing an updated MP3 version of it from her site next month, if you haven't placed an order for the expensive OOP tapes yet:

http://www.spaceclearing.com/html/kk-blog/clutter-clearing/audio-recordings-of-clear-your-clutter.html

(see the comments section for the updated TBA)

Alex.

My office desk used to consist of a slab of kitchen counter top (the kind with a built-in back splash guard) laid over two two-drawer file cabinets.

Plenty of space for hardware and things like a plastic organizer for various types of printer paper. Lots of room for files. A spare drawer for computer crap. But . . . the little-used scanner tended to accumulate layers of stuff. The spaces between the hardware accumulated dust and screws and twist-ties. The spare drawer came to contain all sorts of crap, like old greeting cards.

I eventually got disgusted and bought a triangular computer desk that fit in a corner. I recycled a whole bunch of old papers, enough to empty out a file drawer. Then I threw out almost everything in the crap drawer; the really vital stuff (for computers I still owned) went into a couple of boxes. I donated the counter-slab to Habitat for Humanity's "ReStore." I gave the empty file cabinet to a neighbor. The contents of the plastic blank-paper organizer got emptied into a much smaller organizer, after a thorough triage; the various paper stocks I didn't want I donated or used as gifts (e.g., greeting cards). The organizer then went to Goodwill.

My office is much tidier now.

* * *

Has anyone mentioned Freecycle? Well, I just did, or did again. Good for liquidating things you know are valuable, but you don't want to go through the trouble of selling. I got rid of a whole bunch of blank cassette tapes, cases, labels and mailers that way.

Thena @ 34
I still have unopened boxes from the move two and a half years ago

My mother and I tossed boxes unopened from a move 40 years earlier. (She said that if you haven't needed to get into the box in that long, you don't need whatever is in there.)

My stuff is in boxes in storage because of lack of space; I have several boxes that if I can get to them, I can get rid of the contents. So of it was my mother's stuff (bobbin lace stuff, anyone?) ....

We're in the middle of an odd form of de(re)cluttering--actually getting round to hanging a whole mess of pictures (photos, museum prints, map prints) that have been living in the under-stairwell closet for three+ years now. Eight pictures got hung yesterday, I've got plans for reframing six of them (currently in frameless glass in a room that really demands thin fancy frames), and the two/three large ones that need matted have been identified.

Sometimes it's a matter of finding the right place/condition for something, rather than actively removing it.

Freecycle is currently my favorite thing EVER. Someone just came by to pick up some portable cassette cases we had no clue we even had until we found them lurking in the back of a closet, and any minute now a local Girl Scout Troop Leader is coming to take away the Very Large, Very Heavy industrial printer that the NPO for which I'm a board member no longer wants or needs. And that's just what I've managed to offload today.

My SO and I have made a blood pact that we're never, ever going to make ourselves go through this again. Let's see if we actually manage it. :} I think moving to a smaller space will help in that respect, as we can say "no, we have no place to put that". That wasn't an issue here, and it turned into a huge problem pretty quickly.

(I firmly believe that storage units = giving in. Won't go there.)

The thing that's really worrying me, however, is what to do with our old, dead electronics. The local water authority is the only city agency that takes household waste and electronics for recycling, but they only accept stuff in the summer months (wtf is up with that?!). We're not sure what we're going to do.

Meanwhile, if anybody wants home-dubbed VHS copies of pretty much the entire runs of "Buffy", "Babylon 5", "Xena" and several seasons each of "X-Files" and "DS9", drop me a line. We've got most of that on DVD now anyway, and there's no room for it where we're going.

My desk in high school was a laminated hollow door. It was supported by a three-drawer cabinet at one end and a couple of tapered legs at the other. Above it were a bunch of single track shelves. My Dad conceived and installed it. It worked like a charm (six feet of desk space!).

Jack of Shadows spent some time as a packrat.

[OCD-Hoarder....]

Nancy C. Mittens @ 25
"Trade books you don't want for new-to-you books!"

It looks like English, but somehow I'm not understanding it. What are 'books you don't want'? Or perhaps you meant trade paperbacks, where you also have the hardback?

Caroline @ 19

As far as I can tell from the research I've done, you needn't worry about coming a serious hoarder unless you've started to show the tendency as a real compulsion early on, and likely not unless there is a history of it in your family. My mother-in-law had a bad case of it*, and my wife shows some signs, although she's kept it under much better control than her mother. But it seems that there is at least a predeliction based on brain chemistry which can be inherited; if that predeliction is not there, you may be prone to clutter, but that doesn't mean you are a hoarder.

What's the difference? 5 years ago, my parents-in-law moved from the house they'd lived in for the last 25 years to a managed apartment. My wife spent 3 weeks, her brother about 4 or 5 days, I spent a week, and our older son spent 3 days** removing several van loads of stuff we kept, at least 3 truckloads of giveaways to charities and other organizations, and 11 dumpsters full of trash***. Much of what we disposed of was still in the original boxes / bags / packages. A large part of it consisted of multiples of a single item, all bought at the same time, according to the sales slips.

Believe me, this is far more than "clutter".

* Still does, actually, though she's 88 and well-advanced in dementia at this point, so it's not a serious problem, at least comparatively.
** None of us lived in that state; my wife and I live on the opposite coast, so the logistics were interesting to say the least.
*** Sadly, much of the trash was really perfectly good stuff of all sorts that we simply couldn't get anyone to pick up with only a week's notice, and we didn't have the time to take it around to various places hoping to find someone to take it. We were under a time constraint because the house had been sold and we had to clear it before the date scheduled for the repairs required by the sale to begin.

Ugh. VCR tapes. Goodwill still takes donations; once in a while I'll still even buy one there rather than rent a movie; when I'm done I give it away or re-donate it.

But what to do with the self-recorded ones? I managed to avoid the "record every episode of my favorite program" nightmare, but after a thorough sorting I still have perhaps a dozen left with stuff I'm interested in.*

I may see if I can hook up my VCR to my TiFaux and digitize the tapes.

* (Shows in the "glad I have a tape of because it's proof I didn't imagine it all" variety. Like the live-action "Dr. Science" show, or a really weird and sweet Fox kids' show called "Zazu U.")

We recently had to face up to our Oubliette of Stuff -- the spare bedroom, which also served as my office. One 10x10 room had three bookshelves, my desk, my filing crates, a plastic rolling chest of drawers, and a futon couch for guests. The closet was stuffed with our hiking equipment, all my craft supplies, all my husband's gaming and WWII re-enactment stuff, and so on. It took months and several waves of reorganization, consolidation, redistribution, and relocation, but the room is now a nursery. (Again. It was a nursery before becoming the Oubliette, because the larger spare room -- now my daughter's room -- was the Oubliette before that.)

It was a very healthy process, actually. It wasn't that the room was cluttered, it was just PACKED. To get to anything meant dismantling other things. I'm sorry to lose my office (the door! it closed!) but glad to have gone through a decent purge.

Caroline, Stories about hoarders and garbage houses frighten me,[...] Reading those "Previously on Making Light" links made me want to go home and start throwing things away, just to avoid such a fate.

These stories give me flashbacks and send me into a fury of de-cluttering. In my student days I had a small place and ordered heaps of everything on the floor with footpaths in between, and felt just fine about it. Only when I lived with roommates clutter started to feel like something attacking my personal space, something that needed to be fought.

Things are obligations, and things call for attention, and I resent them for making demands and then I feel like a bad person because the things did nothing to deserve my resentment. I still feel bad about a bicyle I never loved and gave to a friend where it got stolen within a month. Best not to buy things one is not ready to care for...

I'm currently engaged in a two-step de-cluttering program.

Step 1 is ruthlessly throw out things I don't use. (I've given myself permission to not feel guilty about not freecycling things or giving them to Goodwill in the name of getting the job done.)

Step 2 is figure out where things go. I'm considering actually paying someone to help with this process.

FWIW, this blog got me started down this road. That and the fact that every time I get things organized, the whole thing collapeses under its own weight in a few weeks.

I'm not (thankfully) a hoarder, but I do have way too much stuff and need to get better about eliminating one object for every similar object I acquire.

I'm also curious as to whether the physical book would be as effective as the audiobook. I'm really, really bad at listening to audiobooks.

Any suggestions on what to do about a roommate who has reached true squalor state that won't result in another stubborn defiant denial tantrum. Eviction is not an option.

xeger, #18: No, you're not. A place with a complete lack of clutter looks like a place in which actual living is not allowed -- like Stepford, or perhaps Camazotz. One expects perfect tidiness in a furniture showroom or a sales-model house, but not elsewhere.

Joann, #24: That works fine if you have space to put them side-by-side; some people don't, and not just because of clutter either! My pair of 2-drawer cabinets holds my boombox, my address books, my scanner, and the laptop currently dedicated to my cassette-archiving project.

R.M. Koske, #37: Also, remember that with very rare exceptions, you'll never need financial paperwork that's more than 7 years old. So by the time you fill up the banker's box, the odds are good that you can take out the oldest folder every year and just shred it.

Lorax, #38: Yeah... once I picked up a book about decluttering, only to run smack into the following "advice": Get rid of T-shirts with artwork or sayings on them. After all, when are you ever going to wear them? My reaction: "Well, THAT'S somebody with a seriously snobby lifestyle!" I wear T-shirts of that type at least 5 days out of 7, and have no intention of stopping. So it was obvious that this guy's ideas weren't going to work in my life.

P J Evans, #42: My only worry about that would be that there might be something of unexpected value in one of the boxes -- either "this is old enough to be a collectible" or "I may not have needed this in 40 years, but my executor will need it when I die." I don't think I'm capable of throwing out unopened boxes of stuff, though I've gotten a lot better at going thru the contents and determining that yes, everything in here is either trash or Goodwill-fodder.

Freecycle and Craigslist are wonderful resources for getting rid of "but there's still a lot of use left in it!" stuff that you feel guilty about trashing. And I've bought a bunch of Slimline flocked hangers at Bed, Bath & Beyond, which is helping me get a handle on closet space -- I've got a lot of tops and dresses with wide necklines that fall off a wire hanger, so I'd been having to use a lot of heavy plastic and wooden ones, and they add up fast. The flocked coating holds things nicely in half the rod space.

We're currently in the stage of clearing the junk we never use out of the drawers and closets and cabinets, so that they'll be available to store things we do use, so that we can get those things off the tables and counters. It's a multi-stage process, but I think that for the first time since I've been living here, the balance of stuff coming in to stuff going out has gone negative.

Steve@47
"Trade books you don't want for new-to-you books!"

It looks like English, but somehow I'm not understanding it. What are 'books you don't want'? Or perhaps you meant trade paperbacks, where you also have the hardback?

This was something I had to come to terms with when I moved overseas and lost 2/3 of my library. Here's the narrative version:

There are some books which you cannot get rid of, either for academic reasons or because they spoke to your soul and you can't be without them. These, you keep. This includes hard-to-find books, out of print books, autographed books and the like. Books which can't be replaced, and whose loss would hurt you, you keep.

But there are other books which you really enjoyed, or didn't, but which you won't read again, or which you could pick up secondhand or borrow if the need fell upon you. There's also junk reading, which in my case is pleasant light SF/Fantasy which diverts but doesn't stand up to close examination. They are "books you don't want" not in the sense you don't want to read them, but in the sense that you don't need to keep them - in my circle, they go into a box beside the front door, and are recycled to friends, or taken to a secondhand bookshop. That way, the bookshelves are full of fabulous resources, and not weighed down by Mere Stuff.

xeger, on "clean vs. cluttered" -- I do feel that those are not on the same axis.

I feel claustophobic in my mother's house, though it is extremely tidy, but there are just loads of stuff. Every square inch contains stuff. Making tea in the kitchen is a logistical challenge because there is no place to put the tea pot. But everything is exactly in the place where it should be.

My own place is untidy. Heaps of books and papers on ever table, cat toys on the floor, clothes on the sofa, dirty dishes on the kitchen counter. Yet, I can any time grab any offending item and put it in it's place: nothing else will have moved into the place, and I know where it belongs. Tidying my desk, should I feel the need to do so, takes five minutes.

So: cluttered but tidy, and untidy but uncluttered. Both is possible.

You know, there's a kind of clutter that you really can't avoid, that I really resent:

Recyclables.

You need a big enough bin so that you don't have to tote it to the collection center each day, but not so big that you can't carry it.

If you have a garage, you can set up bins in a corner. In an apartment, you're pretty much stuck with the stuff. If you pick an out-of-the-way corner, you have to make special trips and end up leaving cleaned-out cans hanging around the sink and mini-piles of newspapers by where you read them. Put the bins in a handy place and they're an eyesore.

I'm considering buying one of those beige-colored Rubbermaid lawn-bins and see if I can get away with leaving it outside my door.

This is a Very Sore Point. We're whittling down the stuff on the living floors (well, not sure about 3rd floor bedroom but there is room for a guest up there...) BUT we have a garage full and a basement partly full of stuff we've not seen in seven years and in some cases boxes that we moved from Lawrence to Merriam to Prairie Village (all KS), then to KC, MO without ever opening.

Also it does not help to move to a bigger house. It just lets you store more useless crap.

When we moved from the house on 75th St to here we should have just backed a dumpster down the drive and emptied the garage into it. Dammit.

Steve at 47, vian at 55 gives a better explanation than I would have.

I gave away The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged because I've read them once, and may never read them again, but if I decided I want to, the Objectivists of this world will have made sure that they are still in print, so there I will not have trouble finding another copy.

T.w. @ 53: Find a way to live with it. Enforce your boundaries. Or move. You will not, can not change them. There might come a moment when they cannot take their own chaos anymore, in one year or five or thirty. But then, there might not.

Steve Downey @ 47: What are 'books you don't want'?

I barely like half of the books I read, and about 1 in 10 I never finish. Experience says that I won't ever re-read a book I did not like, and I won't finish one I haven't finished in three years, so everything meeting those criteria goes out to make place (and money) for better books, and find owners who will (hopefully) love them better.

Of course, the books I keep are getting steadily shabbier, because those are the ones I do read again and again. It's good to have friends who do book binding as a hobby.

"This is the year I really do something about all this clutter." I've been saying that for at least a decade. Began actually doing something about it (what a concept!) last year, and the process picked up TONS of momentum when we hired a professional organizer -- for the first business day of 2008, as it happens. Talk about first-footing for luck!!

Momentum is really the word, too. It becomes easier and easier to look at the next object and say "Nope. Don't need that."

We are in NO danger of doing away with the "lived-in look". But I will gladly pass up the semi-panic of not finding my passport this morning. It was right where I left it when we came home from Thanksgiving vacation: in a tote bag dumped on the couch. Which I've seen every day on my way out the door (or when dumping another bag next to it on the way in), and then left for "later".

Leaving things for "later" is selling your future self into indentured servitude for a mess of pottage.

I pulled this book out of one of the book boxes this weekend. A friend gave it to me after she used it. She found it very helpful, although she told me I could ignore all the Feng Shui stuff. I remember that it seemed to make sense when I read it (well, except for the "Clutter Clearing your Body" chapter) Perhaps I need to read it again, since the whole unpacking and trying to figure out where things belong seems to be particularly difficult this time.

And I am trying to let go of books that I don't want to keep. It's just the business of trying to find them good homes that's slowing me down.

Steve, #47: Yes, books you don't want. Books that you read once and decided weren't worth re-reading, or worse yet, books that were so bad you couldn't finish them. College science textbooks 30 years out of date, of interest only to a historian of science. (Liberal arts don't age so fast.) Books that you bought from the impulse-purchase rack at the bookstore register, and look at them 2 or 5 or 10 years later and say, "What was I THINKING?" Fad books for fads you're no longer interested in. Books you got because they looked interesting, which upon reading proved not to be. "Self-improvement" quackery that you tried and found worthless -- and helpful self-improvement books from which you've extracted and internalized all the value you're going to get. Crafts books for crafts you never really got into. Books you managed to buy duplicates of because the first copy was still on your TBR shelf. Books of jokes and comic-strip collections that were funny the first time, or funny 30 years ago.

Why yes, I have been culling my library, why do you ask?

Lee @ 63:

College science textbooks 30 years out of date, of interest only to a historian of science.

Unfortunately I am a historian of science! Luckily I don't work on anything recent, otherwise I could never leave the thrift store without an armful of textbooks.

On clutter generally: I work in a museum and am surrounded by other peoples' precious junk all day, things I cannot get rid of without a great deal of discussion and paperwork, so when I go home I constantly purge my own stuff with the displaced getting-rid-of-things energy.

I throw stuff out all the time. I regret having tossed only one thing: a letter I received from J. R. R. Tolkien, typed, but signed by him and with a few notes in the margin in pen. It was around 1960, I think. I threw it out just before some cross country move. Silly me.

I have no idea how many books have passed through my possession over the years. Thousands. I'm pretty ruthless about culling. My rules are entirely individual and eccentric. Some books I hold on to because I like the illustrations. In my most recent culling I finally relinquished the collected works of Shakespeare -- two volumes -- that I used in college. I inherited my mother's six volume set, and the print on the two volume set is too small for me to now read in comfort.

Those photos from the link My Mother Is Insane made me cringe. I know someone who lives like that; it's very scary.

I heartily recommend shredding services. They come to your house. Oh, and I don't want to hear any more of that excuse, "My shredder is too small." BUY A BIGGER ONE.

Our problem area is paper— getting rid of the stuff we should destroy while keeping the stuff we shouldn't. Mostly it just piles up.

I do not consider the piles of books a problem. I consider the lack of well-designed bookshelves a problem. Of course, one of the reasons I would like to be in a house instead of an apartment is the opportunity to build in bookshelves and darned well do it right. (Why, oh why is 12-18 inches considered "ideal" for a BOOKshelf? Hardbacks are nine inches deep and paperbacks 4 inches at best. You can line a hallway with narrow bookshelves with very little intruion on walking space but only if you design the shelves yourself.)

Incidentally, I moved six times (four if you discount two-stage moves) in two and a half years. One of those moves involved lots of stuff belong to people I had never lived with. (Tail end of a serial roommate situation.) That's when I learned about pruning.

Still haven't pruned the books, though. When your reading total with a full-time job averages 150+ books a year (not counting children's novels or magazines) and your spouse has similar speed, a large library is a necessity, not a luxury. I *have*, though, no compunctions on getting rid of books that are boring or outgrown. There's actually not that many in the latter category, and children's books don't tend to qualify.

I do wish my friend hadn't lost my college physics textbook, though. I want to see if I can make any headway on EM again.

I'm not a clutterer, but things don't look perfect. For one thing, there's a sheet over the couch to collect cat fur (and currently, a cat). That way I can offer company a fur-less couch.

When I had to pay movers to pack all my stuff and move it out while the laminate was put down, I did get rid of things I had thought I would use again someday. Lots of cookware/tableware, books, my dining room table and chairs, etc., but those weren't really cluttered. Now things are pretty spare.

There are things that aren't in their normal spots. Right now I'm soaking my left foot (minor ingrown toenail surgery) twice a day and I'm keeping the towel, generic neosporin, and bandages by the recliner. The bucket I'm using is in the guest bathroom where I left it to dry after I rinsed it. I'm not hauling all that stuff from various parts of the condo twice a day, but when I get to stop, they'll all get put away.

(couch sheet now catless; cat eating kibble in kitchen)

I prefer Don Aslett's book on decluttering (he is of the Severely Energetic persuasion of Mormonism, though; one of those guys who can do eight things at once and probably could have your entire spice collection alphabetized before breakfast while you're still sitting with your face in your mug of coffee).

I became even more un-packrat-like in my years of staying home with the kids, because one thing you learn as a stay-at-home mom is that YOU end up being responsible for maintaining, cleaning, organizing, and God help you finding everybody else's crap, not just yours.

It gets super old, fast.

mythago @ 68 ...
I became even more un-packrat-like in my years of staying home with the kids, because one thing you learn as a stay-at-home mom is that YOU end up being responsible for maintaining, cleaning, organizing, and God help you finding everybody else's crap, not just yours.

Hm. I've experienced almost the opposite effect. I know that there's only one denizen that's going to do anything at all about a mess that's been created, and thus don't worry too much about not cleaning up a mess if I can't cope with it just then, or creating my own mess. It'd be really lovely to come home to no dishes in the sink (because they're clean, not because they're stashed somewhere unfortunate), and a variety of other chores dealt with...

vian #55: Thank you. Now that we've finished cleaning out the closets (no fewer than *ten* jumbo garbage bags are now out on our landing, ready to go to Goodwill), the bookshelves are next. Your guidelines are exactly what we need to keep in mind as we get going on that tomorrow.

xeger @ #18: I agree 100% about the pristine, unused look. I once did contract work for a man who insisted that I office in his space, and insisted that all our offices be perfect at the end of every day, and any other time he looked in. I found it impossible to do it--but learned early enough that he had another office in his girlfriend's house, which was a rat's nest. Maybe someday I can afford an "appearance" office, but I doubt it.

My sister is a hoarder; her house looked like the one in "My Mother Is Insane" 25 years ago. Not only does she refuse to get rid of anything, but, like the poster's mother, she compulsively buys things. No one has been able to penetrate into the (oversized, 2-car) garage since the early 80's, which means the stuff has been in the freezer for at least that long. The attic is so full that the garage ceiling sags, but, again, no one has been able to get to the attic steps since 1981. Each of her three kids' rooms (the kids are now 37, 45, & 47) are full of all their furniture, school work, and all their old clothing. There is a path to her and my BIL's bed through the boxes. The only usable room is the den, and it's only about 1/3 clear. My BIL had to build a 20'x40' building in back to have a place for his business stuff.

First my mother, then I, then each of my nieces and nephew, in order, tried to "help" her do something about the clutter and the assembled useless crap, but we met with more and more vehement refusals, to the point, with my younger niece and nephew, of violence. I went to see her in 1985, and we were going to cook a meal (family feast) together, which was something we used to really enjoy. But there was nothing in her cabinets that hadn't been expired for years. By the time we got through arguing about what needed to be replaced, and then shopping for groceries (how in the hell can you spend 2.5 hours shopping for groceries in a small-town store??), there was no time to prepare the food. And of course it was all my fault.

Between 1985-1990 (ages 48-53 for her), teeth started falling out of the cog wheel. She had a psychotic break in 1990, which precipitated my final visit. Now, she might wander around the house or the neighborhood naked, or in any stage of dress from scanty to many layers. Some days she only crawls. She goes for days without turning on a light, or speaking a coherent word, then might carry on a good conversation with someone for an hour or more. Her response to medication has been only spotty, but it's hard to know how compliant she is, because my BIL is such an enabler. But no matter how closely her orbit around the sun approximates that of Neptune, any statement about getting rid of any of her treasures is sufficient to get her back on Earth and into warrior mode, even at 70.

I'm not a good housekeeper at all, and have a hard time getting rid of books and even good magazines. But I'm very careful not to let the clutter build up. If it's beyond convenient use, it goes in the trash or gets given away. I use lots of office space (even in my home) because I tend to sort things into stacks before putting them away or creating a permanent place to put them. But I have my sister's example on how not to be.

The Don Aslett book Mythago mentioned at #68 is Clutter's Last Stand. It is very good, engagingly written with cartoony illustrations. And you don't have to be especially energetic to follow his advice. It isn't about 'set up and maintain this incredibly complex organizing system'; the man made his fortune with housecleaning: he is all in favor of low maintenance.

A brief excerpt to show his overall approach:

Anything that crowds the life out of you is junk. Anything that builds, edifies, enriches our spirit--that makes us truly happy, regardless of how worthless it may be in cash terms--isn't junk. Something worth $100,000 can be pure clutter to you if it causes discomfort and anxiety or insulates you from love or a relationship.

Most active things are not junk, most inactive things are. But you have to determine the degree of activity that makes something meaningful to you. Whatever contributes to a happy, free, resourceful, sharing life isn't junk to you---but it might be someday.

So he doesn't advocate an eternally clean desk: piles of papers you're actively working with are functional, only the ones you plan to deal with someday never are clutter.

Footnote: changing how I list my email to avoid attracting more canned meat product. Previous comments can be viewed by removing the first all-caps block.

When I moved to Boston in 2000 I had one (1) large camping backpack full of stuff (mostly books). When I moved to New York this summer I had . . . well, considerably more stuff. It depresses me that I can no longer move by public transportation.

Still, I think there's also a minor pathology in the other direction which is "tossing stuff because it clutters the place up and then buying it again." Certain types of books do this for me. I've bought most of Agatha Christie's opera omnia at least 3 times. I find the total artificiality comforting and infinitely rereadable in times of stress. So I sucked it up and stopped putting them in the "to be given a home elsewhere pile."

B.Durbin @ 66... Still haven't pruned the books

It'll sap their plots if you don't do it soon.

mythago @68:
I became even more un-packrat-like in my years of staying home with the kids, because one thing you learn as a stay-at-home mom is that YOU end up being responsible for maintaining, cleaning, organizing, and God help you finding everybody else's crap, not just yours.

Amen.

And I'm mildly Aspie, which (in my case) includes being intolerant of visual or auditory clutter in times of stress.

And the one class of possession we did not declutter when moving was toys, because the kids were going to be stressed and disoriented enough.

Sigh.

Don Aslett (if I'm thinking of the right fellow) doesn't work for me at all, because he seems to boil it down to willpower and "just do it" in a way that absolutely paralyzes me.

For some reason I find decluttering and certain types of housecleaning to be difficult in much the same way I think bungee-jumping would be difficult. I could force myself to do it, but I'd have be fairly violent with myself to get there. I've currently committed to five minutes of decluttering a day, and I have to be very firm to even get started.*

I don't know why it seems so terrible, but explaining it to other people is apparently impossible. I once had a friend argue with me for twenty minutes that "all it will take is two hours and the house will be clean." I couldn't get him to understand how impossible two hours felt. So books that are too gung-ho with "just do it" make me not only paralyzed and unable to do it, but guilty for being such a wuss as well.

I'm currently reading Making Peace With the Things In Your Life, by Cindy Glovinsky. She takes a very psychological approach. Why do you have a problem with things in the first place? Do you bring in too many? Not store them properly? Not get rid of them properly? Each stage in a thing's life cycle has a chapter detailing possible problems and a long series of questions at the end to help you narrow down what the problem is.

I haven't gotten past the "narrowing down the problem" chapters, so I don't know what the solutions are. But I am finding the analysis to be slightly helpful, so I'm hoping the solutions will work for me.

*Somehow I manage to not get buried in things. Perhaps because I'm fairly good at avoiding buying tat in the first place.

I'm the same way with getting started, RM Koske. For cleaning, I seem to work best with very small starting points and unrelated deadlines-- "I have homework due tomorrow. I'd better clean the desk. Now the desk is clean, onto the pile next to it...." A job begun is half done, sometimes more. I sometimes wonder why my inertia is so high; it's really not useful.

Abi @ 75... intolerant of visual or auditory clutter in times of stress

I don't mind visual clutter if there is some order to it. (If you ever saw that photo of my home office, you'll know what I mean.) It can make things cozy. The bottom line is that it's not clutter but disorder that I dislike.

Elric, please put Stormbringer away. Pretty please?

I think one "reason" some people give for not getting rid of stuff is "But it's still good!" i.e. it will be useful to someone. Those folks who are in more extreme hoarding mode say: "But I might need it someday!" The fact that they haven't needed it in oh, ten years, that it is possibly out of date, that it's ugly, broken, etc. is less important. This strikes me as requiring therapy, but what do I know?

Still, folks who have serious trouble getting rid of stuff because it's still "useful" might find it easier to dispose of things by giving stuff to Goodwill/Salvation Army/etc. or by freecycling. I have a great deal of sympathy for this attitude, since I buy a lot of stuff at those same thrift outlets and have indeed, found other people's discards extremely useful.

I've kept all my textbooks from college, many of which are frighteningly out of date. I graduated in 1981.

In 2007, I played a professor giving a final exam in a short student film. In each shot of me I was reading a textbook on a different subject (to emphasize both the universality and the nightmarish quality of the exam). It was the only psychology/Old Church Slavic/calculus exam ever given!

See how packrat tendencies pay off? Once ever in 25 years pays for all! [/sheepish, self-deprecating sarcasm]

Stefan Jones at 57: I sympathize about the recyclables! When I was in a smaller apartment, I used a small version of Ikea's Trofast system (this one, actually) for recyclables. It doesn't give you a huge amount of storage but it's better than having a tower of cans and another of newspapers.

Making four moves in a year really cut down on my tolerance for Stuff. Unfortunately, it also gave me a higher than average number of boxes marked Misc. I'm chipping away at them slowly, and reminding myself that even getting things into smaller boxes marked Misc is a victory.

My father has a tendency to hoard papers, which I find maddening, but it could be a lot worse.

Is the theory here that the tendency to clutter is a malfunction of the ability to judge usefulness and/or future need?

A further question for those of us who are clutterers:

In your own estimation, are you better than average at spotting the object or objects in your environment that can be used to address some emergency or sudden need?

Do other people say you're good at that?

...

Okay, so in re Kingston we have Dena Shunra (3) saying yes, there's something oddly efficacious about the advice when Karen Kingston gives it.

Thena (34) says it worked for her.

Laina (62) says a friend vouches for it and gave her a copy, and that it looked good but she hasn't yet gotten around to engaging with it.

Alex Wilson (40) very helpfully says that "Kingston will be releasing an updated MP3 version of it from her site next month, if you haven't placed an order for the expensive OOP tapes yet," and gives a link.

...

Caroline (19), if I didn't live with Patrick, I'd be scared too. On this issue, Patrick is (1.) a compulsive neatnik; (2.) a nag; (3.) my salvation.

Shall we try the Kingston thing? It might make us happier.

P J Evans (42), I should not be saying this, but ... bobbin lace stuff?

Bruce Cohen (48), that's a known behavior, and it has a name: shop and drop. Somehow, learning that has kept the areas just inside my front door much clearer. It's the same kind of useful interrupt I was writing about yesterday in the "In the whale" thread.

Regarding file cabinets: my grandfather, who was notoriously well organized, used a single two-drawer file cabinet his entire life. He had everything he needed and nothing he didn't. If you wanted to know how much the refrigerator cost in 1978, he could go to the file cabinet and produce the receipt. (It probably helped that he was a lawyer, with a fine sense of what did and didn't need to be kept.)

I don't think I'll ever be that organized, but it's something to aspire to. I do have a two-drawer cabinet, and it isn't stuffed full yet (nor is it fully organized), but older stuff lives in boxes in the closet, so I can't really claim to have pared back to that level.

I tossed out cartons of damaged library discards and such.

I sold four boxes of books to Half Price books for ten bucks a box.

I unloaded 11 boxes of fanzines at the last Corflu Vegas.

I unloaded 13 boxes of stuff at a dealer's table at the first CoSine.

There's still too much.

One man's priceless treasure is one man's piles of crap taking up space. Unfortunately they may be the same one man.

Teresa @82 Is the theory here that the tendency to clutter is a malfunction of the ability to judge usefulness and/or future need?

Unfortunately I can't find the article, but I read somewhere that what parents might define as 'clutter', children actually tend to view as 'organization'. That is, they like things spread out everywhere because they can see where everything is. The article was suggesting that this is some kind of developmental step, but I don't recall if there was actual hard data to back this up.

If one defines clutter as too much stuff, regardless of whether it's sorted neatly in boxes stacked to the ceiling or spread all over the place, then I'd go along with the above statement. If clutter is defined just as the way stuff is arranged -- i.e., lying around without a 'proper' place like a drawer* -- then I'm not sure.

*thinking of some of my drawers -- maybe that's a bad example of something different from clutter.

66: The "Billy" CD shelves from Ikea are about the right depth for storing paperbacks. Greater width would of course be desirable, but then again they can go into smaller, otherwise unusable, corners.

74: Be sure to tell Jasper Fforde.

I liked Aslett's Clutter's Last Stand a lot. My favorite part is that he spends most of his time driving home the point that clutter lowers your quality of life. You lose functional space in your home; you waste time trying to find things; you lose money by needing a bigger house or a storage space. In the end, he makes fairly explicit that everything he's said about physical clutter, besides being useful for itself, is an analogy for the clutter in our lives from wasting time and emotional energy on things that aren't worth it.

His How to Have a 48-Hour Day was just scary, though, with advice like skip meals and sleep to get more done. I described to a friend how it sounded like a great plan for a repetitive strain injury (my history); he noted it sounded like a great plan for a manic episode (his history.) The book also says it's good to always keep yourself busy so you'll have less time to sin.

Teresa @82:

As a recovering clutterer: I am *definitely* better than anyone else around me at spotting stuff. I never lose my keys. My neatnik honey loses his keys, sweaters, camera bag, etc., etc. with baffling frequency. I don't think I know how to lose stuff: if it's in the house, I know where it's at.

And Debbie @85, that "I'd rather have it out so I can see it" is *exactly* how my mind works. This extends to pots and pans (and a very dusty experience in my early years of housekeeping), pens, knitting needles, and the bobbin-lace cushion that would never be used if it weren't hanging on the wall. Things that aren't useful, though, irritate my. Why would I want to display knickknacks? If you can't read, cook, or knit with them, what's the point of having them at all?

George Carlin: Stuff

Teresa Nielsen Hayden @ 82 ...
In your own estimation, are you better than average at spotting the object or objects in your environment that can be used to address some emergency or sudden need?

Hm. No idea - possibly?

Do other people say you're good at that?

Other people say that I'm good at finding things, full stop.

Debbie @ #85: I read several years ago (in an article that's probably hidden in the same place yours is) that organizing things in stacks is a discrete personal style, along with that of hating any organization but remembering where everything is, and two styles that involve having a phobia about anything not being put away. It went on to say that the more common type of "clean countertop freak" tends to push everything out of sight without organizing it. Didn't mention anything about stages of development.

Teresa @ #82: I think what Bruce Cohen and I are describing is beyond the "shop and drop" syndrome. It comprises a system of compulsive shopping and spending, belief that anything on sale is a good purchase whether it's needed or not, lack of ability to utilize things in the home, and unnatural attachment to personal property. It's a type of OCD that doesn't involve repetitive or ritualistic behavior. Things I've read describe "shop and drop" as a tendency to bring things home and never put them up. For me, that's a good early sign of a period of depression.

Doug #86:

A local purveyor of bookcases has a handy item called a DVD shelf. It's 5.5 inches deep and will hold 7 rows of paperbacks. We've got one in the hall. Then there's the custom item that fits almost perfectly behind my study door, made with 1x4s, 12 shelves high. I designed it, spouse built it, and it handles 2/3 of the SF mmpbs.

Teresa @ 82

I see the potential to use things all the time. One of the bigger changes of my early thirties (where I am now) is that I am willing to let go of some things. For example, I just decided that I am going to find another home for my conga drum. I won't be using it anytime soon, and have not used it in close to 10 years. This requires accepting the fact that I am not, now, a conga-drum-playing person, which is sort of sad, because it's so fun to do, but closing that door of potential allows me to focus on the room which I am in.

I must admit, my ears perked up too at PJ Evans bobbin lace offer, but I decided that I will not get the use required for the commitment, so I am keeping my mouth shut. If you do take her up, I can send you a bunch of printed out books and some links to more/other bobbin lace books (all out of copyright).

I have a long-term de-cluttering technique that I haven't heard mentionned yet on this forum. I learned it from a woodworking magazine years ago. We all know how fast workshops get cluttered...

The technique is to put away (or throw out) ten things every time you walk into the shop. And I don't mean 10 classes of thing. No, I mean 4 clamps and 6 nails is 10 things. If you're like me, you won't stop at 6 nails, but put away all *8* that were there, and feel good about exceeding your goal. The reality is that it takes no time at all to put away 10 things, and the habit clears spaces like you wouldn't believe.

I've been applying it to my living spaces for a while now too - 10 things in the kitchen clears a foot of kitchen counter; 10 things in the living room makes me put away the books and the mail once a day. 10 things in the bedroom tidies all the loose dirty laundry. And you can do 10 things in a room in under 2 minutes.

I admit now that sometimes I get carried away and put away 20 things. It's just a little compulsion, I'm sure I can control it.

Teresa @ 82:

I am definitely good at laying my hands on the things I or anyone else in the hosuehold needs (or, less often, the office). I wouldn't ahve noticed if I hadn't lived with two people who enver seem to find the object without a lot of hunting and asking. I describe it as spatial memory; if I visualise an object, I must automatically visualise its most common and/or most recent surroundings. If I think about my passport, this vague image of Neil Gaiman books rises up in the background; and I check that part of my desk, and lo and behold.

(I have to say that the differing spellings of Neil and Nielsen, which my brain tells me ought logically to be the same, keep causing me to try and misspell one another.)

B Durbin @ 66:

My husband built a bookshelf in our hallway out of 4" wide boards. My first reaction was that it was ugly and awkward and too small. I *still* wouldn't want it in the living room or the study, which in an ideal world would be the pretty places in the house. But it's growing on me, because he can store a lot of books in an easy to see space. and i'm starting to feel inclined to suggest he make another so I can put my own unpretty paperbacks someplace more useful. It still wouldn't go in the study or living room,

However, when it comes to the other spaces, I love my 12" bookshelves. Most cheap bookshelves I see are 9" deep at best and *totally inadequate* for my study. This is because I have dual-purpose bookshelves: I put the books on, then put the pottery, trinkets and seashells in front, spaced to look good and allow view and access to the books. It saves me having boxes of pretty things I'dike to set out on view, and saves me having to buy a second and separate set of shelves. so *now* I only need to figure out where to set the two figures that are, respectively, too big to fit in front of books, and too big for any shelf.

(The price of being a visual artist as well as an avid reader)

Joann @92:

After I built my wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, we realized a large percentage of our books were paperbacks and wasted a lot of the 12" wide shelf space.

My solution was to build a 'mini-shelf' that allowed us to put two rows of paperbacks on each shelf, with the back row elevated about 4" above the front one so you can see the title. The 'mini-shelf' is an insert that can be removed, and is just a hollow box of wood for the particular shelf width. By using them we can double the storage space and still be able to see all our paperbacks.