I have won and lost some battles on that front. The main entryway took a long time to sort out, and now stays mainly clear, but I still need to implement some sort of landing strip.
The living room is staying clean, though! It’s even getting vacuumed regularly. This is so much easier now that we have a central vacuum system, instead of an old broken upright. I am enjoying having at least one area of the house where guests can sit without feeling embarrassed. The rest of the house… still needs work.

Today, however, I’ve been inspired! I saw this amazing home office makeover appear in my Ikea Hacker feed!
It’s originally from the Ramblings of a Renovating Couple, an awesome decorating duo from Toronto.
They have several posts on their office re-do, and the photos are great and helpful.
I love the colour of the walls, and I’m always up for a room full of the IKEA Expedit!

I think I might have to totally swipe some of their ideas for my sewing room. Their office is neat and organized, and yet still lovely and functional. I could definitely see myself sewing in a room like that! All that desk space would be great for cutting fabric, too!

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Long Time No See!

I am a perfectionist. You might not believe it, after seeing the photos I posted of my most cluttered spaces, but it’s true.
It is also part of the reason I have so much clutter, so many things “on the go” and so many half-finished attempts to clean things up.

You’d think being a perfectionist would help me declutter, but in fact it’s the opposite.

Why?
It’s simple: I don’t like to do something unless I can do it well enough that it turns out properly. Not necessarily “perfect” most of the time, but at least “nice” and “worthwhile”. I find myself avoiding starting a large, daunting project, like my clutter, because I’m afraid my results won’t be “good enough” to me.

I’m a bit like this in all aspects of my life, but especially so when it comes to clutter. When things don’t go well, I do tend to get frustrated. Sometimes, I’ll spend hours, most of a day even, on cleaning up a single area. I sort garbage from good things, I sort things to put elsewhere from things that should stay in the area. I try. I really, really try. And what do I have to show for it? Not a clean, organized area (I’m too far gone to be able to fix everything in a single day!), but a mess. A different-looking mess than when I started, but a mess all the same.

I always hit that “in between” stage, where I may have removed 3 garbage bags full of useless items, but there’s still lots of stuff there. You need to both purge and organize in order to have a neat, tidy space. Even if I make it all the way through the “purge” stage, there’s still everything that needs to be organized. Sorted into storage containers (that I don’t have, since I didn’t know what I’d have left to store) or filed into folders (that I haven’t labelled yet, since I didn’t know what I’d find to file). While I do feel a small sense of satisfaction at having accomplished as much as I have, there’s still the feeling that I’ve worked for hours, and all I have to show for it is a mess. It’s very disheartening.

To avoid this self-disappointment, I tend to avoid cleaning up in the first place. If I don’t do it, I can’t feel bad for not finishing it. That’s the idea, at least. Instead, what ends up happening is that I feel bad for having not done anything. Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t, it seems.

I’ve got to get over this perception that everything must be perfect. I obviously don’t hold my possessions to such a high standard, or else I wouldn’t have nearly so many of them (but that’s a post for another time!).

Perhaps once I manage to get past the stage I’m at right now, and get my house cleared of clutter, my perfectionism will help me. People with spotless, Martha-Stewart-esque homes are often called perfectionists, so maybe when my house starts out being clean, my perfectionist nature will allow me to keep it that way.
Here’s hoping!

Incidentally, do a Flickr search for “perfection”. It’s utterly fascinating to see what people label as perfection.
While you’re there, join my Flickr Group and add your decluttering before/after photos, or just browse to get some inspiration!

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Perfectionism Doesn’t Help You Declutter

What not to wear' class=

Two different shows featured two different women; one who had gained some weight since her college days but was still trying to wear her old school clothes, and one who had lost over 50 pounds and was still wearing her clothes from before she lost the weight.
Hosts Stacy and Clinton gave them each the same advice!

Their lesson (paraphrased) was

Clothes that no longer fit (either too large or too small) can cause emotional baggage and keep you from looking and feeling your best. Wear clothes that fit and flatter your body to look and feel better.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Stacy and Clinton have a point. It’s not just the clothes, not just the clutter in your closet, there’s emotional baggage as well.

Dress your body as it is now, not as it was or as it will be.
It may be tempting to keep your “skinny pants”, or that dress that you love but haven’t fit in 2 years but have been “saving for when you do”, but why torture yourself with them? You’re likely to look at them and think “If only I still fit into that!” or have been saying “If I tried hard enough, maybe I could wear those again” for 2 years, and that’s emotional stress you don’t need in your life.
Toss the stuff that doesn’t fit, and you’ll have more room for the clothes that flatter your body right now. There will always be sales on clothes, so you’ll always be able to find a size-appropriate replacement for items you love.

Conversely, if you’ve lost weight, don’t keep things that fit your old body! Despite how lovely a vest may be, if it’s 3 sizes too large for you now, it’s not an asset to your wardrobe.

Worse, clothes that don’t fit you now (regardless of whether they are too large or too small) can actually bring your mood down by reminding you that you used to be a different size. If you actually wear them, you don’t get a chance to feel good in your new body. Squeezing into too-tight clothes can make you feel sad that you no longer fit them properly, while draping yourself in clothes 3 sizes too large can make you feel as if you haven’t lost the weight at all!

If it doesn’t make you feel good, get rid of it!
You wouldn’t stock your fridge with food you hate to eat, so why stock your closet with clothes you hate to wear? If a shirt makes you feel dumpy – why own it? If a pair of pants is itchy and rough – why put up with them? Out they go! You’ll feel happier once you do, not only because you’ll no longer have to look at clothes that make you gloomy, but because you’ll be freeing up space!

Now, odds are you don’t have $5000 to spend on a whole bunch of new clothes (I wish!), so your closet will be much more empty looking if you follow Stacy and Clinton’s advice. This is a good thing, because it’s far easier to organize that way!

Photo by George Lange / Discovery Channel

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Clutter Lessons from TLC’s What Not To Wear

If you’re like me, one of the “reasons” you have clutter is actually to try to save money. I put reasons in quotation marks because it’s not really a proper reason so much as an excuse, but that’s a post for another day.
You keep some things around because you feel you may need them in the future. You don’t want to pay for a new item, so you keep the old one around so you’ll have it at the ready the next time you need it. Makes sense, right? You have good intentions, but if it ended up as part of your clutter, this means it is either being stored in the wrong location, or that it doesn’t even have a proper place in your home at all. And clutter can cost you money just by sitting there.

Every so often I re-learn this lesson, but I hope that by writing it down in this blog it will actually sink in once and for all. It’s quite simple: having clutter makes it more difficult to locate specific items, especially when you’re in a hurry. You may be like me and say “I know roughly where everything is”, and I do. However, I can’t locate items in a split-second because they are often not where they should be. Last night I was looking for my seam ripper. It’s a small item, so it can get hidden quite easily. I know that it’s probably “somewhere” in my craft room, but I couldn’t find it at all. It may be hidden somewhere in that room, or I may have allowed myself to walk off with it and leave it in an improper place. The long and short of it is that if I can’t find it today I will have to run out and buy a new one, because I have a project on the go that can’t be held up and I need my seam ripper.

What’s that? I’ll have to go out and spend money on a duplicate of an item I already own just because I can’t find my current one? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Not to mention being completely contrary to one of my reasons for having clutter in the first place, which was to try to save money. A seam ripper only costs a couple dollars, so it’s not a big deal. Or is it? Every small item you need to re-purchase due to clutter can add up in the long run, and no one needs to waste money that way when there’s much more important things to put it toward.

In addition to lost items, you can also easily lose bills and invoices in your clutter pile, or important notices. No one likes to pay past-due fees because they found their bill two days too late. You may also easily lose larger-ticket items to your clutter piles; a while ago I had a 1gig thumb drive lost in my clutter for a couple months. This was back when a nice 1gig one cost about $99, so I did not go spend the money on a replacement, but for a long time I didn’t get to use the item that I had paid good money for.

Getting rid of your clutter and then keeping everything in a proper place (or at least near  to its proper place )  will save you money in not only the long run, but in the short term as well!

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Costly Clutter – Getting Rid of your Clutter can Save you Money

People are thought to have a compulsive hoarding problem when they meet all three of these criteria:

1. They regularly keep a large number of possessions that most people would not consider to be very useful or valuable.
2. Their home, or parts of their home, are so cluttered that they can no longer use those parts of their home for their intended purpose.
3. The clutter is so bad that it causes significant distress or impairment.

The causes of compulsive hoarding are not known, but researchers think that it results from problems in one or more of these areas:

1. Information processing (e.g., problems categorizing or making decisions)
2. Beliefs about possessions (e.g., a sense of attachment to possessions, or fears of forgetting things)
3. Emotional distress about discarding, which leads to avoidance of discarding

This is somewhat depressing, because I certainly meet all 3 criteria , at least on the surface. #1 for sure, but hey, who doesn’t have keepsakes that no one else would find useful or valuable? For #3, I don’t know about “significant” distress or impairment, but I know for sure my clutter has made me late for things on several occasions because I couldn’t find an item I needed, and it certainly causes me distress that I can’t even have someone over to visit because the place is so messy.
#2 is a new one for me, but I’m definitely here now. My craft room has become my “clutter room” – it’s definitely the worst room in the house (which is not good when your house only has 6 rooms if you count the bathroom!). While it can technically be used for its “intended purpose” that is, I can sit down and use the sewing machine, that’s about all I can do in there, so the room is certainly not functional. Piles of fabric cover the shelves, the spare futon, and spill onto the floor. Boxes, some leftover from moving here, some simply containing seemingly random craft-related items sit on the floor. Miscellaneous crafting supplies are scattered throughout the room with no sense of purpose. I haven’t seen the surface of my cutting table in months, and I cannot use it for cutting.

Unfortunately, this means that all the other parts of my crafting – cutting fabric, drafting patterns, storing finished items, etc., spills out into the living room. These two rooms are (unfortunately) the two rooms you see instantly as you walk in the door.

There is no current treatment for compulsive hoarding; the drugs that are sometimes used to treat OCD do not work on hoarders for the most part.
That’s fine by me, I’m not looking for a magical medical cure. The “help” I need is more like a kick in the pants to get me going, and this blog is intended to be that kick in the pants.

Disclaimer: Websites cannot provide a diagnosis, and should not be used to do so. Please refer to your appropriate healthcare professional for all matters of diagnosis or treatment.

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Compulsive Hoarding