Declutter to de-stress

Editor’s note: This column was originally published Feb. 5, 2016

Have you heard about the tiny living movement? People choosing to ‘simplify’ their lives by downsizing? Willingly choosing to live in an area averaging between 100 and 400 square feet. There is certainly a lot of information out there on the subject.

I understand it in theory. Declutter your life. Focus on simplicity. Enjoy the things that really matter.

Kudos to anyone that can successfully pull that one off. Personally I can imagine few things more stressful than going from my current accommodations to a living space 10 times smaller.

The way I look at it, I’ve already served my time living tiny — my first apartment. Back then, I thought it was perfect. But that was a number of years ago. Now I need elbow room. I deserve elbow room.

I’m all for reducing the clutter our family has managed to collect. In fact, recently we’ve done some extensive soul-searching and began taking a hard look at the importance of some of our material goods a/k/a keepsakes.

New Year’s eve morning, we put some of that soul-searching in to practice and did some extensive cleaning in our basement. I discovered the more determined I am to get a project done, the less sentimental I am. I was on a mission to clear out one of the rooms in our basement.

This was another project where hubby was rolling his eyes, doing a considerable amount of nay-saying, a lot of murmuring under his breathe and wishing he hadn’t taken the day off from his paying job.

I headed down the stairs around 8 a.m. Dec. 31 and I admit, as soon as I opened the door to the targeted room, I wanted nothing more than to head back up the stairs, pour another cup of coffee and forget the whole idea. The only thing that kept me going was that hubby was begrudgingly behind me. I was the one spear-heading this assignment, so I had to get the ball rolling. The room we were focused on had simply gotten out of hand.

Back in the day, it had served us as a playroom for the kids equipped with a TV and VCR, shelving for toys and books, a Foosball table, durable yet comfy furniture, and anything else we could think of to keep them occupied if it wasn’t nice enough to be outdoors.

In more recent years it had become a storage room and housed everything from luggage to artificial Christmas trees, old VHS tapes to NASCAR tires and non-working televisions to outdated Home Interior decor... you name it, we probably had it in the basement.

Fortunately for me, college kid and his girlfriend were there, plus our trash collector was due to show up that morning, so I rallied the troops and was more motivated than I’d been since the last great idea I had.

Funny thing is, as I was compiling towers of junk, hubby was beginning to get a wee bit nostalgic about some of the items I was trying to purge from the basement. I just kept saying, “if it hasn’t seen the light of day in the past 3 to 5 years, we can do without it.”

We worked furiously that morning and completed the room in record time and better yet, mere minutes before the trash truck showed up. It looks pretty good down there now.

Decluttering actually is de-stressing, once it’s completed. But you still won’t find me living in home the size of a garden shed... not willingly anyway.

Contact Dana King at dking@shawmedia.com