Decluttering: Life Revelations Available Here

In ordered homes, decluttering is a process that gets repeated over and over in some way or another. You may do it on a regular schedule, as the need arises, or when desperate times call for desperate measures, but all of us practice some form of decluttering often enough, if only by taking the weekly trash to the curb. Usually, decluttering is simply a matter of throwing out used batteries and stained clothing and giving away the throw pillows that are more shabby than chic and figuring out a better way to arrange the linen closet. It is routine, must-do, and mundane most of the time, but sometimes we start decluttering and have an epiphany.

The epiphany can be small – we save every twist tie that enters our home and now we have 843 twist ties and there is no need for that many so I think we can take a hiatus on saving twist ties for the rest of our lives – or it can be big. The big ones often involve the realization that we have left one phase of our lives behind and entered another. I am having a big epiphany like that this month, and it was revealed when I started to declutter our project room.

Our youngest child is in the second half of eleventh grade. When he graduates at the end of next school year we will have completed 21 years of homeschooling, if I got the math right. Twenty-one years is a significant chunk of my lifetime so far, long enough to get lost in, long enough to almost forget it won’t last forever. Now, don’t pull out the tissues yet. It is bittersweet, but I hope there is enough sweet to offset the bitter. In many ways I have to fight hastening the arrival of the retired homeschool mom phase – the pleasure of seeing our boy launched and the possibilities my freer schedule will offer are enticements to get there and enter with delight.

Even though we haven’t quite stopped homeschooling, we are already in transition. Our household is comprised of five adult-sized persons with grownup interests and grownup needs for workspace, storage, and materials. When I started decluttering in our project room, I realized a lot of it was still set up for people under five feet tall. After indulging in a little weepy nostalgia for the days when the crayons and simple chapter books needed to be front and center, I got tough with myself and started experimenting with how to organize the room for adult needs while reserving some space for the young visitors who are here sometimes. This is where we store the majority of our books, where we keep many of our craft and photo supplies, and where we have our Great Big Desk. We also keep a worktable in here that doubles as a second study spot. When The Husband works from home, he usually works in this room. When I am studying for a class, I am usually found in here. Even though we still wrap presents, scrapbook, and do other crafts in here, it is most often used as a study now, and I worked hard to make changes to reflect that current reality.

First, I went through all of the items in the room and removed everything that didn’t belong there or that we no longer want to keep at all. We had a large collection of board games. I knew many of them hadn’t been played with in years, so I pulled them from the shelves and arranged neat stacks on a table. I invited each family member to go through them and pull out all of the games they wanted to keep. I reassured them that it didn’t matter to me if they all stayed, but perhaps there were a few nobody really wanted anymore. To my surprise, about half of the games were able to go to the thrift shop with everyone’s blessing. I moved the ones that passed the stay/go test from their former front-and-center place to a tucked-away shelf, still accessible but no longer the first thing we see as we enter the room.

I really used my muscles during all of the refiguring of the storage. We shelve our books in a few loose categories, and it took some doing to change locations without having to split categories in odd ways. After adjusting many shelf heights and dealing with cascading stacks of books and breaking a nail, I finally had everything in place. It was only then I realized I had put the parenting books on a low shelf at about six-year-old height, including the ones about sex education. Not cool.

There is more about this room, but that will do for now. We are already benefitting from the changes I made. Tempting as it can be to hold onto the past, a space decluttered and organized to reflect the current needs of the family always pays big dividends in ease-of-use, greater productivity, and a peaceful acceptance of what is. Those epiphanies are a gift to be embraced.