Declutter

Where can you reduce clutter in your life?

Where, oh, where can we reduce clutter in our life? Everywhere! So much stuff — physical, verbal, creative, emotional, psychological, social — ready to be filtered and distilled. Things to downsize. Bits and bobs to organize. Debris to purge. Busyness to abbreviate. Distractions to alleviate…

Over the last year and a half I have often committed to reducing the clutter in my life. In our life. At Rosslyn. Progress is ongoing, but gradual.

Today I tender scrapbook snapshots and excerpts from previous posts, as if an incomplete collage coalescing around the possibility/ies of reducing clutter.

It’s time to declutter the carriage barn that has served as a lumber and architectural salvage warehouse, workshop, and staging area. It’s time to consolidate and organize miscellaneous stacks of lumber. It’s time to make space and make way.

[…]

Declutterring continues. Ordering ongoing, like with like, streamlining storage space, ensuring efficiency. Harmony reigns again. Maybe not again. Maybe for the first time.

(Source: Declutter & Consolidate)

Eliminating, systematizing, harmonizing. Levity returning. Essentialism.

My years at Rosslyn have been a time of gathering, collecting, and curating. Ample house and outbuildings. Ample acreage. Accumulating possessions was perhaps inevitable. Furniture, art, decor. Toys and tools. Bikes, boats, tractor, Gator, and all sorts of property maintenance equipment. A startlingly expansive store of architectural salvage, lumber, and building materials.

[…]

I need to evaluate the minutia as much as the biggies. Essential or nonessential? Fundamental or filler? Additive or ready for recycling? Discretionary doo-dad? Let it go. Optional, outdated, or simply unused? Let it go!

(Source: Do Differently)

This underutilized outbuilding had become a storage space in the 15-16 years since it was saved from inelegant rot and collapse. Over the last few days the icehouse is being purged by Pam and Tony so that we may at last begin rehabilitation and repurposing.

[…]

there’s still about a day of decluttering and organizing before the historic icehouse is once again stripped bare and ready for the next phase of rehabilitation. All of the materials that were removed have been inventoried and relocated to the carriage barn and the new storage container we’ve rented for the duration of the project.

(Source: Clearing Out Historic Icehouse)

Fine flavor, this last excerpt, rolling around in my mouth like a delicacy savored. The rewards of retrospection. Almost a year and a half later that space is transformed, and most of the former clutter has been repurposed, recycled, or rehomed.

The ravages and risks of storm damage, impossible to eliminate altogether, have been mostly ameliorated through the vision, perseverance, and hard work of Aaron, Tony, and others.

And then there is the question of Rosslyn‘s waterfront, still hyper saturated by alarmingly high lake water levels. Clutter carried ashore, and clutter created of otherwise tidy beach, terraces, and boathouse.

And then there’s the clutter of mind, notebooks, and hard drive.

Long before journals became weblogs became blogs, writers and storytellers kept fuzzy-cornered, coffee-stained notebooks and clutches of notes wrapped in string. Word people (my kind of word people, at least) are chronic collectors. We cling to our clutter because we are paranoid. Or maybe because we’re hoarders. We’ve learned that our best ideas may be yesterday’s mistakes. Notes become novels. Slapdash clouds of words becomes monumental poems. Not often, of course, but once is all it takes to convince us that we’d best hoard our verbal midden heaps. Just in case. My Daily Munge is my squalid midden heap. My compost pile. My scrapbook. And in some slightly esoteric way it is what made Rosslyn’s endless rehabilitation survivable, what kept me intrigued, note taking, documenting. After all, isn’t it possible that Odysseus’s almost endless homecoming might have had more to do with collecting and curating chronicles than obstacles? Possibly.

(Source: Old House Journaling)

Much to declutter, but enough progress already to prime the Pollyanna pump, to encourage us onward.

2024 is our year of decluttering, simplifying, minimizing. Distilling essentials. Lifting off.