Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
I Was Saving That For…
I love my clients. They’re so creative. They save old T-shirts to make a quilt. They save ticket stubs to make a shadow box. And they save all manner of old containers for organizing.
I get it. I have too many empty glass jars. I will never make enough bean soup to use up all my cheese rinds.
The problem is, sometimes you save more stuff than you have time to use. If you aspire to organization (and don’t we all?) you have to get honest. I do use jars, and I do add cheese rinds to bean soup, but I have to have a limit. If I’ve got more than two or three rinds of cheese, I toss the older ones. I don’t keep more empty jars than fit on the shelf where I store them. In my book, I refer to this as a boundary.
Clients often resist when I try to curb their craft-material collections. They feel like I’m the big, bad, no-fun organizer come to make everything black and white and linear. But I’m not. I love a good craft project, and I certainly love recycling and reusing, but I believe in being honest and being accountable.
Hoarding Popsicle sticks to make a craft project with a kid who only wants to build with Legos isn’t being honest. Keeping every New Yorker cover because you’re going to decoupage your powder room is probably unrealistic.
Think about this: If you let go of 75 percent of the supplies you are hoarding for projects, you might free up the space—both psychic and temporal—to actually complete the other 25 percent. The truth is, a lot of people don’t save all that material because they’re doing crafts every weekend, they’re saving it because they hate waste, they feel guilty or they just hate throwing stuff out.
It’s okay. The more you practice letting go of things that are hard for you to let go of, the better you’ll get at it. You also might get better at not saving things in the first place.
Of course, if you really can’t bear to throw it away, you know what you have to do: Get out your glue and start making that shadow box.
Personally, I’m going into the kitchen to throw out some cheese rinds.