Clutter

My decorating strongly tends towards functional minimalism.   Nothing in the middle of the room and that much stuff on the walls.  A more accurate and less charitable description is that I crappy decorator.  My efforts have always felt a lack of the warm and inviting feel of a place to socialize.

The current situation is a perimeter of crap all around my living room.  Putting a dresser and chest of drawers to use as hobby toolboxes moved the needle from an iffy situation to full on busy.  For whatever reason, I have lacked the motivation and/or energy to streamline and organize the front room. 

The biggest component of stuff collection is that I have not moved in a dozen years.  This is the longest I have lived anywhere in my adult life by years.  Goods that would have been recycled or junked found a place in the closet without needing to be moved or discarded.  Now my closets are full of clothes that are too small, linens, duffle bags, wheelchair parts and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper (which I don’t even use much of in the first place).

Another part of that is observing that Lea has not seen an empty space that did not need filling.  Pre-emptive clutter has cut down on the rate of stuff increasing.  Still I could fill the spaces in vastly more organized and attractive ways.  Blaming it on others is a feeble excuse at best and more nearly another character  flaw.  Having a spare bedroom was a great clutter reduction method for the front room.  That space resource was reallocated two years ago.  Time to move on.

My rule of thumb is nothing more than one layer deep around the perimeter.  Unfortunately that has expanded to include blocking my access to the sliding deck door and the front closets.

It is time to declutter my living room.   I will at least get rid of enough stuff so that everything else fits in a place that is at least out of sight and hopefully well organized.

My place is messy and kind of trashed.  Wheelchairs are hard on carpets and foot-high sheetrock (where the wheel bumps corners).  My lease expires in April.  I can’t imagine finding the gumption to move out, get new carpet and paint, then move in.  I can at least attenuate the IED bomb crater (currently watching American Sniper about US soldiers in Iraq) look.  Okay, it is not quite that bad.  I can reach the wall from my wheelchair all around the room and the stuff that I have all works—I just am not using it now.

I am grateful that one of the biggest problems in my life today is having too much crap that I don’t need or use.  That is fantastically better than suffering from a scarcity of resources such as food, clean water, warm shelter and a safe place to live.  I have a classier set of problems these days.