A few weeks ago, while I was immersed in my own continuing downsizing saga, I made an absolutely wonderful discovery. Eve Schaub is what we call in our book, and on this blog, “a keeper.” She is also a writer who describes herself as “a serial memoirist.” In 2011 she wrote a blog about her family’s attempt to live for a year without any added sugar in their food, which later became the book “Year of No Sugar.” This spring, Eve published the “Year of No Clutter,” which describes her struggle to transform herself from a self-described “clutter-gatherer” into “a neat, organized person who can actually walk through every room of her house and does not feel the need to keep everything…”
With refreshing–even brave–honesty, with sensitivity and self-deprecating wit, Eve tells the story of how that year went, and how her family helped her–more or less–achieve her goal. Her book is not only entertaining–in fact, often laugh-out-loud funny–and deeply insightful, it is full of practical ideas that will be helpful for the keepers of this world who are trying to talk themselves into getting rid of things, and the loved ones who are either helping them, or looking on in horror and trying not to interrupt.
Eve recently returned to her Vermont home after a book tour, and was kind enough to answer my questions about the “Year of No Clutter” via email. Her husband, Steve, and their two daughters, Greta and Ilsa, who were intimately involved in the process, also agreed to answer a couple of questions. Many thanks to the whole family for sharing their inspiring, and (mostly) successful story of dealing with the mountain of stuff in their “Hell Room.” Janet Hulstrand
JH: Steve, the book begins with a foreword by you that makes it abundantly clear what a tolerant, understanding, supportive, and forgiving person you are. How did you find the kindness and the generosity of spirit to be so supportive of Eve and so patient with her, and with the situation in your home, throughout the Year of No Clutter? And do you have any thoughts to share with other husbands (or wives) who live with someone for whom dealing with clutter is a constant struggle? In particular, how do you keep the demon Anger from rising up, and make room for more productive emotions to emerge?
Steve Schaub: Eve and I have a very giving and loving life together, and we’re both creative people, so solving this issue in a creative way (through writing about it) made total sense to me. I think the first thing is to be aware that the person you love is in a struggle and getting angry is the wrong approach. Trying to win an argument about what is of value, or what is or is not clutter is also the wrong approach–-you don’t win in a situation like this. You compromise, you listen, and you try to be aware of how very hard this is for someone you love.
JH: Eve, was there one particular moment of awareness, or event, that caused you to decide to launch into your attack on the challenge of decluttering the room you called your Hell Room?
Eve: I describe in the book one especially memorable moment in which, in order to do his job, the energy assessment guy had to poke around the atrocious Hell Room–which was my nickname for the large spare room in our house that took up the slack for my extreme-keeping-behavior. Over the years, this room had gone from being a regular room, to a very cluttered storage room, to a giant sponge–while everywhere else in the house was relatively okay, this was the room that absorbed everything. Eventually there weren’t even paths through the stuff anymore, and knowing what was there, finding things, keeping things from being ruined, were activities that were getting harder and harder to do.
So here’s this poor energy-assessment guy, trying to get to the far corner of the room, stepping over piles, literally wading through the horribleness and I was utterly mortified. Up until that moment I had been able to remain in denial about how bad things had gotten. But now I was forced to see the room–and me–through his eyes, and I did not like what I saw one little bit. I wasn’t sure if it was possible to change–or rather, modify–the sort of person I was, but I realized for the first time that I wanted to try.
The “Hell Room” Before the Year of No Clutter. Photo by Stephen Schaub.
JH: What was one of your happiest moments in the process? The saddest, or most difficult? The most enlightening?
Eve: The happiest moments were the moments in which I felt I had achieved a clear mark of progress: the times I came home from dropping off a car full of things at the charity and consignment shops with a blissfully empty car, or the times when I was, for the first time, able to sit down and use a space that previously had been filled up with piles of stuff. Just sitting down in a newly cleared-off armchair to read a book became a small but significant triumph.
Of course, by contrast, the most difficult moments were those in which I felt I was spinning my wheels and getting nowhere: when I’d start out with a pile and get stymied halfway through, unable to make decisions or discard much of anything. Life has a way of getting in the way of decluttering with more pressing tasks like eating and sleeping and changing the cat litter and it’s sooooo easy to get sidetracked. When this happened I’d be very hard on myself and start to lose hope that anything would ever really get accomplished. The only remedy for this was to keep going– sooner or later there’d be some small victory again to make me feel back on track.
As for sadness, at some point I made the decision that regret/sadness was just going to be part of the bargain for getting control of my house and living space back. Because I had experienced loss so keenly in the past over things I had gotten rid of, I fully expected the process to be a very sad and upsetting one. Surprisingly, this time it wasn’t. I attribute this largely to two things: first, I had a newfound sense of what was at stake in this process, and that larger purpose helped me overcome that tendency to get bogged down in regret. The second thing was simply practice. I realized that the getting-rid-of-stuff muscle in my brain had lain so long unused that it had atrophied. So using it more and more, making lots and lots of decisions all the time, seemed to inoculate me to a degree against the tendency to obsess over one thing or another.
JH: At one point you write, “I’ve come to realize that the Stuff conundrum is one that people in our culture feel quite keenly, even when it isn’t on an epic scale…helplessness is the key emotion I hear [among people who talk about their issues with Stuff] and on some level I’m coming to see it as an issue of empowerment…” Can you say a bit more about this? What is the nature of this helplessness, and how can people who feel it begin to take control of the situation and become empowered?
Eve: It really is all about empowerment: who’s in charge around here anyway? Me? Or my Stuff? Taking control for me meant giving myself a certain degree of permission in a very conscious way. I mentioned that I made a decision to accept that a certain measure of sadness and regret were going to figure in to my decluttering. I also knew the Murphy’s Law of Clutter: “If you get rid of an object, exactly forty-seven seconds later you will suddenly discover that you desperately NEED it!”
So I knew that sooner or later I would get rid of something and soon thereafter wish I hadn’t. In fact, I realized that much of my cluttering and keeping was based in a deep-seated fear of making a mistake, doing something that I would perceive in hindsight as being wrong. I was so averse to the idea of making a mistake that I’d end up making no decisions at all.
This brings me to what I arrived at as a definition of clutter. I wondered: how is “clutter” different from “a mess”? I realized that a mess is pretty straightforward. The kitchen is a mess, so you go in and clean it up. It’s pretty common sense: you wash things, you put things away. In fact, someone else could probably do it for you. But clutter? No one can solve your clutter for you. This is because clutter is about deferred decisions- items that don’t really go anywhere because we haven’t fully decided where or if they fit into our lives. Once I realized this distinction, I found it very helpful and empowering- the key to cleaning out my clutter was making decisions…thousands and thousands of decisions. If I made enough of them, one day I’d get my room–and the sense of control over my life and my living space–back again.
JH: One of the traps for people who have difficulty getting rid of stuff is the aversion to getting rid of the “perfectly good…[fill in the blank]” Can you share with our readers some of the things that helped you feel better about getting rid of perfectly-good items in your Year of No Clutter?
Eve: At one point in the book I describe helping my father have a tag sale at his house in preparation for his move from New Jersey to Kansas. Now, my Dad is a big-time keeper– his level of clutter makes my petty one-room nonsense look like nothing. In fact, it was only once I was a grown-up and stood back and looked at the way my father and some other members of my family lived with their belongings that I began to see a pattern and started to wonder if all this cluttering and hoarding was genetic.
As you can imagine, having a tag sale with a tremendous keeper like my dad wasn’t going to be easy. I vividly recall at one point having a rather animated conversation over a brand new roll of shelf paper, still in the plastic, that had been lying around for at least a decade, unused. Dad objected to me selling it on the grounds that it was, of course, “perfectly good.”
“But Dad,” I found myself saying, somewhat desperately, “I’m pretty sure they have shelf paper in Kansas.”
What I tried to convince my Dad of, and what I tried to convince myself of (somewhat more successfully), was the idea that every item we own comes at some sort of cost. It’s a small cost, almost infinitesimal at times, but it’s there nonetheless… it’s the cost of owning that object, taking care of it, allotting space for it in your living space as well as in your brain. Sometimes there’s monetary cost too- such as when we have a storage locker.
When we get too many items under our jurisdiction–unless we are lucky enough to have a museum staff at our disposal to sort and organize and protect all our things–things start to happen. Not only do you not have the full, functioning use of your living environment, but you also can’t take good care of the things you care about most–there’s just too much stuff to be able to care for it all properly. And things begin to happen: the piles topple and your wedding album gets stepped on. The mice move in and begin eating your collection of baby clothes. There’s a cost.
So in a way we can think of decluttering as a process of prioritizing what we are willing to take care of and devote some time and energy and space to keeping. So then the decisions become easier: things that are replaceable, like shelf paper, or a “really great box,” or an extra lamp nobody really likes or needs, can all be dispensed with, so that we have more resources in our lives for the items that can’t be replaced, such as the baby clothes, the wedding album, the old notebooks from college and so on. The bonus is that items that are easily replaceable (i.e.,the perfectly good lamp) are often things somebody out there can use and would be delighted to have. So you avoid the dreaded landfill, clear out some much-needed space, AND make someone else happy in the bargain… it’s a win-win-win.
JH: Toward the end of the book, you talk about your “revelation” that “despite my knee-jerk tendency to keep, keep, keep! there were many things that I could, in fact, get rid of…” How important do you think it was the YOU were the one who was given the time and space in which to learn how to “give YOURSELF [my emphasis] a good stern talking to” and do what had to be done, rather than someone else “helping” you do it, or threatening you if you didn’t do it, or simply trying to shame you into doing it?
Eve: Prior to my Year of No Clutter, it had happened at least twice that I’d had a friend over who said, oh, I can help you with this! And they’d start putting things in boxes or bags, holding things up and asking me questions. Both times I was uneasy, and ended up saying,” Okay! That’s enough! Thanks for your help!” I wasn’t ready, and therefore, no matter how good their intentions were, they weren’t able to be helpful.
I think it was absolutely pivotal for me that this was not a process that was imposed from without, but rather something I realized I really wanted/needed to do, and that I initiated and carried out. While researching for the book I learned that hoarders who have been forced to clean out, or who have had the cleaning out done for them, have a significantly higher propensity to be depressed and/or suicidal.
So I think that reality shows like Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive can actually be harmful, not only potentially to the people they are often forcing to clean out, but also to the people who watch these shows and think that forcing their friend or family member in a direction they’re reluctant to go is “for their own good.”
JH: What would you say to those reading your book who are reading not because THEY have an issue with keeping too much stuff, but because they live with someone, or care about someone, who does. How can they be helpful to their loved ones who are struggling with the problem of Too Much Stuff?
Eve: Although I’m the one in our house with the biggest “stuff problem,” it turned out that my husband had a significant amount of stuff in the Hell Room as well. So even while dealing with my own demons, I was also in the position of trying to convince someone else to confront their own.
My husband is kind of the opposite of me in how he deals with clutter: he has a tendency to want to simply throw everything away without even looking at it, just to get the process over with as quickly as possible, like ripping off a Band-Aid. But this can present other problems: once my husband donated a wallet with his social security card inside to the Salvation Army! (Fortunately a kind soul found and returned it.)
But the boxes in our Hell Room had things like photographic negatives and valuable camera equipment in them (my husband is a photographer), so we really did have to go through them. After lots of resistance from him to come look at the boxes, I finally brought all the boxes full of his stuff downstairs, into the dining room and let them sit there on the floor. They sat there for days, and quietly drove him crazy, because he couldn’t ignore them anymore. Finally one day after lunch he said “Okay, fine. Let’s go through a box.” After that every day we’d go through a box or two making decisions, emptying them out, putting things in proper places or discarding them. After only a few days it was all done and it seemed amazing that it had ever presented a problem at all.
What I found over the course of this year is that different strategies work for different people, so sometimes you need to experiment. Patience is key. Making sure the person feels respected in their choices and in control of their belongings and living space is too. I know I pushed the envelope a bit with my husband’s boxes- quietly confronting him with something he didn’t want to deal with–but ultimately it did work, perhaps because I let him work it out in his own time.
JH: Are there one or two key things you hope people who struggle with the problem of “too much stuff” will take away from reading your book?
Eve: First, I really hope people who struggle with stuff come away from the book with the feeling that they are not alone. I’m amazed at the fact that every person I talk to about my book has a connection to the problem of too much stuff–either they have a stuff problem, or someone they know does. It’s a much more common problem than people think.
Another important realization I came to during this project was that decluttering isn’t something you have done–and then it’s over. Rather, it’s something you do–it becomes a part of the way you live your life. Although decluttering might come naturally to some, for a “too much stuff” person like me it is a conscious, carefully considered decision I make to part with some things while keeping others, realizing that I only have so much space and energy and time to give to my things.
Just like making your bed in the morning or brushing your teeth, decluttering has now become a part of my regular routine: discarding things, bringing clothing to the consignment shop with every new season, books to the library sale, and so on. Sometimes it shows up in the form of a small new habit, such as, when I come home from a play, recycling the program right away, or deciding not to feel guilty about giving away a gift that I know I’ll never use. Above all it means making decisions, not deferring them, and knowing that my decisions won’t always be perfect, but that it’s worth it in the long run, because it means I will get to use and enjoy my objects and my home much, much more.
I’m not “cured” of cluttering, and I’ll probably always struggle with stuff on some level. By no means is my house going to be featured in the next issue of House Beautiful either, but it’s so much better and more functional than it was. No matter how frustrating decluttering seems, I’d say: don’t despair. I’m living proof that change is possible.
The “Hell Room” After: No Longer a Hell Room! Photo by Stephen Schaub.
JH: Since this project was really a family affair, if Greta and/or Ilsa would like to add a short, one-sentence summary of how they feel about the outcome of the Year of No Clutter, I think it would be nice to give them a chance to share their perspective too. I guess what I’d really like to ask them is, what is the best thing that happened to, or for, your family, in the Year of No Clutter?
Greta (age 17): The rediscovery of family heirlooms, and being able to use them again.
Ilsa (age 12): I guess that the best thing would be, the discovering of old treasures and heirlooms, but also being able to walk in the room that you cleaned and not feeling guilty about not have cleaned it, and being able to feel that you did the right thing. Maybe something you no longer needed and gave away is in the hands of someone who truly needs or appreciates that item more than stuffing it in a box or throwing it in a pile.
Janet Hulstrand is a writer/editor, writing coach, travel blogger, and coauthor of Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home. You can learn more about Eve Schaub on her website. You can also take a short video tour of the newly decluttered “Hell Room” here.
downsizing the home 