Mothering Forum banner

how does clutter come about, any theories?

1K views 18 replies 15 participants last post by  contactmaya 
#1 ·
Im trying to figure out, how, despite my best intentions, clutter starts to grow.

Even if you were to throw everything but the bare essentials away, within days, clutter starts to grow....

Anyone got any theories about this?

I think its related to time. There are things i need daily, weekly, monthly, trimonthly, yearly, 10 yearly, etc. But the stuff that you only need weekly or monthly, is clutter when it comes to day to day living.

...trying to figure out how to solve this dilemma...

I dont know. Has anyone ever figured this out?
Maya
 
#2 ·
Laziness, plain and simple, at least in my house. Lack of follow-through. If everyone went that extra step to pick up what they are stepping over and put an item in it's home (including in the garbage or the dishwasher) then the house wouldn't be so cluttered. And clutter begets clutter, leave one item and others seem to congregate around it. My kitchen table is the worst for this.
 
#3 ·
our clutter is paper that we bring from outside of the house.

so, for example, we go through our day and pick up flyers, coupons, receipts, business cards, etc. at the end of the day, DH empties his pockets in a single location, that becomes a little pile of clutter by the end of the week.

at the end of the week, i sit down and i file everything. i have a place for receipts, and so i file those. i add business cards to our contact lists in our computer and then i recycle the card. I put the information from important flyers into our calendar, file away those that have ideas that we want to hold onto (inspiration files), and file the coupons appropriately (and flag in the calendar when the coupons expire, or can be used for certain events, etc).

that is our predominate clutter. right now, we also have a lot of card board for recycling and large plastic mattress bags that can't be recycled so i'm looking for a home for them (i think the community garden may be able to use it for the winter garden).

otherwise, we keep it clutter free by diligently keeping after clutter.
 
#7 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by kdtmom2be View Post
And clutter begets clutter, leave one item and others seem to congregate around it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dachshundqueen View Post
It asexually reproduces when we are not looking.
There you have it. You put one piece down and when you aren't looking *BAM* 5 new pieces.

Horizontal table surfaces are very fertile breeding grounds.
 
#8 ·
Some thoughts:

- I think that the decluttering has to continue until there is _empty_ space - a fair bit of empty space - in every storage area. You can't just get to the point where everything fits perfectly, because that gives you no slack.

For example, if everything fits perfectly and you buy a new pair of shoes, you'd have to get an old pair of shoes out of the house, immediately, the day you come home with the new pair, or there would be a misplaced pair of shoes cluttering the place. And no one is going to get rid of the old pair the day that the new pair comes home.

If you have empty space big enough for, say, two more pairs of shoes, then you can put the new shoes away where they belong, without making clutter, and make a note that some time in the next few weeks, you need to take time to get a pair out of the house.

Similarly, if everything fits perfectly, you have to find the _one_ empty slot in one bookshelf to put a book away. If every shelf has ten or twenty percent empty space, putting books away, and rearranging them as your book-using habits change, is easy.

- In addition to empty space for regular storage, you need empty space for temporary storage. The library books need a place to sit when they're in your home, without cluttering up a table or chair somewhere. The rented videos, same thing. Same thing for the incoming mail, the "to be filed" papers, the papers that need to go to school with the kids or work with you, the dry cleaning that's on its way out or on its way back in, the magazine that you're still reading.

I call this all "pending stuff".

As another example, I go back to those shoes - if the kids or the cat come making demands when you got home, you're not even going to get to the bedroom closet to put the shoebox in one of those two spare slots that I discussed above. You're going to put it down, still in its bag, somewhere near the front door. So, there should be a place where it can sit, out of the way, for a day or so until you get around to putting it away. A place that you keep clear for just this sort of thing - the "incoming packages cubby" or whatever you call it.

Now, you don't need a _specific_ place for each of your categories of "pending stuff", but you need some places where the stuff belongs, so that it doesn't have to sit on a chair or on the floor.

We have, for example, a bookshelf where library books and new magazines and rental videos and the books that we're in the middle of reading and small packages, and all other booklike or small "pending" objects, go. It's a long shelf - six feet, I think? The shelf above it and below it are regular storage, but that shelf is temporary storage.

When the house is perfect, that shelf would be empty. (I don't know if that's ever happened.) When we've been busy, it gets fuller and fuller. I know that when it's half full, I need to make a point of finding time to get it to less than a quarter full, sometime in the next week, or it will get all full and the stuff will spill over to other spaces. But meanwhile, all that stuff is on a shelf, all reasonably neat and tidy.

So I think that two important tools are:

- Empty space in permanent storage.
- Convenient temporary storage in clutter hot spots.

Both of these assume that you regularly patrol these areas - keeping the empty space empty and clearing out the temporary storage. But you never have to do that _immediately_, and I think that's essential. Any housekeeping strategy that forbids you to postpone a task to a more convenient time is, IMO, doomed to failure.

Crayfish
 
#9 ·
i agree with that crayfish--though i never thought of it that way. we have a place for library books and rental DVDs. we have a 'drop spot' for things that come in that can be handled later (and don't clutter up the place). in fact, i mentioned such a spot in my post above--the 'drop spot' for the papers that we pick up during our day, and then there is long-term storage for it elsewhere.

i hadn't really thought of it in those terms, but it is definitely true.

and things do stack up. we have a lot of stuff to donate to the community garden for compost, gardening--all recycled packaging from our new mattress, bed, etc (which we didn't have any before because we just moved here). i go there on sunday, so i hope some of the folks can help me carry some of it from here to the garden.

but otherwise we have a lot of storage space and not a lot to store, and because we use the "can we live without it" process, we tend to keep having storage space because we don't buy things. LOL
 
#10 ·
It breeds on it's own?

I think even if you have done a great job decluttering, if you live with messy people it will seem more cluttered. I think my house looks great, and we have plenty of extra storage in each room/area (ie: toy storage, yarn storage, bathroom storage) but when people don't put things away it looks much more cluttered than it really is. Or if things don't get put away where they belong, like toys on a bookshelf for example.
 
#13 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Crayfish View Post
Some thoughts:

So I think that two important tools are:

- Empty space in permanent storage.
- Convenient temporary storage in clutter hot spots.
This is so key. I realized this after nearly 15 years of decluttering/organizing but then stopping just short of this. That's what causes it to go back to looking messy/cluttered in a day.

We have a terrible habit of working on a room and then stopping when there's still a tote of miscellany we're not sure where to put. That happened in my office the last 3-4 times I decluttered/organized it. Then it's also the dumping ground...if someone leaves a stack of something in the kitchen (or if a pile accumulates over a few days) it ends up in the office and no one has any idea where to put it (and occasionally it includes things we DO have designated space for, like books). A week of that and the office is trashed. My dh and I have always been of the philosophy that better one room than the whole house, but I've discovered that it tends to overflow into other rooms...like my bedroom!

The office is actually my big project this week and I told dh I'm not stopping till there is a place for everything, even if that means giving away a LOT of stuff or throwing out a lot of the paperwork he's stuck on keeping (old-fashioned philosophy about that).

This worked last week with toys (brought in 10 totes from the garage that I had to go through) and we gave away a mountain of stuff. I told the kids that we could only keep what would fit in the areas I'd decided to use for storage. They were awesome about it and we realized they didn't want/need anything else anyway and were relieved to be "saved" from the toy clutter (my 5yo's words). It's only been a week but the kids have been able to put toys away at the end of the day in about 5-10 minutes rather than it being an hour-long event that we often skipped.
 
#14 ·
It's because the fundamental physical laws of the universe dictate that entropy (also known as "disorder") in a closed system always increases, never decreases. To put things in order requires an expenditure of energy from outside (and this expenditure increases the entropy outside). Excessive clutter in the house can usually be traced to not enough personal energy going into maintaining order.

I want to add that laziness is not always the cause of clutter. There are many other reasons for low personal energy, such as illness or demanding jobs or challenging personal relationships.
 
#15 ·
I'd argue that it's usually not laziness, it's usually Too Much Stuff, and after that it may be a house that's badly adapted to the way that you live.

More stuff makes keeping a house tidy much, much more work. There's a point where you have so much stuff - and it's not a dramatic amount of stuff - that you effectively cannot keep a tidy house. You can, sure, get it tidy for an instant once in a while, but you can't _keep_ it that way. Failing to keep it that way is not evidence of laziness, it's evidence of the fact that the house is unmanageable.

Now, if your house is unmanageable, you may have given up on managing it. You may have completely lost the habit of regular maintenance and tidying. I suppose that you could call that laziness, since you're not doing the work, but I think that it's more of a rational recognition that there's not much point in doing it, because you can't do enough. I'd only apply the "lazy" label if you reach this point and refuse to make a change to make this situation go away.

So the first step in making that situation go away is to fundamentally change the house - get rid of a huge percentage of the stuff, rearrange the storage areas, create drop zones, etc.

And then you need to re-form the habits of tidying and home maintenance, because the helplessness that you learned is no longer true. Now it is possible, so now you need to do the work. But now, it's not that much work.

Crayfish
 
#16 ·
I agree with alot of people are saying and its all very helpful. But sometimes i am not sure that having too much stuff, is the cause of clutter. Almost all of my stuff is in storage, and i have the bare minimum with me in a new apartment that is quite large. Yet still...clutter.

One reason in my case, is that there is not enough stuff...there are no shelves, or boxes to put things in.

Actually, what takes up most of my storage space (ie in paid storage) is the 'stuff'', used to contain things-shelves, drawers, boxes.
Also, i dont think too much stuff is necessarily at the core of this. If you have more space, you can have more stuff. Its also how you arrange your stuff. it depends on how you design your space.
Just thinking about all of this...i want to prevent clutter once and for all. My definition of clutter is-what you dont need.

But, what you dont need today, you might need next week....
 
#17 ·
I always seem to think I can do more. I constantly see books, magazines etc that look great and I think I'll have the time to read them. I sign up for too many things, and neglect my home.
THings pile up. And nothing gets done. As I add babies, there is less time for volunteer work etc. , but I want to do it all.
 
#18 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by contactmaya View Post
One reason in my case, is that there is not enough stuff...there are no shelves, or boxes to put things in.

Actually, what takes up most of my storage space (ie in paid storage) is the 'stuff'', used to contain things-shelves, drawers, boxes.
Also, i dont think too much stuff is necessarily at the core of this. If you have more space, you can have more stuff. Its also how you arrange your stuff. it depends on how you design your space.
Just thinking about all of this...i want to prevent clutter once and for all. My definition of clutter is-what you dont need.

But, what you dont need today, you might need next week....
ITA. My definition of clutter is things that aren't where they're supposed to be.
 
#19 ·
Cayfish, i find points about storage space, then pending hot spots illuminating. But i particularly like this point
about 'having a house that is badly [or well], adapated to the way you live.
That is very key.

So how do you figure out how to adapt your house to the way you live?

How do people solve the dilemma about some things needed on a daily basis, and others needed, but on a less regular basis?
I wonder if sorting things out this way (rather than by type), would eliminate clutter once and for all? I wonder if types of containiners, are better at containing clutter than others? For eg, i only use retangular containiers because they can be stacked more easily (as much as cylindrical containers are very easy to come by, but i find they cause rather than contain
clutter because of their shape) ...am also looking forward to reading the book one pp mentioned.

Clutter- things that are not in their place.

Ok, but my question is finding the best place for them.....
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top