De-clutter, minimalistic living, have become the new buzz words in today’s living. Life style shows and life style gurus like Mary Kondo have a huge fan following with their tips on how to organise your things and thereby your lives. Living by the credo that less is more has had many of us suddenly throwing out things that haven’t been used for the past 5 years or even months. No longer will Hubby Dear show with pride his grandma’s 100 year old beaten brass pots that has served three generations of his family. It isn’t even consigned to the loft because recently we have broken down the loft!

Every big job has a small beginning

Like most of us , I purge my home of clutter twice in a year : once in spring time and once after the monsoons. Of course, there are times when I de-clutter even more often when I suddenly get overwhelmed by the piles of clothes lying on my rocking chair.

Recently, however, we decided to renovate one tiny bathroom that badly needed repair, refurbishment and a new life. So we ripped up the tiles, took out the fixtures and began building a bathroom from scratch. Before we knew it, we moved on to the adjoining room which had jammed windows that hadn’t been open for 20 years . So we decided to replace the windows and consequently paint the room.

In order to do this, we had to empty out the room and keep all the stuff in another room. This room happened to be our living room.

And then, we found that our kitchen needed re-doing so the kitchen was ripped apart and all the stuff came into – you guessed right – our living room.

While the kitchen work was being done, we decided to paint the other bedrooms one by one (on advice of the contractor who told us to grab onto the workmen who were free and put them to work when they needed to work rather than call them when we needed them and they had no time to do it). And so more stuff was emptied out of cupboards and rooms and shifted to our living room.

So now we have a huge pile of clutter occupying our living room and as we go back into our rooms, find that there is a lot of stuff that we needn’t put back into the cupboards or rooms that they came from.

And till we find someone to take away the stuff that we have weeded out, the clutter in our living room is slowly increasing.

Isn’t that strange that what began as an exercise in de-clutter has now resulted in more clutter?

Ciao,