I come from a family of packrats.
My maternal Grandparents were messy and disorganized about it. There was a room that was invisible to me even though I could brush against the outside of the door, and all I know about its contents is that it was so full that a person couldn’t walk into the room. The living spaces were cramped, and one of my strong memories was being able to find discarded stockings buried in dust in certain corners. Grandpa’s stuff problem got worse after Grandma died and he got cancer.
My paternal Grandparents and their daughters have tons of useful treasures all neatly boxed and stacked. If I asked them to find a crafting kit that’s older than I am, they would likely be able to touch the box that it’s in. What’s more, their living spaces are only visually cluttered. There are china cabinets neatly arranged with all manner of pretty glassware and printing drawers on the walls with tiny figurines. I wanted to be that type of packrat.
My parents’ house was large and they managed to fill it. It was a combination of boxed things and piles on every available surface. Even if you knew where something was, it could take some digging to get to it. Their storage room wasn’t invisible to me, but I also didn’t know that there was a functional sink in it until much later. The living areas were hard to dust.
When I was a child, maybe five years old, I remember that whenever I was bored with my ponies, I could go into my closet and pull out the toys that I had as a crawling infant. My mother tells me the story of how I was tired of a stuffed animal and she forced me to keep it even though I didn’t want to. At some point I wanted to keep Happy Meal boxes in their open state complete with the uneaten fries that had fallen out of the fry envelope… the boxes went away. (I probably thought they were ruined if they were folded down. My mom might have tried to file them before giving up.) I think at some point we both agreed that the Happy Meal toys had to go.
When I was a teenager, I became interested in getting organized, but my relationship with stuff was a little skewed. I liked shopping and acquiring new things, but I didn’t really have the room to appreciate them. There was also the aspirational clutter of buying stuff to try new hobbies and either not having the room to use them or getting scared of using them up.
I would read organizational books and pride myself on not going out to buy a bunch of containers as the first step. I would turn my nose up at complicated organization systems. I even prided myself at how MY collection of organization books wasn’t taking up space in my home, but rather I stored them at the local library.
I missed the part about getting rid of unimportant junk because very little of it felt unimportant at the time. I didn’t make much progress in getting things organized because my goal was to be able to grab what I wanted quickly and I couldn’t do it with that volume of stuff.
I spent some time not living at my parents’ house after going back to college. (I had commuted the first time.) Both times were still within driving distance so I only brought what I felt I absolutely needed. I ended up moving back in both times.
After getting married, my husband and I were living close enough to my parents that I could go home on the weekends. I decided to be selective about what I moved. We used a truck for the furniture and then I decided what else to move one carload at a time for a year. I had aspirational clutter, but it wasn’t bad.
We had to move halfway across the country. Upon getting to our next house, I couldn’t stand the emptiness as we waited for the movers. I drove around exploring the area a little bit, but I also hit a thrift store and bought a dining set. We moved to another house in the same area, and I was steadily filling up all the available space. (Some of it was taking carloads from my mom’s house when I visited. I was allowed to leave stuff there, but a lot of what I took was either stuff I wanted or stuff I wasn’t sure if it should be kept or not. I also put some stuff that I wanted someday into her house because I had to store it in boxes anyway instead of enjoying it.)
So we moved into an apartment that’s about half of the size of our last house. I made decluttering progress before moving out, but I still have a ways to go.
Packrat's Purge 