The great paredown

[Johns_Gal]

Toys. Clothes. All of it.


Step One: Our closet. I'm thinking of stashing everything on hangars in the spare closet in the extra room for a little while bfore donating it. If it's not missed, we don't need it, right?

Problem with all this, is I feel like a heel putting away other people's belongings where they won't have access to them. :/ I mean, I guess DH could just go into the extra room and hunt down his missing shirts or whatever, but he's not likely to do that. More likely to bleat at me in distress (if he ever notices) and then get all huffy that "You put my out of season clothes and identical gray tee shirts away? WHY?! I neeeeed them." *grump, pout*

How do you cope with husbandly griping about things like this? I wouldn't care if his clutter didn't make me feel claustrophobic, or if I didn't wind up doing laundry so much.

[mamamonkey]

Honestly, I don't tell him. I see if he notices.

As for the 20 million t-shirts, DH had, I kid you not, 22 plain white t-shirts. He is Army and wears a uniform to work. I finally told him he could keep 4. His response was "well, what if I need them when I get out of the Army?". My response was "I think we will be able to afford new t-shirts if you need them then" (he still had 7+ years at this point).

DH is a serious packrat. And after 8 years of marriage, it's a work in progress. He is better about contributing to the twice a year clothing donation. But, I still hear him in the closet hemming and hawing about what he is going to be able to part with.

[Mother of Sons]

Dh has a lot of stuff too and he still wants to live like a bachelor with room mates (meaning everything he owns should be in the bedroom) it drives me crazy. I don't need fishing poles in the bedroom!

I would just move the stuff and get it when he asks.

[RiverRock]

Was, "hangar" a Freudian slip. If you have that kind of storage space you don't need to get rid of anything.

Srsly though, if you expect your dh to complain, just keep his boxes near the front so if he does want to find something it is easy to get to.

[tazmom]

I'm willing to go through the kids stuff for them, but not dh's stuff. He needs to decide what he's willing to part with.

However, I did stand there and watch him while he went through his stuff. I said, "Do you *really* need that?" about a hundred times and promised we will buy more Dockers if he ever goes back to work in an office. (It's been 10 years since he worked in an office.)

He kept different things than I would have, including his Nascar hat collection , but he did get rid of a significant amount of stuff. The point is to have less stuff, not to get rid of the stuff I don't like of his. I get to do that with the rest of the house.

[Johns_Gal]

Originally Posted by RiverRock

Was, "hangar" a Freudian slip. If you have that kind of storage space you don't need to get rid of anything.

Srsly though, if you expect your dh to complain, just keep his boxes near the front so if he does want to find something it is easy to get to.

I am submerged in airplanes and their terminology. Yay.

We have space, but clutter makes me . Just because there is a space does not mean it needs to be filled. Repeat ad nauseum.

Of course, this means I am blessed with a man who is the clutter king; he brings in mail, onto the counter it goes, never to be touched again. He comes grocery shopping, we have fifteen pounds of oranges and ten of apples to store, like we still live an hour from town or something. And then when it gets to be too much, and I have adopted the policy of Doing Nothing with the man's stuff, he gets all freaked out and bug-eyed at the sheer amount of Things.

He used to get rude and nasty about any mess in any circumstances. We're finding a balance between unrealistic expectations on his part and snarky responses of "Oh really?" on mine. Old patterns die hard, even when you're both trying.

[Niphredil]

IMO, if something is missed then it's a good reason to get it back out. And if it's not then it's probably good to get rid of. My husband is rational enough that if I pulled out a box of his stuff from the closet and said "Here's all the stuff I put up three months ago, you haven't so much as thought about it, what should we do?" he'd vote to toss it too. Maybe a couple items might get retrieved. But anything gone is something I don't have to pick up on a daily basis.

We're doing a BIG pare down too.

[Domina]

[tazmom]

I'm the clutter queen myself and I easily get overwhelmed by All The Things.

Can you set a time each day or week to work on the clutter together? We take a few minutes after dinner to work on the obvious stuff like mail and massive amounts of fruit. On Thursday evenings we work together to declutter the kitchen and living room before I host GS on Fridays. Bigger projects like the pile of outgrown clothes or all the stuff stashed in the office gets worked on a little bit at a time on the weekends.

---------- Post added at 09:37 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:28 AM ----------

I'm suggesting not going through his stuff yourself because my dh would be super upset if I did that. He would feel disrespected if I decided what he was allowed to have. He's a grown man who has equal right to buy and store things I find useless, just like I would be really mad if dh decided to get rid of every book I hadn't read in the last few months or my concert t-shirts from high school. To *us* it's a matter of mutual respect.

I realize that different people's marriages work differently. If your dh would really be okay with it, then I would absolutely be willing to store stuff for a little while like Lindsay suggested.

[Domina]

Last year, DH and I got rid of Half the Things.

http://www.gentlechristianmothers.co...d.php?t=416478

After having spent last week in a super-sleek, minimalist hotel, my house still feels like a disaster area. Planning to go much further this year.