Someone saw one of my project pictures and accused me of being a hoarder. Even though the point of most of these projects is PURGING. What’s the difference between being a saver and a packrat and a hoarder? Are they all just degrees of tendency? Mine seems to go in waves, in that case. Plus though I’d sometimes LIKE to, I can’t just throw away stuff in the house that belongs to one of the three other people who live here. I can only gently encourage…
Does saving stuff at all make you a hoarder at some point? Or is it just the size of the space you keep it in that differentiates the madness? We have a REALLY big house, so we have lots of space to put things in. We have lots of closets and an attic and cupboards and shelves and a garage. I do periodic clean-outs of closets and drawers and all year long I put stuff we don’t need or want or that’s too small in bags to donate to the annual Flyinge flea market or to the AWC media sale.
I don’t buy extra stuff (except for spices…I admit that’s a problem area). I don’t shop much at all, as a matter of fact. And yet, stuff accumulates and needs to be sorted and organized and cleaned out at some point. Today I cleaned the front hall closet, but I didn’t get rid of that much, probably because I had cleaned it out not all that long ago.
And Karin started working on her room today, and really started cleaning things out. She wants to re-do her room and Anders told her he wouldn’t start until she had thoroughly gone through everything and cleaned it. It’s been nearly 2 years since she started asking, and she’s just now getting started. It’ll be a shame to see the dragon wall and the Asian accents go, but the little karate 9-year-old is a long-gone thing of the past.
There’s not that many cleaning-out projects left on my list. The kids’ rooms and the chest in the playroom are the only two. Everything else on the project list is something specific that has to be done: replace the door, paint the plant stand, figure out a better solution for shoes, buy new bookcases for the computer room, dry clean the rug, etc. Easy peasy, nothing to do with purging. Purging is HARD WORK. But if you can do it, do it at all, well then, you’re not a hoarder. Right?