Decorating Your Home: An Optical Illusion

Back in the days when we only had two children, my little family found itself traveling a bit—a homeschool convention here, seeing family there. We stayed in hotel rooms just enough for the two children we had to remark on how much they loved hotels. They wanted to live in one, they said, and I knew just how they felt. I loved hotels, too.

I remember standing in the middle of our room at the homeschool convention in Houston, looking around, and thinking how much money we could have saved if we’d bought a 200 square foot house instead of 1200. What is it about hotel rooms? I found myself wondering.

I quickly remembered my piles of crafting and scrapbooking messes, all the clothes we hadn’t brought, the toys, the dishes, and…life. The hotel was nice because all of that was forgotten for a little while.

It was nice for other reasons, too, though. The kids said that part of what they liked was being all crammed together—we saw more of each other. I noticed that things stayed cleaner because they had to stay cleaner. The scope of our mess and existence was limited, and—as long as the stay was brief and by choice—so was our stress. Our focus was on each other instead of our space.

I haven’t forgotten that a 200 square foot hotel room can feel more peaceful and spacious than a 1200 square foot house, though. While there are days I’d like to apply that knowledge to an overnight bag and head somewhere else for a little while, the logic frustrates me, and my pocketbook is unrelenting.

We all know where this article is going. We love to get tips and insights into making our homes our retreats, but these articles always tell you to get rid of all your stuff or redecorate. You’ve gotten rid of an unreasonable amount of stuff already—so much in my case that my husband has accused me of an addiction to “getting rid of stuff.” And if you had money to redecorate, you’d be reading Better Homes and Gardens or House Beautiful.

Keep your stuff. Unless you have enough stuff to warrant an intervention, there is really a limit to the purging, and we all know that getting rid of leads to buying. Buying also leads to buying. I have a theory that if we can resist buying and purging, we might actually reach the equilibrium of stuff that will carry us through until we die. Kind-of like going on stealth mode from stuff.

So I’ve held your hand about keeping your stuff, but your living room still doesn’t offer the peace of the couch-sized section of the hotel room that doubles its price. Your bedroom is still the place you shove the laundry when your in-laws call and say they’ll be at your house in an hour. And your full-sized kitchenette has a sinkful of dishes and no fun snacks. And that’s at the end of cleaning day, when you look around and ask yourself, Is this really as good as it gets?

I’m a person who can stand a very small amount of low-level noise. The hum of the refrigerator and fluorescent lights in the kitchen make me nuts. (Yes, I know that makes it funny that I have four kids.) I have recently noticed that clutter has a noise to it, like the hum of the lights in my kitchen, that most people don’t even notice until it’s gone.

We live life sweeping the floor and cleaning off the table, and there get to be spots that we can’t even see any more—mine’s the top of a bookshelf by the dining table and the pie safe in the kitchen. Actually, the top of anything the two-year-old can’t reach becomes a safe zone for junk.

You’ve tried cleaning these spots up before—I know how it goes. You pick up a mysterious grocery bag that’s been sitting on the counter (top of the pie safe at my house) and look inside. There’s a plug-in air freshener, some oil for wood furniture, and a motley assortment of screws. None of it really goes anywhere. The plug-in thing would be great, but you can’t remember where you last saw the smelly stuff that slides inside. Somebody sees you in the kitchen and asks for a drink, insists on milk, and then everybody wants a full-blown milk-and-cookie snack. Maybe you move the bag to a new spot, but you don’t actually find homes for the junk. One last glance at the spot you were trying to clear yields a cake cover and plastic crate with a breathing machine your son used one time five years ago and packets and packets of expired medicine.

The problem with these things—kipple, according to a crazy man in a classic tale—is that we can never win our battle against the junk, the old newspapers, the mourning socks. Worse, though, we can’t even see them for what they are as long as we leave them where they are. In other words, you’ll never see your living room’s potential if you look at all the clutter piece-by-piece there in the living room.

Here are some tips for getting a handle on your clutter:

• Take a laundry basket and clean off the TV, clean off the bookshelves, clear every surface in one room of everything that doesn’t belong on it. You can leave the TV and the books, but the broken toys that need to be fixed, the abandoned pony tails, the movie cases and play-doh parts must go in the basket.

• Dust, vacuum, rearrange furniture if you want, but take the basket of stuff to another room, where its camouflage won’t work. You’ll find that you do, in fact, want to get rid of some of it. The rest needs either a new home or a new container. Movies probably want to stay in the living room with the TV, although we’re keeping ours in a rubber maid container under the bed for now. We watch movies on the computer in our room, so they’re really more accessible, and they never fit on the bookshelves anyway: we were always cramming them in there, which made them too much trouble to put away.

• For the pony tails that are forever following me but never when I need them, we created “the hair-fixing kit.” All combs, gels, spray water, etc. goes in this one bucket. It sits in the bathroom, but I can tell any of the kids from the two-year-old up (or even my husband!) to get the hair-fixing kit, and not only can they can do it, I know I’m getting everything I need. Nothing’s worse than getting a nice, tight French braid on a wiggling toddler and realizing that someone forgot to bring pony tails.

• Our kitchen is impossibly small. You can’t really tell to look at it, but try cooking with nothing but one looooong counter and an oven at the end. The storage is all out-of-reach, all on the same side as the counter top, oven, and sink. The other side of the kitchen is bare. We use the pie safe for dishes, and we bought a baker’s rack to hold pots and pans and dry goods, but storage still requires creativity.

• I piled the tops of the refrigerator and pie safe with junk—candy from last Halloween, chips, cookie cutters, etc. Before Thanksgiving, I took my laundry basket through the kitchen and cleared these spots off. Only the mother of two-toddlers-at-once will understand the sacrifice I made in giving up these storage locations. I didn’t get much further than these two spots, but almost every time I have walked through the kitchen since then, I’ve looked at the top of that old piece of furniture and smiled.

• I did the same in the living room—pulled movies off the bookshelf to make room for candles, emptied the kids’ art folder (which was so full it no longer fit behind the sofa), and moved furniture. I was drastic and even sent the TV into exile. It would only play movies now, but I was tired of the begging for movies.

• The diaper stuff is in a basket on the bottom living room bookshelf now. There’s a matching basket for scarves and gloves and another for books on tape. What was once a lot of clutter and noise is now quiet and self-contained.

The moral of the story is to create visually-pleasing storage solutions for the junk, so you don’t have to look at it when you don’t want to, keep the junk if you want to, and if you really want a peaceful, hotel-style ambiance to your home, hire a maid.

Aubrey Lively is a homeschooling mother of four, ages 8, 6, 2, & 1. She has a BA in Literature and an MEd in Teaching and is currently surviving seminary with her husband of ten years. Visit Aubrey online at http://aubreylively.blogspot.com.

Tags: Decluttering, Decorating Your Home, handling clutter, homeschool convention, Homeschool Travels, organizing

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