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the packrat's  guide to a  happy home  by Hilary Emmons | 1 2 3

If you’re like me, you’ve read –

Wait.  Start over.

If you’re like me, you’ve pulled twenty-five pairs of shoes out of your closet to get at your “to be filed” boxes, and then spent hours sifting through your piles of receipts, old Christmas cards, miscellaneous scraps of paper, and grade school homework, in order to find those magazines you’ve been meaning to look at.

Then you’ve read article after article purporting to give advice on how to organize, streamline your housekeeping, and deal with all that stuff.

As one of two packrats sharing a one-bedroom apartment, I’m always on the lookout for help with my “stuff problem.”  The expert neatniks who pen this advice are full of ideas on what to do with your belongings, but they all start with the assumption that what you really want is to reform your packrat ways.  Sternly, they admonish that the first step in any neatness campaign is to throw out as much stuff as you can.  After all, you don’t need most of it; it’s just an obstacle to their prescribed housekeeping plans.  Being a packrat is looked upon as a personality flaw, an illness to be cured.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to stop being a packrat.  It’s who I am.  And the narrow interpretation of what people “need” doesn’t cover me.  Sure, a lot of my stuff serves no practical purpose, but that’s not the only kind of need.  Some of my stuff has sentimental value.  Some of it ensures that I’m never lacking a Halloween costume.  Some of it is just, well, neat.  I don’t want to reform; I want to manage the stuff I have, without judgments about whether it’s too much.

With that in mind, I’m going to share some tips on how I coexist happily with my stuff – a guilt-free lesson in how to be a happy, healthy packrat.

step one:  take inventory.
If your closets are crammed, your cabinets are bursting and your floor was last seen in 1998, don’t despair.  Your first step is to take stock of your stuff and see, once and for all, what you’ve got.  We packrats tend to hide our stuff away, either as a quick fix for messes or because we’re embarrassed at the sheer amount of stuff we own.  This habit makes it difficult for us to create a real, lasting storage plan for our stuff.  So get it all out in the open.

keep on wandering this way

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