Clear that Clutter once and for all!

While this looks fun and retro, this is actually a source of stress to our brains. You would be wise to put most of this in a cupboard, and cycle out a few at a time to enjoy, rather than see the whole lot at once. Also the “red” in the knobs also adds fuel on the brain stress fire.

What really does most people in visual clutter-wise is all the stuff that’s somehow made its way into their homes – from birthdays long ago or inheritances from Aunt Birdie or impulse purchases or something else. When you’re doing that image comparison, pare things back, and put them on the floor in another room as you work through the space.  What does “pare back” mean here?  It means looking at all of the collections of stuff in place and picking out a single (or so) item of each to remain out.  You’ll know when you’ve hit the level of visual clutter in that Frank Lloyd Wright room, believe me, you will.  All this will result, for example, in several dozen framed pictures being removed from the top of your concert grand piano and only three or four 5-inch by 7-inch images remaining in place (pianos are big, so 3 or 4 is OK). Go look at the stuff on the floor of the nearby room.  Some of it may be actually, truly trash, stuff you didn’t realize had been left behind from the holiday party, etc.  When you actually look at the rest of the stuff, you may decide that you don’t actually like some of the stuff that remains, and you can give that away to friends/family or donate it.  Things you’ve inherited that you don’t want are tricky, to avoid familiar ill feelings, they should probably go to another family member and not Good Will.  Keep what remains, that’s the stuff that is not trash that you like.  Yes, keep it—but put it out of view in the back of a closet or maybe even back into the room it came out of, but if it returns to the room from whence it came, it must do so in a storage container, drawer, or cabinet WITHOUT transparent panels—if the front of a cabinet is transparent and you put stuff in it you’ve added to visual complexity.  If all your cabinets have transparent fronts, put décor-enhancing paper on the inside of the cabinet doors.  Every month or so, on some regular schedule you yourself determine, rotate some of the stuff you like but that’s out of sight from storage into view and the same number of items out of view.  After a while, you’ll likely find that there is some stuff you never “put out,” for example, maybe some of those photos that were on top of the piano are never seen there again.  After a year or two, you can decide what to do with these “never-seens.”  By then, it’ll be clearer to you how much the items in question really matter to you.