The war on paper

It began with the coffee table. For the past 3 years we have lived in a 3 bedroom house. For more than two years of that, it was just the two of us. One might think that 3 bedrooms is more than enough to house just two people. That’s what we thought when we bought it. We wanted room to grow our family. But after two years we found the house seemed to be shrinking. What was once spacious had become crowded. No matter how many shelves we setup, no matter how many plastic tubs we put into the attic, the house was getting progressively crowded. What’s worse, we were plagued with clutter. No amount effort was sufficient to eliminate the clutter from our home. Many weekends were lost in the effort to clean up and organize the home better. There simply was not enough space to house all that we had accumulated.

Credit to the source of our solution comes from my sister’s boyfriend. We visited them one evening and both of us could not help but notice how clean his apartment was. Granted, he had no child to muss things up, but our problems predated the birth of our son. His toys only added to the mountain of clutter. On the trip up we’d talked about the feasibility of finding a larger home. Neither one of us liked the idea. We like our home, we like our neighbors, and the market means we’d have to sell at a loss, which would not position us well to buy into a larger home.

But, back to the apartment. Very open, very clean. The drive home was a different conversation. That’s when I realized it: Surfaces! Kevin has a distinct lack of surfaces. Surfaces obviously afford a place to put things down, but unless you maintain vigilance, they will gather rather than forcing you to tend to them. Lacking surfaces, there was no place for clutter to really gather. He had to deal with the mail when it arrived, rather than putting in a pile to grow. He had to deal with the empty grocery bags, rather than throwing them on top of the coffee table.

It took some work, but we finally got rid of our coffee table. The impact was immediate. The living room doubled in size, and was inherently cleaner. My wife looked at me and said, “What else can we get rid of?”

We posted items on ebay, craigslist, and freecycle. We donated what would not sell or people asked for. We threw away what the  donation’s people would not take. We hemorrhaged clothes we’d never wear and books we’d never read again.  Finally we came to the latest project, which is the filing cabinet. I’ve had this cabinet since college. It’s survived 5 moves (including one down the street on top of a rolling trash can in the snow), it weighs a ton, and it’s big and an eyesore. Julie never cared for it, but we needed a place to keep all of our files. The irony, is that the solution to get rid of the filing cabinet weighs about `1 lb and is the size of  a brick. It’s a duplexing scanner. We are going paperless.