A Clutter-Free Existence
As I recently chronicled on my website, I just returned from Austin, where I spent a week visiting my sister, Betsy, her husband, Matt, and their new baby boy. I’d never seen their new house—the house they moved into over a year ago—and after spending an entire week there, I returned to my home having decided something important: We humans have too much stuff.
Betsy and Matt’s house is in a dicey area of Austin, so they were able to get a pretty cool house for less money than if they’d bought in a better area of town. You’d think this would mean they would have used the money they saved to fill their new house to the brim with tons of furniture, pillows, accessories, and velvet wall hangings of The King. But they didn’t. They just kept it simple, using the cleanlined furniture they already owned, and resisting the urge to accessorize-accessorize-accessorize.
As a result, the only clutter in the entire house was the stash of Central Market groceries I brought to their house every day: I had to put all the bread products on top of the fridge because I’d filled the fridge itself with sushi, grilled tilapia, gourmet soups, and Eggplant Parmigiano. I even cluttered up the island—which formerly housed only a plain glass bowl of fruit—with lotions, bath gels, and baby products. Before I showed up, however, except for the oft-used collection of Betsy’s cookbooks, the kitchen was as clutter-free as the rest of the house.
In a nutshell, everything in Matt and Betsy’s house is in its proper place, and sparseness reigns supreme. There aren’t stacks of magazines or baskets of stray junk to distract your eye; you only see clean.
The result? At the end of the week, even though I’d spent the majority of the time taking care of a newborn baby and helping my sister around the house, I felt relaxed, mellow, at peace. And I couldn’t help but think that spending all that time in a clutter-free environment played some role in that. And I resolved to go home and rid my house of every single item that wasn’t monumentally necessary to human life.
Wish me luck—I may not come out of it alive.
-Pioneer Woman
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