De-Clutter....aka Domestic Dieting !!

The last month has been a roller coaster by itself...my first promotion, thinking of paati, having lots of visitors, signing up for a 3K walk and trying to get others hooked to it, accepting the fact that B’s iphone shall become an official member of the family ...and we were too occupied in it all that we forgot that our lease expired. After paying an unneccessary extra month-to-month fee, we finally signed the lease again….Mostly due to the nightmarish feel a move would give us. That tied with the amount of stuff we've managed to accumulate over the last 2 years...

Rewind to March 2007.., we moved into this place 4 months after our wedding. It was a nice apartment..Nothing ultra-cool about it, but was a welcome change with so many windows after my last apartment. I like the fact that my patio gives me the "interesting" view of the parking lot which i prefer a lot more than a view into my neighbor’s kitchen. Also the number of windows and loads of light made me discover that i am a very photosensitive being whose cheer index is deeply wound to the amount of sunshine around. Thank God for this city!!...The fact that i have an obstruction less view of the moon from my room lent a special touch. And in the process of making this place our home, our favorite abode to return to after long trips, after tiring days at work...we ended up buying so much of stuff...

My earliest and undoubtedly easiest way to remove clutter was to stuff them all up in the cupboard and slam the door tight and shut...The avalanche that gets out when an unsuspecting victim (mostly my mother) opens the door is another story..

Since then, I have grown and matured..I have resorted to distributing my junk around into shelves, over the door hangers, beds and ottomans with storage; under the bed boxes...I obsess on furniture with extra storage. I seem to use every bit of them. We picked up this tall armoire from Ikea which seemed to be my dream to get all our clutter hidden in one location, safe and secure and from every one's sight. One slight miscalculation i made was to compare IKEA ceilings to my apartments’. After a pretty loud “aan-haan..I now get it” to a weary B who explained to me how the longest diagonal of this newly purchased cuboid was taller than our ceiling and hence even though the armoire as such was shorter, we cudnt assemble it down and lift it up..We assembled it vertically telling ourselves that we would never do this again..ever!!. But our weekend of weightlifting has so far paid back its price in full.

I am not exactly a conventional shopaholic…its just cool gizmo’s and spacesavers/organizers I seem to have an addiction for. The oxymoron that it may seem, the net result of it is that my home is cluttered with space savers that encourage u to buy more junk with the excuse that they shall still be easily organized and retrievable on the rainy day when I want to find a need for them.

But after one nailbiting experience searching for an important document, I resolved to change... having realized that the clutter in my room has direct correlation to the clutter in my mind. Hence the project Domestic dieting….

What followed on our path of self realization were numerous donations made to GoodWill. After a whirlwind of donations, the guy there started giving us this smile of familiarity that said "See u tomorrow"...

The next was the motto Go green, Go Electronic, and Go Minimalist…

And as is with real dieting, domestic dieting doesn’t work….atleast by itself.

We adopted a minimalist regime to see if our "accumalation tendencies" can be curbed. We cut short the 5 varieties of cereal we have to 2 (I couldnt get myself to eat the wheat bran stuff B does even if it means I would be much healthier)...cut down 5 pickle, 3 sauce combinations to one. We avoided stocking the 4 brands of tea we dont drink. I tried doing my grocery shopping on weekdays after work, so I would be too tired to overbuy. I am also going electronic on everything - winding up with the innumerable CDs I have that I have stopped playing thanks to the ipod era. We have a bunch of tech books in computer science which we plan to dump on B's poor sis for her only fault of having graduated with a degree in comp science. I resolved to get myself a new t-shirt only if throw two out. Net result, my colleague thinks I don’t have clothes now :( !!

This attempt to donate, sell and pawn off the stuff I have, has taught me that I am never going to be a minimalist. I still love cool gizmos…..I still like to mix things up a bit starting from cereals to placemats. So the next time I decide to move, I just plan to move to a place with a garage and lots of storage and I will stuff all my odds and ends there out of everyone’s sight…Childhood ways are hard to change.