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Get Rid Of The Junk And Improve The Home

Improving the home by getting rid of the junk that has built up around us like the shattered remains of a wooden ship that has gradually come to rest on the shoreline is more difficult than it seems. Truly, we have a tendency to accumulate stuff that never actually is used once we grow tired of it. As an example, consider the old wet dry vacuum which was once loved but which is now neglected.

Maybe we tend to think like the people who build the space shuttle over at NASA and intend on keeping redundancy in vacuums like they keep redundancy in keeping extra flight computers aboard the shuttle. In truth, we’ve convince ourselves that there may one day be a need for two sets of vacuums because the floors in the basement will be so flooded a pair of vacuums will be needed, maybe.

In keeping with that line of thought, take a walk into the garage and eyeball all of the things that have been stacked up inside over time. Maybe we once had a garden — or maybe we still have one but it’s being worked on by gardeners — and we loved the garden blowers that we got at the local home improvement store, though we haven’t used these blowers for quite some time.

Maybe we’ve convinced ourselves that those blowers will be needed once some crisis comes along and we need an emergency garden to be grown or the gardeners we’ve hired are going on strike against us for better tasting lemonade, perhaps. Whatever the reason we just don’t want to see any of this stuff gone, though we probably will never use it again, either in this world or in the next.

A great example of this is the fact that we might once have owned a really nice motorcycle but got rid of it long ago to fund the building of a brand-new nursery up on the second floor where the twins now happily spend their evenings. However, we neglected somehow to toss the full face helmet that came with the bike. It’s now occupying a place over the mantle, gathering dust and slowly rotting.

One would have to ask, of course, why we would want to keep the helmet when we do not have a motorcycle to go along with it. Maybe it’s our subtle way of convincing ourselves that we haven’t totally gone domestic and that there’s a possibility — however slight — that a honking new chrome-wheeled, fuel injected beast will soon be back in our driveway, rumbling and waiting to be ridden hard.

It’s possible, though highly unlikely, that this scenario could play itself out. The truth is; we love our stuff no matter what that ‘stuff’ is. It might be something that connects us to our past, but if we want a little less clutter in our life we need to get rid of the junk and improve the home at the same time. It might be easy or it might be hard, but it probably needs to be done eventually.

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