Clean and Guilty

I sometimes feel as if I am in a perpetual war against clutter.  Kevin and I have lived in the same 980SF condo for the past twenty years.  In that time we have acquired far more stuff than we have disposed of.  We acquired standard possessions like housewares, clothing, books, art, and all manner of bric-a-brac.  Some it is purchased and some of it our friends and family gifted to us.  Paperwork accompanies everything, and so do boxes. Speaking of paper, there is always a steady flow of incoming catalogs and magazine subscriptions.  

Some of it is useful.  Some of it is sentimental.  Some of it is stuff we believe will be useful at some unspecified time in the future. Thanks to this massive pileup, we have outgrown the space in our home to the point where I have to rent a storage locker to handle the overspill.  Still I can't fight the piles.  All I can do is try to organize the piles in a way that doesn't look too messy and hope nobody who comes to visit judges us too harshly.  (If it's a dinner party or other large gathering, I throw everything into the spare room and shut the door.)

I'm no minimalist.  I do not worship at the altar of Marie Kondo. I like much of my stuff.   Regardless, I do love having an excuse to get rid of things.  I love to declutter.  I love it when I have a place for everything and everything is in its place.  I would throw away more stuff and put more in the storage locker if Kevin would let me.  

The hardest part about cleaning and decluttering is knowing the stuff that leaves your house has to go somewhere else.  Where does it go?  

Some items can be donated.  I can put clothes in donation bins or take them to Goodwill.  I can donate housewares, jewelry and tchotchkes to Goodwill and similar thrift shops as well.  I can pass books on to friends or family or donate them to the library.  I can try to sell items at various places online.  

I can also recycle some items.  I can recycle paper.  I can recycle electronics.  I can recycle plastic.

Or can I?  

Are all the clothes I donate at Goodwill or the bins sold to the needy at a low cost, or do they end up in the landfill?  What happens to those old computers and phones and appliances when I take them to the electronics recycling events?  Only a fraction of the plastic bottles and jar I put into the bins in apartment end up being recycled. (Petrochemical companies don't profit from the circular economy.)  

Recent events drove home the point for me that decluttering and being green are often at odds with each other.

This week brought on new challenges and new chances to clean up.  In the past three weeks my second bathroom sustained extensive water damage after a leak in the internal pipes caused water from the shower two floors above me to come dripping through my ceiling.  The leak is in a pipe in the wall of the bathroom directly above me, but Kevin and I had to fight for the right to let a plumber go into that apartment and fix it.  The owner of that apartment was adamant that only she can decide what plumbers can come into her apartment.  The situation was so bad we had to call the police and fire department to force their way in for safety’s sake.  It was a nightmare, but the work on our bathroom is going ahead. The water got into the walls and is causing a risk for mold.  We will have to demolish our bathroom down to the studs and replace everything but the toilet and the bathtub.

Even though I didn't enjoy being rained on while brushing my teeth, I am looking forward to a bathroom renovation.  I was planning to have the bathroom painted this year anyway, but I love the idea of refreshing the entire room.  We renovated the master bathroom years ago, but the second bathroom still has the original sink, tiles, and tub.  I would love to see it spruced up a bit.

Over the past few days I have been moving stuff out of the cabinets and shelves to prepare for the demolition. We removed the items in the medicine cabinet and shelf behind the toilet, stuffed them into bags and put them in the computer room (as we do with everything we don’t want visible in the main areas of the apartment).  Since the stuff stored in the sink vanity doesn’t get rained on when the water comes down, we didn’t clean that space out right away.  Now that the demolition and renovation are becoming more of a reality (we hope), I decided to clean out the space.

The space under my sink was a terrible mess.  There were no shelves or drawers, so there is no way of keeping things organized.  I tend to throw stuff in there, with the more important, or more frequently used items in the front.   I had to dig deep and find out how much stuff was worth saving, and how much stuff would have to be thrown out.

Much of the stuff under the sink was useful.  Up front I had spare bottles of moisturizer and toothpaste and extra toothbrushes.  I keep my makeup bag under there since pre-pandemic I did my makeup in that bathroom.  

As I kept digging, I found items I not only haven’t used in years, but also items that seemed to come from nowhere.  I found bottles of lotion and soaps in unpleasant scents that I kept because they were gifts from friends and family. I found plastic airline baggies full of toiletry samples leftover from various vacations.  I also found dried out packages of wet wipes also left from international or faraway vacations.  I found a dirty old makeup bag filled with broken makeup brushes.  I had bottles of shoe polish (I rarely shine my own shoes as there are shoe shine booths all over NYC) and furniture polish (Huh?)  I found a half-used bottle of generic Mr. Clean (Uncle Shine).  I have no idea where some of this stuff came from

Obviously I couldn’t keep all of it.  I want my new bathroom to be neat and organized.  I divided the mess into what I should keep and what I should toss.

Tossing useless junk from my home should be a no-brainer, but it’s not so easy when I am confronted with a pile of garbage.  What do I do with it all?  Where does it go?  I was able to empty and rinse out many of the bottles and put them in the recycle bins, but that begs that question of whether or not they will truly be recycled.  I couldn’t donate anything.  I had to face the fact that I was going to be taking a bag of garbage to the bulk bins where everything would end up in landfills or the ocean.

The guilt became even worse when I went to look for a bag to put it all in.  I have a huge stash of bags in my utility closet.  Whenever I open that closet, I have to brace myself for the potential crash of household and garden items as everything is perched precariously on top of a stash of plastic bags. Before reusable grocery bags were common, I saved every plastic bag that came my way to use as trash bags.  I collected far more than I could ever use.  I also held on to the fancier type of paper shopping bag (like the kind one gets from department stores) because they were nice bags and ought to have some future use.  On top of all that, I saved every gift bag I ever received because those are reusable as well (but I have to remember to take the gift tags off- don’t ask).  

I found bags to store the stuff I was keeping.  I found bags to hold the stuff I was throwing away.  I had to decide what to do with the rest of the bags.  I went through all the plastic grocery bags and determined which ones were still in a good size and condition to use as trash bags.  I recycled as many paper bags as possible.  I went through the gift bags and determined which ones weren’t too squashed and damaged to reuse.  In the end there was a large pile of bags that couldn’t be salvaged.

The final result was I had decluttered two small areas of my home, but I had thrown away a pile of garbage that could not be reused or recycled.  I was cleaning my home, but trashing the planet.

The trend toward minimalism in both the home and the wardrobe feels like it's less wasteful, but how do you go from being a maximalist home to a minimalist one without generating some waste?  Not everything in our homes is reusable or recyclable.  Our household junk has to go somewhere.

I suppose we can't change our past, but we can improve going forward.  We also can't let perfect be the enemy of good.  If many of us do a little more, the benefits will be better than only a few of us try to do everything.  We don't have to become minimalists, but there are steps we can take to undo some of the damage.

The world has changed since I moved into this place twenty years ago.  The plastic bags used to pile up because I acquired more of them than I could use.  Now I use reusable shopping bags almost exclusively.  I have also attempted to reduce single-use plastics by not buying household items in bottles.  I buy shampoo, conditioner, soap, and body lotion in bar form that is packaged in reusable or paper packaging.  I am buying more of my household cleaners in tablet or powder form that go into reusable containers and bottles.  I don't own, and never will own, an SUV (or other high-emissions gas guzzler) and I am fortunate to have a job that is easily accessible by public transportation.  I buy as much of my food as possible at the farmers' market, so I can keep my food purchases local.  

The above paragraph may seem like a humblebrag, but it's not meant to.  I hope to inspire or give my readers some ideas of places to start when looking for some ways to save the planet and generate less waste.  I would love to see other ideas and tips and tricks from my readers.  What are all of us doing? I also hope that all of us can look at what we are currently doing and realize we are doing more than we think we are.

I know once my new bathroom is complete it will be cleaner, neater, and more organized than it was.  I may never eliminate all the clutter in my home, but I can try to make sure I'm always adding less.