So retirement de-cluttering. If you’re one of nature’s born collectors verging on the psychotic hoarder, that’s me by the way, then you might wonder why the act of decluttering, sometime known as dieting for the soul, should give me such pleasure. Mrs Summerhouse as well but then she isn’t really a clutterer in the first place. Her only crime is failing to keep me under control.
My rationale for never throwing anything out is that good old catch-phrase / mantra of my generation, it’ll come in. This only needs to bear fruit about once out of fifty times for this behaviour to be reinforced and continue ad infinitum. Like all that old wood in the garage that made possible so many repairs during lockdown.
So this last week following on from my purchase of my recording / mixing gizmo for creating my jazz tunes and its subsequent location in the attic (along with all the rest of my musical stuff – mainly guitars, but also 2 keyboards and a drum set), we’ve been de-cluttering this space. You might think looking at first photo below that it doesn’t look very uncluttered but you’d be very wrong.
It’s a nice space and many years ago, when we had the loft space converted, we had it in mind as a second child-free living area. You know the idea, nice furniture in an open-plan, almost Nordic, setting. That didn’t really happen although I did make a fire-place for an open fire in the exposed chimney (you can just see the exposed bricks in third photo below).
It amazes me to look back on what I used to do DIY-wise but that’s another story. It is however a bitter-sweet experience, a mixture of being proud that I did all this work and a sadness that I couldn’t do it now, wouldn’t even attempt to do it.
Anyway back to the present day. Now it’s my music room and Mrs Summerhouse’s art studio. Between us we’ve filled the space to the rafters, if it had any. Frankly it looked a mess and it certainly didn’t encourage me to go up there and be creative. That said it didn’t seem to bother Mrs SH terribly much but that’s the artistic temperament for you. In the photo above her work desk looks unbelievably clear of clutter. It was not always thus.
Anyway it looks nice now, not exactly Scandinavian but fairly open-plan with some nice furniture (like the stripped down old cupboard that had been my grandfather’s tool repository (see second photo below). And of course it has that work related vibe going on.
OK, a small confession. We have taken a slight liberty with the term de-cluttering as perhaps most people would use it in its purest form. That is the act of throwing out stuff. There has been some actual removal of stuff but more typically for us, it means moving items from one spot to another. In this case this meant putting things behind the walls created in the eaves when the space was converted.
An example of our version of de-cluttering is the moving of my train set from behind the sofa in photo 4 and hiding it behind the walls which I had thoughtfully and cunningly made removable when I finished off the transformation of the attic. Emptying the space behind the sofa means space was created to fill up by, in this case, Mrs SH’s past art work. Looks better though, we think so anyway.
Retirement de-cluttering summary
All of which does not begin to answer the question, why has de-cluttering like this given me retirement pleasure. It certainly doesn’t run in the family with the idea of clearing things out so your kids don’t have to when you’ve passed over as they say. My mother’s house was absolutely rammed with her stuff and it took us many a day to empty it. At least the stuff we didn’t like and do you know, we have items now that we kept because we couldn’t bring ourselves to take them to the tip (unlike the urn of my mother’s ashes that was loaded by our gardeners into the firm’s van thinking it was simply another item to be thrown away, how we laughed), that we really like. If this doesn’t fit with the, it’ll come in concept, then I don’t know what does.
So perhaps it’s not the actual de-cluttering that has given me pleasure, but simply the re-creation of a nice environment in our house and all for no money at all. Always a pleasure – something for nothing or summat f’nowt as they say in Yorkshire.
PS The photos in this blog were taken with my new phone. This is pleasing.
PPS I wish we had taken some ‘before’ pictures but then we didn’t know what a big operation it was going to be when we started.
