Jul

Want To Improve A Home? Get Rid Of Superfluous Junk

Want to improve a home? Get rid of superfluous junk that continues to build up like some sort of mold that just can’t be gotten rid of. It’s a fact that we have more and more ‘stuff’ laying around that is hardly ever put to any good use after the first few times we’ve tried it out. For instance, maybe there’s an old wet dry vacuum that was replaced by a new one, yet the old one just won’t go away.

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.

One day, they just may be needed when the gardeners go on strike for higher pay, perhaps. Or maybe it’s because we (men, especially) just can’t bear to part with the accumulation of stuff we gather throughout our lives. Maybe we’re even willing to sacrifice a bit of cleanliness or non-cluttered space in order to keep around items that were never going to use, at least in this lifetime.

As an example of this particular line of thinking, take a moment to remember that gleaming chrome-plated motorcycle that was once a proud occupant of the driveway out front. It was sold off a long time ago to help pay for the baby’s nursery and there doesn’t seem a chance that the bike will be coming back anytime soon, though the full face helmet we used to ride it is still hanging around in the house.

Of course, if one were being logical, the helmet would have been gone long ago but maybe we’ve convinced ourselves that we aren’t totally the domesticated beasts we really are. In fact, there’s a good chance that a replacement bike is just over the horizon, maybe 20 or so years from now when the girls are safely through college. There it will be, in the driveway, waiting to be ridden.

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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