Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed, oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.
Your listening to the Minimalist Podcast with Joshua Fields -Milburn and T .K.
Coleman, recorded live at Earthing Studios in sunny California.
Yes, thank you, Malabama.
Hello, everybody. Today, for the third installment of our five -part household clutter series, we're talking about one of the most difficult clutter areas to deal with, garage clutter.
Now, when I say garage clutter, I'm also referring to our basements and attics and sheds and storage areas and any other space that has transformed into a repository of excess.
Joining us in the studio to help minimize these overwhelming spaces is Dr. Julia Raz.
Dr. Raz is a professor with a PhD in Communication And the founder of Golden West Organizing.
Coming up on this free public minimal episode, Coler has a question about establishing boundaries to help minimize all the excess stuff in our home.
And then we've got a question about the different ways you can use your garage to produce a clutter free life.
That's followed by our right here right now segment and a listener tip.
You can check out the Maximal Edition of episode 479.
That's the full two hour episode where we answer three times as many questions on Patreon.
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Let's start with our callers.
If you have a question or comment for our show, we would love to hear from you.
Give us a call. Our phone number is 406 -219 -7839.
Or you can email a voice recording from your phone to podcast at TheMinimalists .com.
Our first question today is from Rebecca.
Hi, I'm Rebecca calling from the great Pacific Northwest of Quigley, Idaho.
I'm a patron. I'm calling because I am so overwhelmed with garage clutter.
It seems to be a twice annual event that we go to clean out the garage.
One morning each spring and again in the fall, my husband will gather all the kids and I and they will begin.
Even with the best intention, to donate as much as I can, and to only keep what I can use or what our family will use, there is still a pile of items that came to make their way back into our home from the garage clean out.
After a few days, sometimes, if I'm lucky, a few weeks, these items will start to pile back up, sometimes by the garage door and sometimes just in the garage.
Often I find myself so irritated that the things ended up cluttering up our house.
but I'm unable to get rid of them because we'll use them at some point.
We have children from teenagers down to choppers and most of the items are things that our older children are too big for but the younger ones aren't ready for, so we've managed these things for the garage to wait until they are needed or until we clean out the garage again.
How do I stop this back and forth as needed but not right now items. I hope you can help, thank you so much. So, I want to think about this question in several different ways.
By the way, Malabam don't you think that Toddlers To Teens is a great like memoir title about parenting?
Yeah, that pretty much covers it.
Now, Julia, you have a brand new baby.
We'll talk about that in a little bit.
You also have an eight year old.
So you've gone through this as well.
Last time you were on the show we talked about professional organizing because you are a professional organizer.
and so you help people with a lot of these cluttered spaces.
And the fundamental question that I hear, hear from Rebecca, and I do hear some anxiety, I hear some stress in her voice, and there's almost like some hopelessness there.
Like no matter what we do, it feels like all of the clutter keeps creeping back in.
And even though we go in there in the spring and we go in there in the fall and we work together as a team to make this happen, for whatever reason, it keeps filling back up with clutter.
And so the question here is about boundaries and what boundaries can her family establish to minimize all of the excess stuff in their garage?
And of course, this can apply to someone if they don't have a garage and their basement is filled with excess stuff, if it's their attic that is filled with excess stuff, or maybe it's a storage locker on the edge of town that keeps getting refilled up with excess stuff.
Where do we start here?
I hear this kind of question all the time and I have a few thoughts on it.
One of them is that having to regularly declutter a couple times a year is expected.
So a one and done thing, which is what many people want, they want it like me to come in and wave a magic wand and then never again in their life are they ever gonna have to deal with clutter again but it never really works that way.
We always have an influx of stuff in our life and especially true with kids.
And what I hear here, and I don't know for sure, but that the garage sounds like it's a go between space of things that really need to exit the home permanently but it's scary to have to let go of things.
And so many times we put things into a shed, garage, basement, attic, any of the above because we feel like we're not ready to let it go.
We want to, but it feels safer to leave it there because it's not really gone yet.
But eventually we have to deal with it at some point or another, like when the clutter pile gets way too high.
And so that's usually when we come in as we're trying to get them to finally get the things to leave and to the point of the stuff that you're keeping for future children.
Now, when I had my daughter, I did not know I was gonna have my son eight years later.
I did not keep stuff, but I also had no space to keep stuff.
And that's kind of the philosophy I live by, I only keep what actually reasonably fits in my space for the purpose that I want to use the space for.
So I wouldn't keep things from my teenager for a toddler.
And I think about this myself.
Would I want stuff like clothes from a teenager when I become a teenager that are 20 plus years old?
Maybe they're cool and vintage at that point.
I don't know, things come back.
But it's very rare that I keep things for a future child so many years later or ever recommend that to people.
Unless it's like one really, I don't know, sentimental thing that you want your future kid to have something small that you have space for, but not all of their clothes, all of their toys.
You can get that later, get the space back now.
But it has to be a regular process in your family and you have to involve everyone.
Like so often when I hear these kinds of questions, I wonder how much of it is on just one member of the family or they're putting it all on themselves and that's why she's feeling so much stress.
It makes me happy to hear that she involves the whole family, but so often it doesn't really work that way and then it's one person that's really stressed about it.
But don't be afraid to do this regularly.
The more you do it, the less you're gonna be in this situation.
I think it's a good point because TK even as the minimalist, like I'm still minimizing and we still play the minimalism game and as a family, we find creative, interesting and unique ways to continue to let go.
and turn it into fun, because what I hear in this question is not fun.
I hear anxiety, I hear overwhelm.
I don't hear a game or a playful way of approaching this.
It feels like a duty, a responsibility, I have to do this ever.
And I totally get it.
If I had to come over to Rebecca's house right now and clear out her garage, it would feel like a duty.
But I would also try to find a way to make it a bit more fun.
I think Julia brings up a really interesting point here.
there's two points that I find interesting.
One is you want to recover the space.
Minimalism is the amplification of spaciousness.
And so in a weird way, this is a problem because you do have the space for the clutter.
And because you have the space for the clutter, or really you have the space, you might feel compelled to fill it with clutter instead of filling it with openness, with freedom, with that carefree feeling of spaciousness, that oh, that full body sigh that you feel from letting go of those excess items. But then there's this other side of it where she's calling in because this is mainly her problem.
Maybe the rest of her family doesn't actually see this as a problem.
It's not an issue for them.
It doesn't mean that it's not an issue for you.
Now, if Rebecca was one of your clutter counseling clients, TK, what words of wisdom would you have for her?
First, I would say we don't have a problem until we have a purpose, because problems are what they are precisely because they get in the way of these larger, higher purposes.
So why is the garage clutter a problem?
Because that garage is for something.
There's something that we want to do with it, and this stuff is getting in the way of that.
So what's the garage for?
Maybe this is an opportunity to talk with the family about how we want to use this space ideally.
If it wasn't cluttered, what would we do with it?
Additionally, sometimes we have these big events where it's like once or twice a year we're gonna go through the garage and take inventory is because it's so overwhelming that we can only stand to do it once or twice a year.
And we can only motivate people to participate once or twice a year.
But here's the paradox.
And this goes back to what Dr. Ross said, the more often you do it, the less time you have to spend doing it, the less stressful it feels when you do it.
Imagine if we shipped it from once or twice a year to saying every month, we're going to go take inventory of what's in the garage.
Two things are going to happen.
Number one, you're going to spend much less time doing this.
After two to three months, there are going to be so many redundancies that it might only take about 15 to 30 minutes to go through the entire garage because you're doing it a lot.
You're going to have some months where you're like five, six months in, it's going to take like five to 10 minutes because you're doing it so often and it feels less overwhelming, but also what happens is you begin to recognize the patterns of clutter emergence in your garage.
Imagine if we did this with our finances where only once or twice a year, we took a look at how much money we have, how much debt we have, what we're missing out on the chance to see what our patterns are every month.
What are those little things that are eating away at our expenses?
And so I want you to have the opportunity to be able to detect that.
I would consider doing this every month so that you can see those patterns.
The last thing, you need a standard for what's coming in.
You can't manage what is, if you don't have a way of defining what's coming in.
And so there are my four questions that I would ask about what's coming into that garage.
And this is a standard that I would invoke for the entire family.
What, why, when and how, so what's coming into the garage?
Why is it going into the garage?
Why is that not going into your bedroom?
Why is that not going outside?
Why is that not going into the kitchen?
Why is that not going in a cabinet?
Why is it coming into the garage?
So what is it? Why is it coming into the garage?
When are you going to use it?
Because we're not going to use the garage, as Dr. Ra said, as a kind of purgatory where it's just going to dwell there indefinitely until we decide to glorify it with our usage of it.
But what's the actual goal here?
And then how are we going to get rid of this or let it go if we don't meet that deadline?
And that way you kind of have a way to keep yourself honest and you're not slipping away into the ambiguity of, oh, just put it in the garage because we don't feel like thinking about it.
I like that metaphor of a purgatory of stuff.
And I think for many people Well it's even worse than that.
It's not just a purgatory.
This is where dead things go.
I don't have a place to put this in my kitchen.
I don't have a place to put this in my living room.
I don't have a place to put this in my bedroom or in my closet.
I don't want to be confronted with it every day out in the open.
So I'll put it in these bins or boxes.
They're not actually bins or boxes, they're clutter coffins.
And what happens is we put it in these because we feel like, oh, at least I'm organizing the clutter.
And that must mean that I'm decluttering.
I put up this video on Instagram recently.
SavvyD, Jordan, and I, we went to the container store.
I'm sure you saw this one, Julia, and I was talking about the easiest way to declutter, right?
We think the easiest way to declutter is to organize, but it turns out the opposite is true, and professional organizers know this.
The simplest way to organize is to declutter, and then, of course, yeah, if you have some bins or boxes after that because you want the things that you actually use to be tidy, but it's so much more difficult, Dr. Oz, to deal with the things when we're just organizing everything instead of getting rid of the things that are in the way.
Absolutely. I mean, there's two things that I'm thinking about based on the things you said.
One is about having the space and filling it just because it's there.
Of all of the content I've ever made about organizing I've done over the years, the one that is the most criticized, most hated one might even say, is one where I didn't fill all of the shelves to their capacity, not in a garage, but in a closet, where I had comment after comment, that's a waste of space.
There's so much open space, you could have put so much more in the space.
I don't know where that mindset comes from for so many people, where just because we have the space, we must fill it, but I really try to encourage people to counter that whenever they're feeling like, just because I have the square footage, I must fill it with stuff.
It is wonderful to have open space.
And then, to your point about decluttering, and this is something that I really try to engrain and everyone to me, there is no organizing without decluttering.
Organizing is all about making sense of your possessions, but you can't do that if you don't even know what your possessions are, where they are, what they are.
And so we have to do that initial step.
And this is why I think I have such strong feelings about garages.
The reason I have such strong feelings about this space is the expectations that people have for what I can do are often very hard, or even impossible to meet.
And it's not as hard for me in other spaces of the home, but because garages are where things go to die, but they never fully decompose.
Although sometimes you do find actual dead things like dead animals in there, things like that.
But because things just stay there sometimes 50 plus years.
I remember when I worked with someone in their 90s who had all of the paperwork from the business he had more than 50 years ago, it was all in the garage.
We brought a shredding truck.
It was one of my favorite moments of this.
I wish it was a shredding truck because the capacity was so large.
It was very emotional for him to let go of all of these papers that he had from a business as he stopped doing, a very, very long time ago, we watched in 10 minutes as all of these years of documents got shredded on a truck with a screen.
It was wonderful. And how did he feel afterwards?
It was really hard. It was hard. So for some, and this is why it's so hard is that, yes they want the relief, but the letting go can be excruciatingly painful for people.
And so a big part of my role, even though I'm not a therapist is just to stand there or sit there with that person and let them feel really uncomfortable.
Whatever it is that they're feeling and let them know it's okay to feel whatever you're feeling.
I understand that you held on to this all this time and that's so hard to let go, but that business you had, it's still existed.
It's not gone just because we saw these documents shredded, I don't know how he is now, or if he's still alive now actually.
But I do hope eventually there was a sense of relief from letting that go and getting the space back.
But yeah, it's quite a hard space for people.
There's a reason why people shove everything in there, whether it's because guests are coming over, but it usually is things that people are just having such a hard time letting go and they figure, well, I've got the space, let's just leave it here for now because it's out of sight out of mind.
But then when I come, it's insight in mind all at once and so it brings up a lot of feelings for people.
Dr. Oz, you said dead animals in the garage.
So I see it a lot in my day and I don't say this to say that every day on this job is scary because I don't think I would do this if I was in fear all the time and I'm not bothered by bugs, by animals, by dirt.
Like all of those things don't bother me in a garage in general, which is why you might think I don't like the space.
It's, but yeah, I found dead rats, things like that, sometimes surface in garages, but weapons that people didn't know about or where they were, we've found those, now I have a very strict weapon policy for that reason is that we had found a gun in a gift bag and uncovering things that was loaded.
That was probably one of my scariest moments on the job ever.
I never wanna be in that position again.
Drugs, lots of things that you wouldn't expect to find that people forgot that they had or maybe they even inherited the home and then with all the stuff.
And then I come in after that person passes away and sometimes families are so overwhelmed with having to go through the stuff that they've inherited that we're doing that for the first time.
But there's a flip side to it.
It's like a treasure hunt too.
Like we get to see very fascinating, interesting things on the job.
But yeah, garages, things really do go to die there.
Well first we need to report this to true crime garage.
Right, right. What's your favorite treasure you've ever found?
Oh, I am trying to think right now.
I'm throwing, like, gold bouillon bars.
I was like, oh, you guys can donate these.
I'll take care of it for you.
It wasn't in a garage, and I don't remember if this had happened before the last time I was on here.
But the most treasure I have ever found was $50 ,000 in cash in someone's bedroom.
Sorry, what? Yeah. Oh, that's the whole thing?
It wasn't, it was strewn about, though, so this was - To the shredder truck.
I did not go to the Shredder truck, but it was in 100s and it was strewn about everywhere in this person's bedroom.
And when I thought he was going to have an overwhelming happiness or joy, when I told him, wow, here, look at all this money, he was like, oh, yeah, I know, it's there.
He wasn't that surprised, nor did I get a tip.
I'm usually asked, like, did you get to keep, no, I did not keep any of it, but that was probably the most surprising thing I've found.
And then, I've worked with people who work in the government and things like that.
And so I've seen a lot of very interesting government documents and photographs that I otherwise would not have access to such as like post 9 -11 things.
But I can't really talk about it.
Are the UFO cover -ups real?
I can't, I can't just start with it.
I wish I had more information on that, but yeah, I've seen some interesting government -related things.
I think that's probably some of the most interesting things I've found in people's barrages.
It's official. You've heard it on The Minimalist, she can neither confirm nor deny the existence of aliens from outer space.
or those could be the dead animals they find in the garage.
You know what's fascinating is, the guy with the $50 ,000, was like, yeah, I knew I had that.
But with the other stuff, it's like the gun or the things you don't think about, we have something called the didn't know rule.
And it's a pretty simple rule, especially for the things that are in all of those clutter coffins in your basement or garage or attic, or all the stuff that is just dead in your storage locker that you're paying for every month, right?
What's the alternative to, Because we talk about like, where else do these things belong?
But also, where else does the money belong?
Where else does the space belong?
Where else does my contentment and peace and equanimity belong?
Because these excess things, the clutter is robbing me of the money, time, attention, peace, that I might otherwise feel if those things were gone.
So the didn't know rule was simply, hey, I didn't know I owned this.
Now I found it in this bin.
If I didn't know I owned it, If I didn't even remember it, that is a definite sign that it is okay to let go.
Now, Rebecca, there are several other rules that I recommend you check out, like the seasonality rule, obviously for your garage, that is super helpful.
Also you talked about they're needed, but not needed now.
Sometimes that's a story we tell ourselves.
We have three rules to help you differentiate that.
There's the just in case rule versus the just for when rule versus the emergency items rule.
So emergency items are just in case items that you hope you never have to use.
Like, I have jumper cables in my car.
Now for someone else, a firearm could be an emergency item like, I hope I never have to use this, but I have it in a locked safe and my kids can't access it.
No one else, a professional organizer, can't come to my home and start playing around with a loaded gun, sort of thing.
For someone else, that's an emergency item.
For other people, that is like junk.
I'm never gonna use it, I don't want it.
And so the question is, is this a just for when item or is it a just in case item?
I'll hold on to it just in case I might need it someday in some non -existent hypothetical future.
Also the no piles rule.
That one's really helpful as well.
You can check out the minimalist rulebook.
It's 16 Rules for Living with Less.
You can download it for free over at TheMinimalists .com Just click resources there at the top.
We have a resource page with a whole bunch of free resources, including the minimalist rulebook.
Malabama before we get back to our callers.
What time is it? It's time for the lightning round where we answer the Patreon community chats question of the week?
Yes indeed. Now during the lightning round Julia I'm sure you remember we attempt to answer questions with a short shareable Minimal Maxim.
You can find this episode's Maxims in the show notes over at TheMinimalists .com and every Minimal Maxim ever at MinimalMaxims .com.
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If you sign up for our email newsletter at TheMinimalists .email, We'll never send you spam, or junk, or ads, but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity.
What's the question of the week this week?
How do you use your garage?
How do you use your garage?
Now, this question elicited so many responses.
And I do want to have some pithy answers here in a moment, but I thought we'd hear from our simpletons.
Malabama, what did some of our listeners have to say?
Alexis said our garage was used to store all the crap we didn't need, Then we moved to our last place and I was determined to store our car because it's one of our most expensive assets." I read somewhere that people would rather store their five dollar trinkets and not their 50 ,000 dollar car and that totally changed my mindset.
Now TK, what is the economic perspective behind this sort of irrational mindset?
Like I've got this really nice asset this car Car can also be a liability as well But assuming you own the car outright and you want to protect it from the weather especially if you live somewhere in the Midwest where it snows all the time, and there's all the elements, but we can't put it in our garage because I need to hold on to a bunch of trinkets.
As she said, she talked about having all of this useless crap we didn't need.
Why block out the car?
What is the fallacy behind that?
Well, the things that you don't want are getting in the way of you cherishing, appreciating and protecting the value of what you do want, right?
And so we have, we have a case of misplaced evaluation.
So I have all of these trinkets and I just don't wanna have to take the time to figure out who I'm gonna give it to, when I'm gonna get rid of it.
But I know that I don't actually use it, but I have this car that's really precious for me and I use it every day.
And I'm just gonna let it sit outside and it's probably gonna last a little less long.
It's probably gonna look pretty for a little less time, but it saves me from having to look at the things, confront the things that I need to say no to.
Julia, how often do you see people in your work as a professional organizer, they crowd out their assets, their useful assets, their precious assets with worthless trinkets.
I would never use the phrase worthless trinkets with anybody that I work with because I never know what anything means to anyone.
Actually as a result of being on this show, I worked with someone in st. Louis, Missouri and I flew out and worked with her in her home, which was wonderful.
She had tons of coffee stirrers, like from Southwest Airlines for stirring coffee, strewn about her house.
I collected all of them.
I did not throw them away immediately, though.
She, of course, had a story associated with them.
They were very meaningful to her.
So I never call anything worthless.
And even when it comes to things that I deem as trash, I will always make an area of things that I think are trash.
Because you really just don't know what something means.
So I would never say that to someone.
Right, but let's just say that Alexis is recognizing.
She's even saying that, right?
So she knows it's that.
I see this all the time.
So I always ask people either to FaceTime with me so that I can see what's going on or send me photos, which no one else has to ever see except for me.
And that will give me a sense of what's going on.
So I see floor to ceiling, packed garages constantly.
Constantly. I don't get afraid of this.
I get excited by these kinds of spaces because I know what's possible.
I was thinking about what you were saying, TK, about it depreciating a little bit outside.
And I was thinking about the outside space.
If we decided to flip this and put our car in there, but we still wanted to keep all that stuff, we pile that all the way in front of our house.
Let's say you have that, it's not gonna be socially acceptable for you to have all of that clutter from your garage in front of your house, right?
At all times your neighbors are gonna say something to you, you might even get like citation from the city.
You can park your car on the street or in your driveway though, without a problem, right?
So I think that that also helps us to justify it.
Like it's acceptable socially to keep it.
If we start, and I have someone who is hoarding on my block, his stuff is creeping out in front of the home.
And I am worried that he's gonna get cited for this soon, but you're getting into real danger with like your neighbors and just what's considered socially acceptable.
But we have made it socially acceptable to have these clutter coffins in our home.
So I see this constantly and it does take time.
So that's one thing I really want to impart is that it doesn't happen really quickly.
We didn't clutter a whole garage floor to ceiling overnight probably, it's not going to get decluttered overnight either, even if you want it to.
So I just recommend people to be very patient with themselves and if you do have help, I'm patient with them too, because the process of undoing that does take quite a lot of time.
But yeah, see this constantly grateful it's not my own garage though.
My garage is purposely for storing vehicles.
I do have some supplies for my small business on a shelf in the garage, some car wash supplies.
I was thinking about this too.
Some tools on one thing of shelves and the other walls are bare.
We do plug in cars because they're electric vehicles and that is the priority though.
I also didn't have a garage up until the place I live in now which I've been in since 2017.
So I was used to not having that space.
And in some days, I wish I didn't even have it because I'm like, I'd have even less if I didn't have this garage.
Because they become this repository.
They're a magnet for stuff.
And that goes back to the no piles rule we were talking about earlier.
It's like having fewer flat surfaces that clutter can then just collect on because it does feel like these flat surfaces.
So if you have a bunch of shelves those become just right for clutter to grow on these shelves.
Now I think it's important, you brought up an important point here is starting in the garage is probably, because it's so overwhelming, not the best place to start.
We talked about with Joshua Becker and the first installment of this household clutter series where we talked about starting with the living room because it is the place where you'll see the most benefit immediately, but eventually you'll get to these spaces.
You'll get to the garage, you'll get to the basement, you'll get to the attic, you'll get to your storage locker and it will be overwhelming because as Dr. Ross said, guess what?
It took you 10 years, 20 years, 70 years to accumulate all of this clutter.
It's not going to go away overnight, but it can go away when we put the appropriate boundaries in place.
What else do we got?
This is one from Stacy.
She said, my garage is for vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles and a few tools on the wall, no stuff allowed on the floor in my garage.
Ooh, I like that as a boundary.
You can't put anything on the floor.
And as soon as you have that boundary, and you can have any boundary you want.
I'm not going to hang anything on the walls, or I'm not going to put anything in here beyond these three containers or 10 containers, whatever it happens to be.
But having these boundaries, then you know this is something that we, as a family, don't do.
No, absolutely. I think it's so important to set boundaries in any space that you're working in, well, and in life and any relationship, right?
It can be really hard to do that though.
And a lot of what I do when I go into people's homes is to just coach them as a family on how they're going to even talk to each other about the stuff in their home because, and I was listening to Joshua Becker's episode about that exact topic too.
And thinking through how many times I've had to just sit down with a married couple and say, okay, we're gonna talk about this for the first time we're talking about it.
And I'm kind of their intermediary party.
What does one of those conversations look like?
Usually it's just each person.
It starts often, by them venting to me.
That's usually how it starts.
Sometimes it even turns towards blaming me, which is okay, because it's always easier to let other people, have the responsibility and not yourself.
Wait, How do they blame you?
That's so interesting to me.
And this is why garages are really tricky for us in this industry, is that a lot of times they'll say, well, you're not going fast enough.
if you said that this would be done in this amount of time, when in fact what's going on is that they're needing to spend 10 minutes talking with me about every individual object and there are thousands, but about the kinds of conversations that go on, it's usually, and I'll just say like a husband and wife situation where the wife says, my husband never picks up after themselves, look at the pile of all of his clothes on the floor, you see the hangers, they will do this in front of me, and then I will hear their perspective in front of them and then I try to reframe it as much as possible and remind
them that they both equally live in this space and all the spaces belong to both of them.
And so trying to come up with some, as I was hearing and Joshua Becker's episode, some sort of middle ground.
And also I try to remind them about picking your battles too in a marriage that like is this the biggest issue?
Maybe it is, right?
But maybe it's not, and maybe you are going to let them be themselves and allow that one pile to be there because it's not worth it to make that the biggest marital struggle that you have. So and then if it gets to a point where I think it's beyond my capacity, I might make recommendations for other types of professional help because I am aware of the scope of what I can and can't do.
Yeah. When you're fighting over napkin rings that have been stored in the garage for 15 years and you haven't used, but there's some sort of story behind it.
The thing is never about the thing.
What else do people have in their garage?
Luis Marie said, we converted our garage to a self contained studio apartment for my mother who was in her late 80s.
She loves the apartment and loves to see us on the weekends.
This enables her to keep her independence of living in her own home.
Well, what I love about this is it's completely different from how Stacey uses her garage where Stacey's identified the boundaries and also the what and the why behind all of that.
You know what? I wanna use my garage to park my cars in, but it doesn't mean that's how you have to use the space.
I'm actually similar to Louise Marie here, where my garage is a detached garage, but it's not a garage anymore.
It's a guest house, it's been converted into a guesthouse because we live in California and I don't have as much need for covered parking.
Although, in our driveway we have some canopies over top of our cars, just to keep some of the debris from the trees and other things off of our vehicles.
But I don't need a wintertime garage the same way I would have when I lived in Dayton, Ohio for example.
And so you're identifying how do I want to use this space?
And there isn't a right answer that you have to park your cars in the garage.
And in fact, if you want to use it as a storage unit, that's totally fine.
But what are you storing in there?
Are you just storing a bunch of dead things?
Or are you storing things for your hobby that bring you to life?
What else we got? Liz said, as a realtor, garage clutter is a huge pet peeve of mine.
I wish I could convince people not to make a garage a deal breaker when looking for their next house Unless they either plan to park their cars in it or finish it and make it a glorified climate -controlled storage unit Saying we need a garage and then all we do is fill it with junk We just don't use allows us to ignore our own hoarding problems, right?
It is easy to have these liminal spaces the garage the storage locker especially and it's easy to ignore the things because they are out of sight, out of mind, or so we think, but they're still there in the back of your mind.
You're thinking about it, you're worrying about it.
I love what Julia was saying a moment ago, and if I were to make it pithy, I'd say, you can't have garage clutter without a garage.
Quite often, like the garage becomes the excuse to hold onto those things.
But if all of a sudden the garage was just torn off of one of your client's houses, they wouldn't have a place to keep all of this clutter.
And they may feel more compelled to let it go because they lost their de facto storage unit.
And I do actually have a lot of people who call me because they want to convert their garage to an ADU, but it's currently a storage unit.
So they have here in California, they have that idea, oh, I see a lot of other people doing this let's do it.
Okay, well, now I actually have to finally deal with this stuff for the first time in my life.
I mean sometimes they just want me to find homes in their home for it, but the reality is most of the time that's not gonna work that's not gonna work.
and a lot is going to have to leave. And why isn't that going to work?
What kind of things are pretty common in a garage space?
I think there's a lot of different things that people store in garages.
Anything from holiday decor to childhood memorabilia, to collectibles, tools.
I mean, it goes, the list goes on and on, but it's so many things that people just don't want to deal with in whatever that moment was in life, whether it was now or whether it was 50 years ago, that they just kind of go to die.
And it's so many of those what if items that people believe I'm going to use at some point.
There's a quote from Dr. Robin Zazio that I say often to clients who are having a hard time letting go, and it's a book on hoarding, The Hoarder in You, which I recommend everyone on my team and any professional organizer to read, actually.
But she says that hoarders have a distorted perception of the positive potential of everyday objects.
And I repeat that often to validate the experiences that my clients have because they see the possibilities in things that you or I, people who don't have as much clutter would see as quote junk or trash.
But they're like, you know what?
I could use that Mason jar for this party I'm going to throw for my kid at their sweet 16, which is 10 years from now.
And so in a way it is a positive reframing of it because they see the possibilities through the what ifs.
But that also hinders them from achieving whatever their dream is of that space.
Right, right. And so what happens here is those things in a very real way get in the way of your dream.
That's how we define clutter.
I don't pathologize any of these particular objects.
If you wanna hold on to sentimental items what's the boundary for that?
Because everything is sentimental if you tell yourself a story about why it's meaningful to you.
And so do you want 10 totes full of sentimental items?
Do you get 10 times the value from those 10 tots of sentimental items?
And if you had one, I might argue the opposite.
For me, watering down one small box of sentimental items with 10 giant totes actually extracts value from those items that I might otherwise be getting.
And so identifying what the boundary is same thing with tools.
We have a question coming up on page two about how do I deal with my husband's tools?
He's got so many tools in the garage.
And it's not that tools are bad, tools are tools, quite literally by definition, that's a tautology even but many of the things that we keep in these storage spaces we pretend they're going to be tools.
In fact, Rebecca said that during her question.
She said, I need them, but don't need them now.
But the truth behind that is I want them, but don't need them now.
And what's behind that one?
What's behind that desire to hold onto these things for some non -existent hypothetical future?
It's worth considering.
Let's do one more. This one's from Sarah Honestly, the garage ends up being the interim space before finally letting things go That is it it becomes the purgatory of stuff and I can't let this go yet And this is super honest. Sarah, you know what I i'm struggling to let this go and I would say that's great If there's another boundary set up there i'm going to put it in the garage for 30 days or 90 days whatever your boundary is.
And then after those 90 days, this happens to me all the time where it's like, you know what, I apply the seasonality rule, haven't used this thing in the last 90 days you know what, I'm going to hold on to it for 90 more days because I think I might.
But I'm gonna be honest with myself.
And if I'm not going to use it in the next 90 days, I'm going to give myself permission to let it go because the story I'm telling myself about the thing and how useful it is, that story was true but it's not true anymore.
Do you have any thoughts on the stories behind those things.
I relate to this a lot.
I think what drew me to this industry and to minimalism to begin with was my inability to let go of things that I experienced for so many years that I felt sentimental towards everything.
And I've shared this story with almost everyone that I specifically had a hard time letting go of my deceased grandmother's possessions then she died in 1998.
And it wasn't until 2019 when I discovered minimalism that I let it go.
Where did it sit in the garage?
Before that, it was closets before I had a garage And it was probably five large storage totes of random possessions of hers.
And when I pared down, like you were talking about, it wasn't even to one tote.
It was to a few objects that I selected that are now in display in my home.
It was so, so hard for me to do that though.
I was telling all of these stories in my head about the memories of her.
And I was afraid that I would lose the memory of her, even though she had died so long ago, if I let go of these objects that just sat in the boxes.
And I know that that isn't a rational fear and I can say that now, but in the moment when I was holding onto it, it felt very real.
And I wanna share a little more with those who are listening just because they may feel like this too.
When I finally donated them and I was able to sell some, I went to an antique shop.
I cried so much to the random person in the store because I felt like I was letting her go.
It was that hard. But then when I came home and I let the feelings sit with me a little bit longer and now it's been years since then, I'm so grateful I have the space back.
And I'm also so grateful that the few things that I do have those stories associated with.
I see them every day in my home.
There's a couple of them.
They're sprinkled in my home.
That brings me so much more happiness than feeling weighted down by all of those boxes in the garage.
For me that was the hardest kind of thing to let go of.
And then the other one, and this is kind of funny, I probably at one point had about 200, yes 200 beanie babies.
I was in the beanie baby craze, yes.
When that was happening.
And the garage in my childhood home was just for storage.
And after my mom sold that home, everything got delivered to my apartment.
So for years I had several hundred Beanie babies, and when I decided to make my own sentimental bin, I kept two, I'm thinking of it.
Yeah, I kept two of the 200 and the rest were donated.
I don't mind that at all, that one was much easier for me to let go, it's just a funny one of an example of how we hold on to things, collections from childhood.
Because we think that they still have meaning to us because at a time it did.
Right, I think the law of marginal utility comes into play here as well, because having two Beanie Babies, you might say, oh, look at these.
And there are trigger for the memories that are inside me.
But having 200 doesn't give you a hundred times more memories.
In fact, it might even get in the way of those memories.
How about you listeners?
How do you use your garage?
Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon Community Chat, which, by the way, you can join for free, even if you don't subscribe to our private podcast. Okay, give me something pithy TK.
How do you use your garage?
an idle garage gathers dust and Act of One fuels dreams. So I think about garage things I've seen them use for.
I've seen them used as a fitness center where you go work out podcast studio, actually recorded in a garage before I listened to the true crime garage where they recorded the garage, I believe I've seen it used as a frog or maybe we should call it a frig.
Since a frig, a frog you never heard that acronym frog for it?
It's like the last two are something over a garage.
It's sort of a something room, family room or something over a garage, yeah.
Or how you use it, Josh.
I've seen garages for lots of meaningful things, but what I've seen them used the most for is to just place things that we don't want to face the challenge of having to think about.
And for me, for something to be idle, it means that it's in a state of rest or emotion without purpose.
And when you allow things to occupy your garage in that state of rest or emotion without purpose, then not only do those things gather dust, but your life begins to gather dust because you're kind of losing sight, losing sight of, losing connection with the reason why you bought those things.
It's not the things being in your garage that makes it clutter, it's you being disconnected from that why that made you excited about getting it in the first place.
I don't really have garage space so I can't say how I use garage space because you can't really use what you don't have. But what I do have is a sense of purpose that I try to bring to everything that I do.
And I'm glad that you told those stories about things that you took personally, because this isn't a show about garage condemnation, where we condemn people for keeping things in their garage.
It's about garage clutter, where we help them deal with the things that are getting in their way, as they define the way.
And one of the things that often gets in the way is organizing.
And that sounds weird, but that's why we have a professional organizer on the show.
One of the things that people often misunderstand when I say, organizing is well -planned hoarding, they misunderstand, they think that I'm condemning organizers.
That's the opposite.
Professional organizers know better than anyone that the easiest way or the fastest way to organize your space is to let go.
If you have fewer things to organize, you're gonna spend less time organizing.
On page two, I wanna get practical.
I wanna talk a bit about the no junk rule.
I wanna talk more about clutter coffins.
and we've got some questions about tools.
And also want to talk to you about the clutter that comes with having a newborn since you have a newborn recently.
Julia, congratulations on that by the way.
Plus we have a bunch more questions.
But first, before we get to page two and page three, we still have an entire switchboard of callers to get to as well.
Real quick for right here, right now.
Here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalists.
We've been doing these decluttering tips over on Instagram, also purchasing tips as well.
If you want to follow the minimalists on Instagram, we're at The Minimalists over there.
We're also putting on other social media platforms, Facebook and TikTok and X, we're at The Minimalists on all of those platforms. We've been filming original videos just for social media going out to these different retail stores, also doing some reaction videos to different clutter reels and clutter TikToks that we see out there to try to help inspire you to let go of whatever is in the way.
We're at The Minimalists on all of those platforms. forms if you want to follow along.
Alabama, what else you got for us?
Here's a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.
Hi, my name's Maddie from Arizona, and I wanted to share a tip that I have found.
I don't put up too many seasonal decorations, but I do love fall the most. And what my husband and I have started doing is, Well, it's mostly me making a cornucopia on our table.
We eat a lot of squash and seasonal vegetables and fruits during the fall, so we buy a lot of them at one time and display them all on the table.
I enjoy walking by and seeing them, and it's kind of fun that the cornucopia constantly evolves throughout the week because we eat it bit by bit and then we can refresh it and it's a way to introduce some something new and and exciting into our home without other more traditional seasonal decorations.
Thanks for all you do.
And I really enjoy listening to your podcast and I've found immense value in it.
I love the idea of edible decorations.
I mean, I guess I need to think about how I can apply that to every room of my house and maybe it doesn't apply to the garage or maybe it does, I don't know.
You can let us know.
Maddie, thank you so much for that useful comment, improving your seasonal decorations by making them functional.
Of course, functional doesn't mean that they have to be edible, but I like the idea of having functional decorations.
I'm also, all for decor that is simply aesthetic and it makes the space more beautiful.
I believe that beauty is essential.
And so to me, having just aesthetic that is there that amplifies the living space is super helpful.
It allows me to come home to a calm home that is peaceful.
But also if I have a bunch of decorations I'm storing in the garage, then maybe that actually disturbs my peace.
It may even get in the way.
Julie, I assume you deal with a lot of people.
One of the things we tend to hold onto are these so called seasonal decorations.
Do you have any insights around the things that we hold onto as seasonal decorations, but then quite often don't use for several years.
So I love seasonal decor myself.
I feel like it's maybe the home that I grew up in that we had quite a lot of that, but it always goes back to the amount of space that you have and how you're prioritizing that space and what the purpose of the space is.
So I like setting boundaries with the quantity that we're going to have. And whether it's seasonal decor or a garage full of children's toys, which I've seen like an adult collector of children's toys, you just have to make that conscious decision as to what the purpose of the space is and what your goal is for the space.
So if you're going to go all out with decor, then your garage is going to be just holiday decor.
That's your choice that you're making, but we can't have everything that we want at all times, right?
Which is sometimes a very hard pill for people to swallow, but we can't have that car in there and the plethora of holiday decor.
I think the idea of the cornucopia is a really nice like family tradition may not be for for everyone.
But the way that I personally manage it in my own home is that I have a selection of some of my favorite things.
And I also, as we were talking before the show about how much you love Halloween, Mallory, like I happen to love at Christmas and Hanukkah time.
So I have the most of that, but I also have decided one storage tote is my boundary that I am having.
All of my favorites, but that's what works for me with the space that I have. It's okay for me to deprive myself of what I love, even if I would love to have much more.
But honestly, if I had more, it would be overwhelming for me.
But yeah, we go through holiday decor constantly.
There's a funny video of someone from my team dancing with a skeleton.
Like not a real skeleton, but like a Halloween skeleton in a garage and waltzing with them because we just, we see this all the time.
Who knows it could've been a real skeleton with all the stuff that you're finding in these garages.
Maddie, thank you so much. Anyone else, if you want to talk about the skeletons that are in your closet, feel free to send in a listener tip.
We'd love to hear from you.
Just send a voice memo to podcast at TheMinimalists .com so we can feature your voice on a future episode.
Up next, pages two and page three.
But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break.
We'll be right back.
Alright, that's the first 35 % of episode 479.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full maximal edition with Dr. Julia Raz, which includes answers to a bunch more questions, questions like, What's the best way to manage that overwhelming burden of getting rid of the camping equipment and sporting gear that's taking up space in my home?
How do I let go of the unmade memories that I associate with my physical clutter?
How can I apply my minimalist principles to caring for a newborn?
What percentage of Americans can no longer park their cars in their garages because of clutter?
Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon.
Big thanks to our guest today Dr. Julia Raas.
You could check out Golden West organizing her company.
We'll put a link to that in the show notes, and that is our minimal episode for today.
Big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space.
On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, T .K.
Coleman, Malabama, post -production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave, SavvyD on the board, and the rest of our team, I'm Joshua Fields Millburn.
If you leave here with just one message, let it be this.
Love people and use things.
because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening, y 'all.
We'll see you next time.
Peace. Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.
