The house is on fire! Quick, you’ve got time to grab three things as you rush to safety. Assuming the cat and your family are safely outside, would you know what to rescue? Are you already out there on the pavement, hugging your trio of cherished items as the sirens grow closer? Or maybe, like me, you are looking around your home in bewilderment and thinking “I’m not sure I’ll miss this lot!”

OK, this scenario may be a tad extreme, but I hope you get the idea. A lot of the stuff we live with serves no useful purpose. Some of it has lurked in corners for years growing dust; forgotten, perhaps broken, certainly unloved & often resented. Why do we live with all this stuff we don’t even like? Where did it come from? More importantly, now we can see it, how do we show it the door?

I moved into my current home in 1988. Back then, it was huge & empty; we could’ve ridden bikes around the ground floor without touching anything. Today, I can’t even walk from front door to back without navigating a complicated route through all the stuff which has accumulated over the last thirty years.

It’s undeniable, I’m a Stuffoholic. My poor home is bursting at the seams and still I’m dragging stuff through the door. I’m realistic enough to know I will never become a minimalist, but I’ve decided it’s time to stop being a maximum-ist.  Hopefully, this blog will keep me motivated as I find new homes & purposes for all the stuff which has gathered around me over the years. And once all the cobwebbed clutter has been cleared away, I might be able to see the three things I’d grab when the smoke alarm starts shrieking.

My pledge: this week I will relocate or re-purpose 35 things.

That’s 5 a day. And 5 a day is meant to be easy-peasy, right?

In the beginning there was nothing, nothing at all, but to cut a very long story short now there is stuff. Not a little more stuff, noooh, so much stuff that we are drowning in it. Now and again we come up for air and see the sky (or the floor) and then we are dragged back under until breathless we surface again.

What are we to do? Well in these times, of course, tackle our problems by blogging and hope others will help make our journey an adventure not a route march. This blog will follow our victories and defeats over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years, as we fight our way to freedom from the tyranny of stuff. We know it is not going to be plain sailing (promise to keep the references to our watery theme to a minimum!) as it’s not always clear cut to us what is good and bad stuff. After all if it were easy we wouldn’t be us.

We’re stuffoholics because we can’t let go of stuff; stuff in the kitchen, stuff from the past, stuff on our phones and worst of all stuff in our heads. We sort of love stuff and the good memories and buzz of re-purposing, yet also hate how stuff can make us feel overwhelmed and sad. There is something very satisfying about turning a few yogurt pots into a herb garden while it’s depressing to keep staring at a pile of them waiting to be somewhere else, be something else. Guess we hate waste and combine it with a sentimental attachment to the memories embedded in ‘things’.

That’s enough for a first post. Time to tackle some stuff, not tap the keys in this virtual world.