I’ve long since accepted that I belong to a family of pack rats who LOVE to accumulate stuff and find it extremely difficult to part with anything, from old T-shirts to frayed sheets or multiple dog-eared copies of the same book.
There are many days when I’m tempted to just pick up a large garbage bag and start chucking stuff into it. I fantasize about how much easier the house would be to clean and maintain in order if it contained 80% fewer things.
Unfortunately, trying something like this around here would start a full-blown war, so I’ve come up with a compromise that preserves my sanity while avoiding conflict: find one item, every day, that you can get rid of without regrets.
It can be anything: an empty perfume bottle, an ancient set of dried-out acrylic paints, a pair of shoes that pinch just a little (and that, if you’re honest with yourself, you know you’ll never wear). This strategy amounts to hundreds of unnecessary items a year, out of your house and of your life. And often, you’ll spot more than one thing you can toss.
On another note, today marks the release of my 20th fiction novel: Lethal Water, book 2 in the Storm of Elements steampunk-y fantasy series. A decade has passed since I self-published my first novel, after snatching away an hour here and there on the family’s clunky desktop while my kids were asleep. Here’s to many more exciting stories to come!
Domestic Felicity 
I come from a long line of “Thrifty” people. To be perfectly honest, they were close to being hoarders!
Mind you, my grandparents lived through two world wars and The Depression. My mother was 8 when her father was laid off, and there was no such thing as food stamps or any other sort of government help, so things were really, really bad for a lot of folks. He did finally land a job as a night watchman, working every other week for $17; that’s about $300 now – $150 a week! You saved stuff, just because you never knew when you’d need it. My grandmother crocheted dishclothes with the string she pulled off flour bags and the like. Flour companies began using pretty prints for their bags and those were turned into dresses and aprons, with the scraps being used for rag rugs and – if you were lucky – doll dresses. That continued well into the WWII years; an awful lot of my clothes were from feed bags!
I wonder if children also hoard things because they are – not to put too fine a point on it – at the mercy of their parents and maybe there won’t be another book or baby doll or whatever, especially if the adults discuss money in front of the kids.
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Good point – people who had grown up poor tend to hold on to stuff. But that’s not a strict “hoarder formula.” Sometimes people hold on to things that are completely useless, like a pair of shoes that no longer fits or multiple copies of the same old book or magazine.
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