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LIZ SOARES: When you finally run out of room, it’s time to get declutter fervor

My Victorian house has a room that was once used as an attic. The original denizens stuck their old trunks, outgrown clothes and out-of-season draperies up there. In the 20th century, somebody installed dormer windows and turned it into a bedroom.

It replaced a small bedroom that had been transformed into a bathroom.

Now, I’m all for indoor plumbing, but there’s something wonderful about the concept of a trunk room.

Don’t we all need one?

I certainly did. Perhaps knowing that this chamber was once a behemoth of a closet made me want to store stuff there.

It’s also at the very end of the house. Things that don’t have a home go no farther than this room.

The journey of a just-completed knitted hat (which will be given to charity at Christmas time), for example, starts in the living room. It may rest for a few hours on the banister until I venture upstairs. Then it could linger in the guest room a day or so. Finally, it ends up in the closet in the “trunk room,” with 1,256 other items.

I may be exaggerating a little, but not much.

My husband, Paul, and I call the trunk room the library, because it contains more books than any other room in our house. It is officially my home office. And, in my dreams, a resurrected trunk room, sans trunks.

Since its circa 1920s makeover, the library sports two closets. One is small, the size of an average coat closet. The other is perhaps little bigger than the average bedroom closet.

We also have a medium-sized closet in our bedroom, a tiny coat closet (another 20th-century addition) in the hallway and a walk-in closet in the “study” downstairs. Needless to say — because modern houses have many more closets — ours are all chock full, except for the bedroom closet, where Mr. Neat keeps all his shirts hanging several inches away from each other.

I wondered how the Victorians made do with two closets and a pantry (also now a bathroom) — until I realized they had the magical trunk room.

Which I don’t have anymore, no matter how much I like to pretend. Let’s just say things got out of hand throughout this room. Too many books, too many papers and too many things that should have been packed in trunks and sent to Timbuktu.

I finally decided enough was enough. Well, I had help from electricians who told Paul and me at the beginning of the summer that they’d have to rip up some floors in order to do the work they needed to do. Around September.

Yikes! I had to get cracking.

I did go at it with a vengeance. Paul made numerous trips to the Goodwill store, toting containers of clothing, old computer equipment, a TV and several fans. I packed up many bags for the Lithgow Public Library book sale, an event I conveniently volunteer at. My yarn stash, to my amazement, filled up two huge orange plastic totes.

I cleared the closets, moved in the stuff I wanted to keep and realized I didn’t have enough room. Period.

Hmm. I didn’t want to lose my momentum, so I set myself a rather arbitrary goal. I had to purge enough so all the books fit straight-on in the shelves. No piling on top allowed. I had to get rid of enough clothes so I could store the remainder in my family-heirloom wardrobe, chifforobe, five-drawer vertical dresser and three-drawer horizontal chest of drawers.

If my mother and her eight siblings fit all their stuff in these units, so could I!

This challenge fueled my fervor to declutter. I emptied the armoire side of the chifforobe and turned it into a mini-closet for extra toiletries and paper goods. I did a second-level purge of my clothes and shoes, ruthlessly eliminating everything I didn’t love.

Pack rat though I am, I felt a rush of joy when I was able to arrange my scarves on the top shelf of the wardrobe and actually see what I owned.

The work is not quite done yet, but I have vaulted some kind of hurdle. I will not accumulate more than I have room for. I do like the idea of a trunk room — but a library that lives up to its name is even better.



Liz Soares is the author of All for Maine: The Story of Gov. Percival P. Baxter. Visit her at peartreemaine.blogspot.com, or e-mail her at lsoares@gwi.net.

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