Let It Go - Peter Walsh Page 0,4
centers and armoires. Across the country, these things loiter on curbs holding “For Sale” signs (or “Free” signs), stand side-by-side in thrift stores and donation centers, and lurk in basements where they’ve been repurposed as storage containers for household clutter.
A lot of these items—along with other outdated pieces of furniture—are also heading into the nation’s landfills. As a Wall Street Journal story noted a few years ago, “Many people are making an unwelcome discovery: Their prized family heirlooms have turned into junk.”
The typical household contains all sorts of objects that had their moment long ago, but now don’t fit in. For example, fragile china sets and heavy, ornate picture frames may still look beautiful, but they’re about as useful to today’s young adults as a closetful of sky-blue one-piece leisure suits.
Especially problematic, according to the Journal story, is the so-called brown furniture. These are the heavy pieces made of solid wood, leather, and thick upholstery. They were built in bygone times for buyers who prized craftsmanship, gathered friends for meals in formal dining rooms, and held on to their stuff for the next generation because their kids actually needed it.
As long as you’re comfortably settled in your home, you don’t necessarily have to think about the space you’re providing to items that have outlived their welcome. Maybe you’ve given your own giant hardwood TV cabinet a reprieve. After all, you can still fit a flat-screen TV into it, as long as it’s not too big. Plus, things come back in style, don’t they? Twenty years from now, maybe you’ll be glad you kept it. Or one of your kids will want it for some reason.
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Household Treasures Can Grow Outdated Surprisingly Quickly
If you want proof that our tastes change faster than our stuff, consider this: Even televisions seem unnecessary to many young people.
According to research from Deloitte, the 14-to-25-year-old age group spent just 43 percent of their television time looking at an actual TV in 2015. Instead, they watched a computer, tablet, or smartphone for most of their time.
Of course, plenty of TV viewers and video gamers still feel there’s no substitute for a 60-inch screen attached to floor-shaking speakers.
But often, people now want the flexibility of watching their shows on a portable device in the setting of their choice rather than having to report for duty in front of a big, unmovable screen.
Others don’t want to buy a costly piece of equipment that only does one thing, when a cheaper device can provide Web access, communication, and TV.
It’s worth asking yourself: Are any furnishings in your home worth selling now before they become outdated? If you’re saving an item for your kids or grandchildren, will they find it useful—or ridiculous?
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Or maybe the cabinet has become part of the backdrop of your surroundings that you don’t really notice. It’s one of those things that’s just there.
We all continually toss out items that we don’t need without a second thought, like gum wrappers, gas receipts, and other trash. At the other end, we treasure special belongings that we might try to rescue if the house caught on fire, like photo albums or the family Bible with great-grandparents’ birthdates.
But in between those extremes, a lot of stuff comes into your home that you can’t so easily judge. It’s somewhat valuable or useful, or you like it for some reason you can’t quite describe, or it just seems like a thing that people are supposed to keep. So you make room for it. Your cabinets and shelves quietly absorb this growing mass.
Once this stuff is manufactured, it doesn’t change. It’s created during a certain era. For a certain purpose. For an audience that has certain expectations at that moment in time.
But our lives change. It’s not just that technology becomes obsolete and new fashions come into style—our interests also shift and our values evolve. We become different people than we were 20 years ago. What do you do with all this stuff when you move to a smaller home, or even a new home of the same size that wasn’t designed to flow around yesterday’s furnishings?
On a similar note, how do you make the right decisions when you sort through your elderly parents’ home after they move into assisted living? You’ll never use your grandmother’s sewing machine, but it’s still worth something, right? It has memories attached to it that you’re supposed to preserve, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t someone care about your father’s collection of commemorative beer cans, even if that