Downsizing Your Life

If you knew Gayle and Marc, you would think that it was entirely Marc’s idea for them to move into a cottage home. For years, Marc led a fairly frugal life. He carried the same briefcase to work. He had the same lunch with leftovers from the previous night…

Clutter. We’ve all experienced it on some level. Some of it is visible. Some of it is hidden from our sight. Physical and mental clutter have a funny way of creeping into our homes and our lives. Slowly but surely, we become inundated…

Even in the tidiest and most organised of homes, there is one thing that never ceases to cause problems and that is the dreaded paperwork. And half of it we never even asked for – we can’t even blame ourselves for the little piles everywhere!

“Who do I leave my belongings to?” is one of the most common questions amongst those who are childless, who are estranged from their children for some reason, or whose children live on the other side of the world. Bethany, aged 70, has never had children…

As I mentioned in the first blog of this series, moving to a new home later in life could be motivated by several things: health status, retirement, an empty nest, living costs, lifestyle choices. Among these, a health condition might force you…

I recently paid a high price to figure out I can’t and won’t get rid of all my clutter. Even my “throw-it-all-out” husband colluded with me in this discovery. I say this after: Putting 30 garbage bags full of my clothes out for a porch pickup from Purple Heart…

You can learn a lot about a woman by looking at her closet. Some closet spaces are tidy and arranged by color while others are in disarray with heaps of clothes that didn’t quite make it onto a hangar. I think that the way we feel about our aging bodies…

My mother had a fabulous collection of what is now called “fashion” jewelry, much of it acquired through her sister’s costume jewelry company. One of the greatest thrills of my childhood was walking through the aisles of stacked wooden drawers at my aunt’s…

We all know the old saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the same principle can be applied to clutter clearing too. The trick is to begin small and take it a step at a time. Begin by choosing a small area that contains things you…

If there is one thing we all noticed a little more of during the Covid lockdown, it was the amount of clutter we had accumulated and the impact it can have on how we feel in our own homes. Perhaps for the first time, you clearly felt the impact…