Moving sucks, but decluttering helps

Moving sucks. Ever since leaving college more than a decade ago, I’ve only lived in apartments, so I’ve had to get good at living small and managing my inventory of belongings before, during, and after a move.

A lot of what makes that possible is that I really like decluttering. But it didn’t come naturally — it’s a skill I’ve had to practice, learn, and occasionally fail at. So I thought I might share my experiences here in case you find it helpful for a current or future move.

I got good at decluttering when my wife (then girlfriend) and I decided to downsize from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio. We loved the one-bedroom for a lot of reasons, including its view of Seattle’s Space Needle. But eventually, we realized we could afford to live in a more walkable part of the city if we could squeeze into a studio.

That meant reckoning with the volume of stuff we had each brought into the apartment. Our move into the one-bedroom apartment was two people stuffing their separate lives into one. Our move into a studio meant we had to really decide what would make the jump to the next phase of our lives. It was an emotional thing.

We made the decision to downsize a while before we actually packed things up. This was right around when Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was blowing up, and while I know that book (and the discourse around it) has become something of a meme, it had a lot of advice that we found very useful at the time and have used for all of our moves after.

Yes, Kondo’s concept of keeping things that “spark joy” is vague, unscientific, and inexact. But if you’re facing a mountain of clothes or a pile of books that you know you have to sort through in order to make space in your new place, it’s a great framework you can use to begin to chip away at those piles. With every declutter I’ve done, I’ve found that starting is the hardest part, but once you get the ball rolling, it becomes much easier.

I’ve found that I’m most successful when I start with things that I don’t really care about. Moving is already stressful, so diving first into an overflowing but beloved collection of gadgets isn’t the best tactic for me. Usually, sorting through clothes is where I begin — I keep my wardrobe pretty basic and I don’t buy a lot of clothes, so I’m not super precious about them. I save gadgets and games for later (I work at The Verge, after all).

One other thing I’ve learned: once you’ve decided what to remove from your home, you still have to find a place for that stuff. That can be its own source of frustration, especially if you’re short on time ahead of a big move. We have an article all about how to responsibly get rid of the stuff you’ve decluttered, if you want some ideas.

But once you get rolling on decluttering, it can feel great. I find great satisfaction in sorting through stuff, finding what I don’t need, and getting it out of the house to free up space. I like it so much that I’ve actually learned — the hard way — that you can take things too far.

My biggest regret is that, ahead of that move, I tossed many books that, while they didn’t actively “spark joy” in me, had sentimental value. I do pretty much all of my reading on an e-reader, so I figured that, to save space (and my back), I could get rid of just about every book that I owned. That included my high school yearbooks, which I justified because I never actually looked at them and because they just sat in the bottom of a box in my closet. But now that I have a baby, I wish I had those yearbooks stashed somewhere so that I could show them to my kid when they get older.

I also shouldn’t have decluttered my old, tattered copies of the Harry Potter series I grew up with. Similarly, they took up space and I wasn’t actively reading them, and while it was a difficult choice to toss them, I figured it was time for me to move on. But in spite of what we now know about J.K. Rowling, I still have good memories of those books, like getting sucked into the Quidditch World Cup for the thousandth time or waiting at a midnight book release with friends. I wish I could pick them up and flip through them again.

I’ve even been overzealous about decluttering old hardware and game consoles. Sure, I wasn’t playing my Nintendo 3DS very much anymore, but now I really wish I had it so that I could play some of the games I had collected.

Even if I have a few regrets, I’ve found that, in general, I don’t miss the vast majority of things that I’ve gotten rid of. And building those decluttering muscles the first time helped us tremendously with later moves, too. When we moved from Seattle to Portland, we picked a studio again to get cheaper rent, and we were able to do that because we didn’t have a bunch of stuff. It also meant we could put everything we owned into one of the smaller U-Hauls, which made a cross-state move less painful than it could have been.

We’re not in a studio anymore. We eventually moved to a two-bedroom condo because we knew we wanted to start a family, and we realized that a studio might be a bit tight for two adults and a growing kid. (If you are parents who raise a family in a studio, I salute you.) In many ways, though, we still try to treat our larger place as if it’s a studio, even with our new “roommate,” who needs a lot of gear. We’ve gotten quite good at keeping our possessions under control, an especially valuable skill when you’re dealing with the chaos of a toddler.

If we ever have to move again — and presumably, someday we will — we will hopefully be able to do the required declutter with as little stress as possible. Decluttering sometimes gets a bad rap, and I would never say it’s easy. But it’s a skill that I’m glad that I’ve had to learn through many moves. I know that because I can do it, my eventual next move will be just a little bit easier.