Your Home Is Not a Museum: Making Tough Choices About Collections

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Evaluate a Collection

This week’s assignment is to examine a collection in your home with a view toward downsizing, either now or in the future.

• Identify a collection in your home—either an intentional one, such as shot glasses or dolls, or an unintentional one like National Geographic magazines or vinyl records—that’s taking up a lot of space or feels out of control.
• Take inventory. In addition to the primary space where you display or store the collection, be sure to find any overflow in closets, storage areas, or scattered elsewhere in your home.
• Reflect on how much space you’re willing to dedicate to this collection in your current home, or how much you’re likely to have in a downsized future home.
• Brainstorm a list of criteria for what “deserves” to be in your collection or what no longer makes the cut. For example:
  • Which items are your favorites?
  • Which items have the most monetary or sentimental value?
  • Which items are in the best or worst condition?
  • Which items best exhibit what you love about this particular collectible item?
  • Which items have you outgrown or lost interest in?
  • Which items have you replaced with better examples, but kept anyway?
• If you’re ready, gather the entire collection into one place, then make a first pass through all the items using the criteria you selected. Remove any pieces that you’re ready to sell, give away, or discard.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.