decluttering – Deborah Makarios

January 27, 2026January 27, 2026

A Farewell to Hat

Today I let an old friend go: a round brown (fake)fur pillbox hat.

It first came into my possession about nineteen years ago, when I was preparing for my 21st – a costume party – and hunting up odd hats in second hand shops for the use of anyone who came without a costume. To my intense surprise, the furry little hat actually fit my remarkably bijou head, and so I kept it and wore it often.

Painting of white-haired pink-cheeked old lady with blue eyes and a brown fur pillbox hat. She has a lavender and green shawl over her shoulders, pinned at the front with a square golden brooch. — My old hat was like this but not nearly so tall.

I was wearing it one night as I passed through the centre of Christchurch, returning from an evening theatrical event. It was winter, so I was also wearing my big belted khaki overcoat and sheepskin boots, and as I crossed a largely deserted Cathedral Square en route to the bus station, I heard a distant – and possibly intoxicated – voice cry out, “The Russians are invading!”

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May 23, 2024May 23, 2024

This Is It

If there’s one subject on which I have written a good many words over the years, it’s the topic of Getting Rid of Stuff. Way back in July 2014 – nearly ten years ago! – I was Feeling the Urge to Purge. Then in September I was wondering how much distillation it would take to get Drunk on Life.

By late February 2015 an alert reader was commenting that “The number of times you talk about purging, your house must be completely empty by now,” – and that was just before I’d posted about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

I regularly listed things I was getting rid of as 2015 continued, pausing in July to toy – for the first time – with the idea of Zero Based Budgeting: starting from zero and adding in what I was sure I wanted to keep, instead of starting from Dear Me What A Lot and subtracting only what I was sure I didn’t want to keep.

Black and white. An empty room with a fireplace, an open door, and a busy floral pattern in panels on the walls.

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August 10, 2023August 10, 2023

Finding Visual Peace

I am in search of visual peace. I did not realize this until I had spent an embarrassingly long time reading books about decluttering, orderliness, and interior design, and getting frustrated by how they weren’t helping me.

I don’t know about you, but I am not aiming for a specific number of personal possessions, and I have no particular desire to sort all my belongings into one of three to five piles, boxes, or bin bags. But I struggled to articulate what it was that I was looking for, until I eventually, by increasingly targeted blunderings, rediscovered the phrase “visual peace”.

The problem with most books I’ve read about improving the home environment is that they assume that once you’ve got rid of everything you don’t much like, you’re happy to keep looking at everything else. All the time. Forever.

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