I LOVE your blog and unitasker Wednesdays in particular. I must confess that the laughter often propels me into adding another item for the next garage sale! Thanks.

Your post came out sounding kind of snobby, but I must admit, I agree with you for the most part. I’d rather look at an empty table than one crammed full of knick-knacks and tchotchkes.

Still, I do leave a little space in my life for what you call “cheap clutter” and what I call “gifts from someone who cares about me but is on a limited budget.” I usually keep these doodads in a box in the garage and whip them out right before the offending party visits. It’s a small price to pay, I think; especially if the gift is from a child or an older relative on a fixed income.

Sorry! Just my opinion.

A point I make over and over and over in my blog is that every single object you own needs to be thought of in terms of “total cost of ownership” or TCO.

TCO is comprised of:

1. cost to acquire
2. cost to maintain (running it through the dishwasher, dusting it, oiling it, repairing it, replacing it, whatever)
3. cost to store.

It’s this third item that people rarely think about. Take a pickle picker-upper. How many items like it clutter a drawer? How many drawers do you have in your kitchen now? How many would you need with a decluttered lifestyle? Even the smallest object requires storage space, and every square inch of storage space can be costed out like so:

1. cost for the storage (cabinetry, fancy closet hardware, whatever)
2. cost for the property in which your storage sits

Whether you rent or own, you can determine a cost per square foot. If your monthly mortgage is $3000 for 1000 SF, then that’s $3 per SF per month for the duration of the mortage. Is an object that takes up a square foot really worth $3 x 12 ($48) per year, just to store? Is that CD collection worth not just what you paid for it AND the cost to store it? Only 31 standard CDs fit within a square foot. A CD collection of 200 discs costs $232 per year to store at a monthly mortgage rate of $3,000. Is it worth it?

Pickle picker upper (and the folks who buy them) be damned.

One of the most egregious Unitaskers is the bread machine. How many people have one in a cabinet somewhere that they never haul out? I found one from Salton that is a bread machine, toaster-over, and broiler. We use it all the time, and even make bread periodically!

Peace. – Larry

Maybe no longer a unitasker?

It was cheap? So what! Since when does cheapness validate clutter? In my part of the U.S. a lot of people stuff their houses (every flat surface and wall-mounted shelf) with “decorations” or knickknacks. None of them is worth a close look or very pleasant to look at for very long, and the overall experience is one of decorative clutter. BUT, they came from the Dollar Tree, so it’s all good! Sure, you could have a single fantastic painting on the wall which would be so much simpler and more beautiful, but that would be expensive!

I don’t get this aspect of our culture which fuels the Wal-Marts and Dollar Stores. Just because something is cheap does not mean it is worth having. In fact, the opposite is often true–cheap stuff is often cheap stuff.

So your pickle-picker only cost ten cents? Still a total waste of space and money. In other words, still a prime example of clutter.