Too much stuff

One persons collectible may be another person’s junk, but many of us are just running out of room.

Our homes are twice the size as in the 1970s and our families are smaller. Despite this, our houses, basements, and garages are full of stuff. Lots of stuff.

According to shrinkthatfootprint.com, living space has increased dramatically. Canadians, Americans and Australians, have the greatest per capita foot space in the world — on average double the space of the average U.K., Italian or Spanish resident.

While Canadian stats are scant, the American ones likely mirror ours. According to the LA Times, there are 300,000 items in the average home. Shopping malls outnumber high schools. In the book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, the authors say 93 per cent of teenage girls rank shopping as their favourite pastime.

In a recent Mpac study, between 2020 and 2023, 11 per cent of space was added to the rental storage footprint in Canada, which equals about 4.2 million square feet in total.

There are many types of clutter, including memory clutter, which is an undue preoccupation with memories, often from their childhood. Having these items may transport them to a different time. These individuals may suffer from depression as well.

Some who can’t toss out items may worry they will need them in the future and become anxious about letting them go. It is often referred to as ‘someday clutter.’

While clutter and hoarding may seem similar, the essence of them is different. Clutter impairs the functionality of a space, while hoarding is a mental health disorder with reluctance to discard items, which may lead to unsafe living conditions.

According to WebMD, studies say there is a correlation between clutter and heightened anxiety and disturbances in sleep patterns. It’s not just our homes that are filled — our waistlines are expanding as well. People with hoarding tendencies appear more likely to overeat and gain weight.

Not everything in our homes is considered clutter or messy. Many people are collectors and start out of love for particular items. In some cases, they keep their treasures in the hopes of one day gaining a profit.

Quinten McLaren is the manager of A Buy and Sell Shop in Lindsay. When it comes to cashing in, he says there’s probably someone out there that will pay you a lot of money for something, but you have to find that one person.

He adds, the internet has been great for a lot of things, but it’s hard when it comes to collectibles. “Because you can type into Google, and Google’s really good at telling you what you want to hear.”

“You type in something, and it can tell you that it’s worth $500, but at the end of the day, if you’re trying to sell it, you have to find that person to pay you the $500.”

He notes locally, he saw changes in the collectibles market during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the influx of items from older generations downsizing or moving to retirement homes. There are challenges in selling certain collectibles, such as Franklin Mint plates, crystal glassware, and Royal Doulton figurines, due to a lack of demand from younger generations. “They were sold (to them) as an investment opportunity for people.”

McLaren says in 2024, if he was to become a collector with the end game of making bank in the future, he would only invest in gold and silver.

“You’ve heard the pipe dream sold over and over again. Those collector plates that I can’t give away, those were sold as an investment opportunity for people.”

Arlene Garelick of Little Britain has loved collecting Beanie Babies since 1997, with a particular focus on bears, dogs, and cats. She has more than 550 Beanie Babies, including rare ones like Diana, which she values at $1,000.

In addition to Beanie Babies, Garelick also collects Sylvester the Cat merchandise, with an estimated 25-50 items. Her collection includes a life-size Sylvester plush toy that stands at her height of 5’1”. She is hesitant to part with her Sylvester collection, as she finds them too cute.

At 75, Garelick has run out of room. Her Beanie Babies are carefully packed in special cases and she notes they are original, not counterfeit. While she would like to get $1,000 for her Diana Beanie Baby, she has no interest in selling her collection separately. She hopes someone will offer her a fair deal for all 550.

Her nieces and nephews have little interest in the collectibles. Many Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Zed generally don’t see much monetary value in older collectibles, and tend to prefer a more curated and minimalist home décor aesthetic instead.

Growing up, Valerie Blanchard* and her three siblings enjoyed the generosity of their benevolent parents. Her mother, Barbara Smith*, was a health care professional involved in academia and served on a university governing council. Her father, Frank Smith* was a high-level government official and was once a professional athlete hopeful with a tryout for a US sports team. He was instrumental in setting up a college program as well.

This power couple grew up with limited financial means and made it a priority to provide their children with the material comforts they themselves never had. “My dad had a good job and my mom did as well and I think they could buy things. But I think they were filling voids of things they didn’t have when they were kids and wanted to give us everything.” She noted at Christmas, her gifts from her parents were usually very generous compared to her friend’s.

The family home was in the GTA, and they purchased a rural property in the Kawarthas when the children were young. Fixing and cleaning up around the family home was not a priority, according to Blanchard. She notes her parents were exhausted and Fridays at 6 pm, they loaded up their family and headed to their Kawartha property, “because that’s where my dad wanted to be until the day he died.”

Their homes became more cluttered over time. “They lived differently. When someone knocked on the door, we’d run around and clean up before we’d answer the door,” lamented Blanchard.

Blanchard said her parents were in denial about their excessive possessions. “They lived with rose-coloured glasses and they loved things, they loved antiques, they loved helping their community,” noted Blanchard. Her mom would attend rural craft markets and buy from a vendor who didn’t have sales that day to help them out. The crafts would then add to the collections at their rural property.

When describing her parents, Blanchard calls them collectors, as the word hoarders has negative connotations. She notes, they did not live in filth or have dead animals in their homes.

Laurene Livesey Park is a certified professional organizer in chronic disorganization, serving the Kawartha Region. She agrees with Blanchard, preferring to say someone suffers from hoarding behaviour, or chronic disorganization. She emphasizes the importance of understanding hoarding as a mental health condition rather than a moral failing, and the challenges in addressing it because of the high recidivism rate and the individual’s lack of recognition of the problem.

She notes there is the piece of the brain that provides organizing — the prefrontal cortex that may not work as it should. There can be executive function impairment, trauma, and neurodiversity as well. “We know about hoarding behavior too is that it is usually co-existent with other conditions. ADHD very frequently, depression almost always, anxiety almost always.”

Blanchard said her parents had multiples of items, with many of them broken. After her father died, she found four broken coffee makers in the pantry. After she had completely cleaned it out, her mother had all the items taken to a drive shed, even knowing they were broken.

Livesey Park says there are varied reasons why people keep broken, useless items that add to the clutter in their homes. People of certain generations fixed broken items. In some cases, growing up without much money causes people to spend to fill a void. If their home is spacious and the clutter is somewhat hidden, the person may not see it as a problem. If items are sold at a good price, there are those who buy them for that reason only. She notes some are unable to get their useless items to the landfill. “If we don’t take it to the dump, it stays in our house because we can’t get municipal pickup. So municipal services can be a problem.”

Blanchard said her parents provided her with a childhood filled with love and care. After their deaths, she spent six months clearing out their Kawartha home and was overwhelmed and exhausted with navigating and clearing out the clutter. She went through each item thoughtfully, donating or disposing of items while trying to honour her deceased parent’s memories.

Livesey Park has strategies for helping loved ones manage these situations, such as finding an entry point where they acknowledge the problem, starting with small decluttering tasks and honouring sentimental items through photographs or shrines. The organizer recently got a tattoo of a shooting star as she and her father used to stargaze together. She said she can’t capture a star, or a piece of dust, but she and her daughter got matching ones, “and that honours something that we did together, too, and so finding a way to express that appreciation, I think is important.”

For Blanchard, the experience of growing up in a cluttered environment and later dealing with the excessive possessions has made her thoughtful about the cleanliness and renovations at her own home. She notes her parents were very good at sharing their rural home and she has wonderful childhood memories but makes sure her house is clean all the time.

“I set goals for myself every day to make sure that I get certain things done.”