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The King of Clutter

By RICK RYCKELEY
Contributing Writer

The Wife and I are building our dream house. We’ve picked the builder, a nice enough fellow. We picked the lot, about an acre, heavy with hardwoods. We picked the type house we want - a ranch. We debated over the brick, the interior and exterior colors, even the amount of grass for the front and back yards. It’s all a very exciting process.

Getting our old house ready to sell? Not such an exciting process. Matter of fact, it’s quite trashy. I’ll explain.

Warning: If you have lived in the same apartment, house, or condo for at least the last six years, stop reading this article now. Continuing to read will cost you many hours of hard work and at least four trips to one of my all-time favorite places to visit - the county dump. Don’t believe me? Well, at least I warned you.

As soon as we signed the contract to build our house, the first thing The Wife did was start to watch those “how to sell your house” shows. She took lots of notes. She’s good at note-taking, her being a teacher and all. It wasn’t long before she informed me what we needed to do: “We need to de-clutter our house in order to sell it.” I soon found out that The Wife’s definition of clutter and mine were worlds apart. What The Wife considers to be clutter, the husband considers to be a treasured antique.

It’s fair to say that I don’t subscribe to The Wife’s rule that “If you haven’t touched it, looked at it, or used it a year then get rid of it. You don’t need it.” Nope, I believe if you get rid of it today, then tomorrow you will need the very thing you threw away. Hence my kingdom of clutter, and in my kingdom I’m the king.

Becoming the King of Clutter didn’t happen overnight. Like most great achievements, it took years of early training. Mine started a long time ago when Mom called for us kids to bring our dirty laundry down to the basement. It was much easier just to stuff dirty clothes under my bed than to take the long walk all the way down to the basement. And so the King of Clutter was born at the tender age of six.

Forty years later, I’m proud to say that I’ve evolved into much more than just the King of Clutter. I’m a Clutter Magnet, and our yard seems to be clutter-central for the neighborhood. For example, I’ve got clutter that doesn’t even belong to me out in our tool shed. How did it get there? Simple - my clutter magnetism. It took two days, and four trips to the dump for us to sort through all that clutter and clean it out. Don’t ask me where it all came from. I swear we threw away stuff I never knew we had. I think my loyal subjects in our neighborhood are bringing clutter to their king and dropping it off. But all the stuff crammed into the shed was nothing compared to the clutter found inside our house, especially the bottom of a certain King’s closets.

Closet clutter is sentimental. Yes, I know the five large boxes of magic tricks stacked in the bottom of my closet and moved from house to house and are a wee-bit old. Sure, the three cups and multiplying ball trick would work better if I hadn’t lost the balls 10 years ago. And the linking rings actually did link together better when they weren’t so rusty. It doesn’t matter that most of the tricks haven’t seen the light of day for over 30 years. What does matter is that I still have them. Well, had them.

By late in the afternoon of the third day of de-cluttering, all of my old high school trophies from 1976 were loaded into the back of the truck. Along with boxes of pictures, old records, the toaster oven I never got around to fixing, scrap pieces of wood, and the shovel The Boy broke back when he was 10. A ton and a half of other “clutter” was loaded onto the trailer and taken to the dump. And on the bottom of all that clutter, were the five dusty boxes of magic from my high school/college days. That show has finally closed.

A ton and a half of clutter - that’s even impressive for me, The King of Clutter. And before all you real estate folks out there start to salivate and send me those e-mails about how great you’ll be as our agent, we’ve already got one. He’s an old family friend, and he assures me that our house will be sold in no time. Just like magic. That is, The Wife reminds me, as long as we get rid of all the clutter.

When she said that, the wrinkles in my forehead folded together as a wave of concern washed across my face. The Wife saw my fear and reassured me with a hug. “Don’t worry, Honey, you’re not clutter. You’re an antique. And that makes you a true collectable.”