Editor's Letter
Conquering Clutter
Spring cleaning arrives weekly in my house.

Happy Earth Day!

April 22 is the official day for celebrating our home planet and our nation’s advances in environmental improvements. But we should consider our effect on the environment every day. Whether you’re cleaning out your home or tearing it down, think before you act according to the status quo. Remember: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Call me obsessive-compulsive, call me anal retentive, call it a career side-effect (I work with perfect-looking homes for a living, after all); I like order. As a person with Type A tendencies, I must keep ‘things’ around me under control. Clutter’s mere presence in the same room gets in my head and won’t leave until I physically remove it. Its existence creates a mental block that prevents any sort of work or play or sometimes even thought! I’ve been known to get up out of bed and clean the house before I could shut off my brain and get some rest.

It’s often tough to keep up a household, no matter what size the house is. My 1,200-square-foot farmhouse looks good on Sunday (cleaning day is Saturday), but by Monday evening, I’m already moving around detritus from the first weekday. The main focus for my husband and I, with our recent and ongoing renovation, has been to infuse functionality into a house built 86 years ago, when the style of living was completely different. Some things that have helped us include installing a medicine cabinet and shelves in our bathroom, building a bookcase and file drawers in our office, and taking measurements and notes of what and how much clothing we own for our closet (which is, two years later, still on our to-do list and therefore a significant source of clutter creep!).

At least I’m not alone in this. Some of the owners of homes we feature in this issue have experienced the same issues with space and dysfunction. Gene and Janice Bode happily moved back into their aging Ward Parkway home after a kitchen remodel transformed the way they live. And they did it all within the confines of the house’s original footprint!

Patty Phillips, who owns a condo at Townsend Place on the Plaza, decided to give up her big house for a more modest-sized condo. She determined that what she would lose in square footage was nothing compared to the freedoms she would gain by downsizing and reducing her ‘stuff.’ How could less be more? Clever tricks of the eye and plenty of professional organizing made it a success.

For those of you who, like all of us mentioned here, dwell in limited space, there is hope of ‘living large’ thanks to space-saving products and thoughtful design. The previous owners of my home raised three kids in a two-bedroom, one-bath house. We wouldn’t consider that comfortable — or hardly even possible — by modern standards. But they ‘made due,’ an old phrase years out of style. Today, we don’t have to make due; we can have it all. We just have to make sure that it all doesn’t turn into clutter.






Andrea Darr,
Editor-in-Chief
adarr@kc-hg.com