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Houston Clutter Coaching September 2010 Meetup

Thursday, September 23, 2010
7:00–8:30 p.m.

Gayle Goddard facilitates the September monthly meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group: Oh Joy, It’s Holiday Decorating Time Again.

Henshaw House (Nature Discovery Center)
Russ Pitman Park
7112 Newcastle St.
Bellaire, TX 77401
713-667-6550
…[Read more]

Houston Clutter Coaching August 2010 Meetup

Thursday, August 26, 2010
7:00–8:30 p.m.

Gayle Goddard facilitates the August monthly meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group: Deep Storage—Forgotten Is Not the Same as Gone.

Henshaw House (Nature Discovery Center)
Russ Pitman Park
7112 Newcastle St.
Bellaire, TX 77401
713-667-6550
…[Read more]

Storage Units: The Exorbitant Cost of Holding On

At the February meeting of NAPO Houston, we watched a documentary called Store. It’s about self-storage units and how people use them. The filmmakers interviewed dozens of renters about their stuff and why they pay to keep it in storage. The interviewees offered all the common reasons: they moved to a smaller house, inherited stuff from a parent, or just accumulated too much to keep at home. But there were some less common reasons, too.

Storage units
Your rental payments, like the storage units that clutter our landscape, go on and on forever.

One retired man had been collecting items from garage and estate sales, and he believed that his children’s inheritance was somewhere in his “collection.” Some day they would open his unit, pull out the junk, and find the treasures they’d inherited. Burglars had broken into the unit once, only to walk away empty-handed because the unit was too stuffed full of junk to bother robbing.

Another interview subject, a divorced mother, was storing a huge collection of stuffed animals. She said that she couldn’t throw away “anything with eyes.” …[Read more]

Houston Clutter Coaching February Meetup

Thursday, February 25, 2010
7:00–8:30 p.m.

Messy closetGayle Goddard facilitates the monthly meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group. The topic for February’s meetup will be “Clearing Out the Closet: Unpacking the Problem of Clothing Storage.” The dead of winter is a perfect time to dig through your closets. Gayle will offer strategies to sort and thin your wardrobe and put things back in a more organized way.

Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research
(Carriage House—Note: If the Carriage House is still under repair, we’ll meet in the main house. Look for a sign on the door if the lights aren’t on in the Carriage House.)
5300 Caroline
Houston, TX 77030
832-393-2600
…[Read more]

Stop Keeping Stuff for the Wrong Reasons

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PROGRAM NOTES

My clients offer a lot of explanations for why they can’t part with the stuff that clutters their lives. Below are some of the reasons I hear the most often. I’d like to offer some ways to think differently about what to keep and what to let go.

“This cost me a lot of money.”

Okay, so what? Are you using it? Do you like it? If it’s just gathering dust because you don’t want to admit that you made a buying mistake …[Read more]