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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Art of Decluttering podcast. I'm your host, Amy Revell. So glad that you're with me today. I think today's topic is going to be relevant to so many of us. We're talking about doom rooms. I published an episode, a podcast episode in 2023 called Doom Boxes.
And Doom Boxes are those places where you gather all the random stuff and you put it all together in a box or a bag and you have all the best intentions that you're going to get back to it, that you're going to sort it through, that you're not just putting it in there forever. It's not going there to die. You have the intention that you're going to go through that doom bag or that doom box.
But ultimately, it's for the paperwork and random stationery and Nerf gun bullets and lip balm and hair clips. And it's full of such random stuff that every time you look at it, you're just completely overwhelmed. And one of the requests that came out of that episode was from Andrea in New Zealand.
And she said, OK, we've talked about Zoom boxes, Amy, but I need you to talk about what to do when you've got a Zoom room. And I think traditionally we've called these doom rooms junk rooms, spare rooms. They are places where there's a whole room and it has no specific purpose or it is not being used for a specific purpose.
Chapter 2: What is a Doom Room and how does it happen?
And ultimately delayed decisions and things we don't know what to do would get thrown into that space. And what you end up with is a room of doom. It's so many items that you don't know what to do with, you don't know where to put, you can't make a decision on, you don't know where to store them. You've got like all these decisions caught up in one space.
And I know Andrea is not alone in wanting to know, like, how do I tackle this whole room where the whole room seems overwhelming? We talked about Zoom boxes sometimes being helpful, that usually they're unhelpful because it means that you put things in there and you never, ever go back to it.
But sometimes it's helpful if the clutter is spread out rather than looking at, say, a whole kitchen bench and thinking, I really have to go and deal with that whole kitchen bench. If you can slide all of that into an open container, and then sit down and make the decisions about what is in that container, it can be really helpful.
When you're dealing with a doom room though, you kind of walk in and you're like, now I absolutely don't know where to start because the doom room, more often than not, is full of doom boxes. And so it's just completely overwhelming. Until about 18 months ago, I had never had a Zoom room in any house that we'd been in. We'd never been in a house big enough to have a spare room.
But the house that we're in now, we've been here about 11 and a half years. It's a four bedroom house and we only really need three bedrooms. So what we've had is the fourth bedroom has been Cal's office for years and years and years. And what we found is Cal works in family services and also works in our church. And there's lots of private conversations that he needs to have and parent coaching.
And he really wanted a space that could just be for him that wasn't so connected to like the bedrooms on the other side of the wall where there just wasn't any privacy. We built him a pod, which many of you know about, and it's awesome. It's just like I can see it from where I'm sitting now. It's a great little space for him. It's his office. He plays music in there.
And so that freed up what was our fourth bedroom. We'd been trying to decide what to do with that space. We were like, do we make it a music room? Elijah and Cal are really into their music. We've got lots of guitars. We've got a piano. Do we do that? I thought about turning it into like a media room so that Jesse and his mates can sit and watch the basketball together whenever they want to.
He said, I'm quite happy to keep doing that in a lounge room. I thought about moving my office in here and went like, could that be a good option for me? And then decided actually I liked the openness of where I am at the moment, which isn't in a room specifically. It's just in what we think was an enclosed veranda.
We're in quite an old house and this enclosed veranda is long and skinny, but works fine for my office. And then we've kind of just accumulated stuff in that spare room because it didn't have a purpose.
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Chapter 3: What steps can you take to reclaim a Doom Room?
You just don't quite know where to put them. So what we had in here is a big tub of framed photos of the kids when they were little and some photo albums. Now it was heavy and it's big and I want to keep the photos. Like they're really important to me. I love them. I want to keep them. But what I don't need to do is keep all those frames and most of the frames I don't really like anyway.
So I've created a little project box with all of those frames in it and I've put it aside and I've put it in a space that it's annoying for me. I've put it near where I keep my shoes in my bedroom so that I can go through, take the photos out of the frames, keep the photos and I'm going to donate all those frames. Some other things that were in this room were like pool inflatables.
So Cal's parents have had a pool. Our kids are way beyond ever wanting to go swim at the grandparents' pool like they're adults now. So that's not very attractive to them. And so we were able to get rid of any inflatables that we had. We had some under bed storage that we didn't need because we reduced how much we're keeping under our beds because we just didn't need that much stuff.
And so all of those under bed storage have also been donated. What I found when I went into our doom room, which to be honest, was not completely overwhelming. There was probably 30 or 40 items in here and most of them were large, like bulk decision items. And we found that as we went through, because it had been nearly two years, we were able to just say, donate, donate, donate, donate.
And almost everything has been donated. And for us, having a purpose for this room has meant that the doom room for us is gone. And I never want a doom room again. It was two years and I didn't like it and I don't ever want it again. But for some of you, the purpose of your doom room actually needs to be storage.
But what I want to encourage you to do is actually be intentional in the way that you keep things in there. If there's a wardrobe in there, use that well for things that need to be kept vertical or don't stack or or sit with each other particularly well, but you might bring in some shelving and you might put containers that are labeled.
And it might be that you have photos or sentimental items, or it might be that you have a little bit of a pantry overflow. But if you've got it labeled and you've got it specifically there and easily accessible, then you're going to not feel anymore like it's a doom room, but it's maybe a storage room. So the doom room, sometimes the issue is there's just so much of everything.
So if you walk in and I want you to get rid of all those things that you can donate as fast as possible, that's what we did and it kind of built on it and I got that momentum and I enjoyed it and I started hunting for items that we could donate. We ended up taking probably 15 to 20 items to...
to the op shop because once you get into the momentum of it, you're like, I actually don't need that anymore. There was a cork board that Cal had used for work in his new office.
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Chapter 4: How can sorting items into categories help with decluttering?
He didn't want to have a cork board. And so it had sat there for over a year and went, we just don't need that anymore. And so it becomes fun. I found it fun where you can start to declutter and get those things happening. But if you're then walking in and you've got rid of some big items and you're like, now it's just lots of bits of bits.
What I encourage you to do is get some containers or some cardboard boxes. And I want you to move from having a doom room to just having some doom boxes or doom bags. And what that might look like is categorizing as you go. So if you come across paperwork, you don't need to make a decision straight away. Put that paperwork in the paperwork box.
And so what you end up with, it's still a doom box because you haven't actually gone through it yet, but it's so much more manageable because it's just paperwork or because it's just photos or because it's just tools. And as you go through and you actually start to categorize, instead of it being this overwhelming room where you don't know what to do with any of it,
you can sit and go through just the paperwork or you can sit and go through just the baby photos. And this can be really, really helpful so you can see what you have. Sometimes what I find in a doom room is it's just a whole lot of linen and it might be bed sheets for beds that they don't have anymore or the bottom sheet got a hole in it and we kept the top sheet for some reason.
We don't really know why. And so once you start to see it all together, you go, oh, we just don't need all this excess linen. Whereas if you just pulled one piece of linen out, you might think, well, one extra top sheet's not a bad thing. But when you realize that it's seven, you've got a little bit more context and can make some really wise decisions from that.
And so I think in doom rooms, it's important to have a purpose for what you want that doom room to actually be and to just get rid of some stuff. If it is a junk room, if it is a spare room that has accumulated lots of quantity and and you're not using it, it's probably time for it to go.
If the spare bed gets used less than maybe a dozen times a year or half a dozen times a year, maybe it's time to get rid of the spare bed. You might keep a mattress. Do you need a whole bed?
If you don't use the exercise equipment in your doom room, maybe it's time just to let go of the exercise equipment and think, well, I'm not using it in there or pull it out into a space that you are actually going to use it. If you're stuck with a doom room, just one bite at a time, get rid of those donations, make a purpose for it and categorize so you can make some good decisions.
And I need your help. One thing that we haven't come up with a solution for is guitar cases. So the guitar cases were previously kept in this room when it was Cal's office. In his current pod, there's absolutely, it's quite a small pod. There's no room for all the guitar cases. I think we've got five on the go at the moment. And I don't know what to do with them.
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