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The Decluttering Rules: Useless Furniture

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Come on, you know you have it. I know I do. That piece of furniture that has been sitting in the living room, full of stuff from years gone by. Or perhaps it’s housing a single television and a few other items that could easily be stored elsewhere. It’s the scourge of the useless furniture.

My house is full of useless furniture. Some of it has sentimental value, like my grandmother’s rolltop desk and her hope chest. This I will keep, because it has a lot of value to me. Most of our furniture has been gleaned from free sources, and its usefulness is often up for debate.

Furniture like the entertainment unit must live in fear of its continued existence in my home. I got it off Freecycle, that source of wonderful free stuff and place to get rid of things that you don’t want. Currently, it houses clothespegs, my knitting, a television, and a fish tank, as well as scattered magazines. Sometimes it also houses the cat. The unit is quite large for our space, so some of it is unusable. Decluttering decision? Find a smaller one that fits in the corner.

In my humble decluttering opinion, furniture serves several purposes. It needs to hide things that you want to hide. I’d love to get a cabinet for our living room to hide my daughter’s toys. You need to be able to use furniture to capacity without creating visual clutter.

Furniture also needs to be extremely functional. It should fit into the space that you have. When you need to work very hard to make a piece of furniture work in your space, this is the wrong piece of furniture for that space.

Good furniture should also last over time. While I rotate used free furniture into my house, when I find the right piece, it stays.

How do you choose what furniture stays in your home?

(Image courtesy of mzacha at stock exchange)