Free up room in your home for other things.

The Flaming Truth: Why and How I Got Rid of All of My Junk

Here's a picture of one side of my old scrapbooking room. My hobby had gradually taken up the biggest room in my basement and my family was complaining. The longer I was involved in scrapbooking, the more storage room I seemed to require.

The odd part is my actual output of scrapbooking layouts decreased dramatically in direct proportion to the amount of supplies I owned. I began hoarding scrapbooking supplies, becoming fearful to use them as I had learned that once they were gone, they were gone. (Okay, so I know that this sounds slightly neurotic, but it’s the way it was.)

I used to go to my shrine of scrapbooking and stare at the stuff I had collected. And before I realized what was happening to me, I started to make layouts that were far too complicated for reasonability, often taking hours to complete – if I completed them at all. (I stacked the unfinished ones in boxes waiting for some big creative revelatory moment to hit me. It never happened and they are still stacked in boxes.)

I had begun to read more and more scrapbooking magazines, looking for ideas to use my stash. Unfortunately, the more I read, the more intimidated I became because at this time, published layouts were extremely complicated affairs, and I am not a complicated paper scrapbooker.

(By the way... we are all shouting with happiness that this trend has reversed itself recently and published layouts look “do-a-ble” again. Hip! Hip! Hooray!)

In any case, I began to become discouraged with the whole thing and even considered giving up my hobby which I had begun in the 1970s - long before scrapbooking was fashionable. (In fact, my early pages were assembled with tape and - gasp! - rubber cement!)

Then I stumbled onto digital scrapbooking, learned how to create digital layouts and discovered the freedom of being able to do what I wanted when I wanted.

• No worrying about slicing up paper and ruining it in the process. Digital paper is always there and it can be sliced and diced endlessly.

• No running out of my favorite embellishments. Once I have them, I have them for life.

• No worrying about ruining priceless photos, either, because the worst thing I can do with a photo is stretch the ba-jeebers out of it when I am feeling goofy. (Since I always work with copies of my photos, it is a perfectly harmless indulgence to make myself look taller and thinner by stretching the photo vertically. I can snap it back to reality with a flick of a finger.)

But best of all, I no longer struggle with...

• Feelings of inadequacy because I realized too late that I have stuck a carefully-planned layout together incorrectly.

• No moments of flaming embarrassment because I hate a layout that I have finished.

• No accidental slicing through a finger and bleeding all over my layouts because I am trying to cut out a cool title with a craft knife. (I’ve done this.)

• No wrestling matches in which I am declared the loser while refilling various types of glue dispensers.

• No accidentally spilling drawers full of eyelets on the floor. (By the way, did you know that if this occurs on a wood floor, you can pretty much forget about walking around in bare feet for five years? Unless you enjoy pain. Which I don’t.)

The madness is behind me.

I began to have a desire to unburden myself of my big paper scrapbooking stash. After considering what to do about my huge mountain of unwanted items, I decided to make someone happy and I went on a popular message board, posted a message that I was giving stuff away, and within two days it was all gone.

It was great fun.

It felt like a bit of heaven to unburden myself of all of the "stuff" that I would never use or want or need.

Now everything I use for working and scrapbooking fits into my little home office (the room is so small that it doesn't even make a good bedroom) and it's great. Digital scrapbooking is certainly more compact. I now use that old scrapbooking room for other interesting things. Like sewing. Painting. And uh... storing items that had formally been out in the rain.

I even have some empty shelves. Lots of them.

It's so cool.

- Ro