The Bog of Lost Scholars

The area that I really need to declutter is my computer/crafts room. It’s a small room with multiple functions, and a lot of random stuff tends to land in there. It’s at the “I can barely move in this room” stage again; it doesn’t have enough space for doing many of my craft activities, and fabric and yarn and things to be mended are piled everywhere, along with the cassette tapes I need to convert to mp3s, the box of papers to shred, the computer supplies and office supplies, the filing cabinet….

(This room really is too small for what I’m trying to do in it; alas, it’s the only sufficiently cat-and-child-proof room for craft storage and the only room other than the kitchen with three-prong outlets for the computer. I’ve occasionally considered switching my son’s bedroom and this room; the boy doesn’t spend that much non-sleeping time in his room, so he’d be fine with it, and his room’s much larger. But there’s still the wiring hassle, and I’d want to install a phone jack…. On the other hand, I could just sell the piano, which I never play; that’d give me back that whole wall for storing stuff.)

However, I am not decluttering the computer/crafts room; I am decluttering my bookshelves. Four feet of old textbooks, craft books that I’m never going to use, damaged Press books that I’ve never read (and that I can always borrow from the editorial library or the university library if I eventually do want to read them)….gone.

I love books, but I’ve realized that I love particular books. The books, fiction and non-fiction, that I love to read or browse, or that I don’t open often but get this shiver of coolness factor just knowing they’re there (hello, Grammar of Western Greenlandic) — those I’m keeping. The books that I never refer to, or that I feel guilty about not reading? They’re off to Half Price Books.

One of the concepts from Steward Brand’s How Buildings Learn that particularly stuck with me is High Road and Low Road buildings.

According to Brand, there’s two routes one can take in designing a building that will be useful and adaptable over time. One is the High Road, in which you use high-quality materials, build for endurance, change things gradually over time, and put lots of money into maintenance. The other is the Low Road — you build a cheap building, and when something needs to be adjusted, you pull out a saw or a drill, and in half an hour you’ve got a solution. Eventually the building’s going to collapse, but it’s okay because you didn’t put much money into it, and in the meantime it’s served your needs quite well.

I’ve been thinking about this idea since I read the book, and it seems to me that you could apply this to interior decorating as well as architecture. High Road interior decorating is where you’ve got the various adaptable antique pieces, the fine upholstered furniture that you’ll reupholster twenty years from now when it’s starting to wear thin in places, the fancy lamp that just needs a new shade to look up-to-date, and so forth. It costs a lot, and takes a lot of maintenance, but it also adapts to your changing needs and tastes.

My house is definitely done in Low Road decorating. A round table, scrounged from the trash, displays my hand-knit lace tablecloth (when my son isn’t trying to climb on the table). The books in the dining room are housed on a bookshelf from Ikea, a bookshelf that used to be my folks’s, and three 1×6 bookshelves that aren’t quite square. My television sits on a chest of drawers, again scrounged from the trash; I watch it from my cheapo Sears glider rocker or from the futon that I got free from a coworker. My computer lives on a desk that I bought used in college; my sewing machine sits on the old treadle case inherited from my uncle. My son sleeps on a cheap twin bed that I got in college; I sleep on a bed that came from my parents’ house, that my dad had previously gotten from a coworker who was giving it away. I have two pieces of furniture that I actually spent any significant amount of money on, and they don’t match each other or anything else in the house; everything else is hand-me-downs, secondhand sale finds, homemade, cheap, or salvaged.

And I like it that way.

It’s not just that I like the eclectic look, although that’s part of it. As I’m a single mother of a special needs kid, with a full-time job outside the home and an adequate but not cushy income, Low Road decorating fits my lifestyle. Almost everything’s low maintenance; I generally don’t have to panic about leaky sippy cups or hairballs, and I can save my cleaning energies for those few pieces of furniture that are important to me. I don’t have to spend a lot of money on my interior environment — yes, my home environment is important to me, but when my funds are tight, I’d rather spend my money on infrastructure than on furnishings. Many of the cheap pieces have emotional resonance for me, but whenever the emotional attachment wears off and they stop being functional, I can leave them at the curbside with no regrets. Low Road decorating works very well for me.