Big Closets are Bad

Realtors will say that they’re a good thing. Don’t believe them.

This bears repeating: big closets are bad. Storage units? Tools of the devil! These things are not our friends.

When I received my acceptance letter from Columbia University — and after doing triple cartwheels around the living room — I took a look around my apartment at the time and blanched. That apartment would easily run $2000 or more a month in New York. In Cleveland, at the end of the last century (are you sitting down?) my rent for a spacious one-bedroom walk-up apartment that boasted a huge dining room, a living room with a decorative fireplace, a perfectly sized kitchen, huge windows, and four, count ’em, four closets cost $275 a month when I moved in in 1994 and the rent had risen to $310 when I left in 2000. Heat included.

Granted, it was Cleveland and it was twenty years ago. And, yes, the landlord, a courtly old Hungarian travel agent only rented to people who were recommended to him by people he trusted. Several years after I had gone I heard that Mr. Balassa had died and the new owners had jacked the rent on my old apartment up to $980. What a world, what a world!

Four closets and a storage unit in the basement.

I’d only been in that place six years at that point but the bigger of the two living room closets — which was big enough to have been used as a small home office if it had had electrical outlets — was completely packed. Wall to wall, ceiling to floor. You opened the door carefully if at all.

This was true of all the other closets as well. And that storage unit in the basement? There were twenty-eight gallons of various colors of high-quality exterior paint from that exciting mural project that fell apart at the last minute.

I got my acceptance letter in October and the sensible person would have made arrangements to start school the following academic year. Does anything about me strike you as sensible? Right answer. Nope. I was going to start in the spring semester, 2001, and that meant I’d be moving during the holiday break, arriving in the city two days before Christmas. And the first order of business was dealing with my accumulation of stuff. I was working and going to school at that time but every other waking moment was spent going through those four closets, especially the big one in the living room.

When I started this process in late October, I was careful to go through each piece of whatever-it-was even though most of it was going to the dumpster. By mid-November, I had moved the wastebasket to the closet door and was basically tossing everything.

As to that paint in the storage unit? It was considered Hazardous Material and I would have had to pay professionals to dispose of it properly. I was set to arrive in New York City with $1700, no job, and an offer from a friend of a friend of a couch to crash on. There was no way this was in the budget. The gods love me, however, and a friend who owned a two-family home nearby was delighted to take that paint.

Thinking I’d hit on the perfect way to get rid of more stuff, I had a house-sale (because no garage, see?) and invited everyone I knew or even stood next to at the grocery store.

I designed clever little invitations and put a decorated box in the middle of the living room. Everything in that room was for sale and I just asked people to put whatever they felt was sufficient in that box. By the end of the day, I had over $400 in the box and almost everything I’d started the day with. People came to support me but weren’t interested in adding to the stuff they already had.

Too too much stuff

The logical outcome of our consumer-based economy is the creation of too much stuff. The engine churns away, night and day, to make stuff to make money. Even the poorest person living out on the streets in this country can fall victim to this tsunami of stuff.

When I finished my wholesale shedding of possessions I still had enough stuff to pack an Enterprise Rent-a-Van from front to back with just enough room for my cat. We made it from Cleveland to the George Washington Bridge in under seven hours. It then took us another two and a half hours to get across the bridge and park in front of that friend of a friend’s building in Washington Heights. I’d had a whole crew to help load the truck that morning but worn out from our day on the road, it was just me and my buddy Steve unloading and lugging WAYYYY too much stuff up four flights of stairs. Several things I foolishly brought along — a flimsy balsawood computer desk, really? — never made it up those stairs. I hope those items brought so lovingly from Ohio found second or third lives in New York.

That friend of a friend stood, slack-jawed, as we brought up my bed, computer, television, chairs, end tables, boxes of dishes, boxes of books, boxes of art, and an insane amount of other stuff. It was all stuff I was sure I’d need, but now it was just too much.

I moved three times in my first two years in New York before landing in my current — and probably forever — home. Each time I shed more stuff. By the time I landed here in Harlem I was down to the bed, the computer, a few books, a pedestal table from the bar I used to kick men’s asses on the pool table in, and some boxes of pans.

When I first saw that this place only had two smallish closets I was dismayed, not recognizing a gift when it was grinning at me.

In very short order, stuff began to accumulate again. It’s mysterious and unsettling how quickly it piles up. I’ve lost everything I’ve owned twice in my life aside from the major stripping down of possessions that moving to New York demanded and in every instance I was almost immediately fully stocked with stuff in less than six months. It’s weird. And if I thought I didn’t quite have enough stuff, I invited my partner of two years to move in with me eight years ago. The man had stuff!

I’ve come to appreciate how those two small closets save us on a continual basis from an overabundance of stuff. Don’t think we’re living a simplified, stripped-down existence, however. Not a chance. And that makes those two modest closets all the more valuable. We don’t have a choice in the matter. Sternly, but lovingly, those two closets refuse to get bigger to take in more stuff.

So as you peruse those tempting wide-angle photos of the next place you’re looking to live in, don’t be fooled by deep, wide, spacious closets. They are not going to make your life better. Trust me, small closets and small living spaces are often the only defense you’re going to have against the onslaught of stuff. Without them, there’s no telling how many unnecessary things will pile up in your life, things that one day you’re going to have to get rid of.

Accept that help and don’t be fooled.

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