Product Description

How to make more of less-the book that shows how to simplify your life, control clutter, and pare down your possessions for a move into smaller living quarters.

There are plenty of anti-clutter experts around ready to exhort us to sort, store, and trash our belongings, but this is the first book to address the specific needs of people moving from a larger to a smaller space, or merging two (or more) people's possessions into a single abode.

If you and your mate are about to swap your large, single-family house for a condo, or move your parents out of the family home of 40 years into an assisted-living center, where do you start? How do you decide what to take, what to leave behind, and what to do with your discards? What can you do to keep the move from seeming tinged with loss?

Scaling Down not only offers terrific nuts-and-bolts strategies for paring down one's belongings to only the best and most meaningful items, but it also addresses the emotional aspects of streamlining-the complicated relationship we have with our "stuff." Countering the pervasive American prejudice that having less is a step down, the authors advance their concept of "living large wherever you are!"

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123678 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-02
• Released on: 2005-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594860935
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
JUDI CULBERTSON is a New York-based organizing/ decluttering expert who gives clutter-control seminars coast to coast. She is also the author of a decluttering newsletter, Traveling Light.

MARJ DECKER is the CEO of the Denver-based company Time Is Priceless, which specializes in helping people downsize.

Customer Reviews

Best of its kind
I have read every book I could find on home organization and "clutter-busting". This book is the first one that contained practical, truly helpful information. We are preparing for our second child and just finished a remodel so I really needed some workable tactics to get our home in order. I carried this book around the house with me, consulting it as I went from room to room trying to figure out what to do with an overwhelming accumulation of "stuff". It has taken a couple of months, but the recommendations I implemented from this book are now paying off. I know where everything is, I have made a lot fewer "necessary" purchases and the house is a lot easier to clean up on short notice!
This book also has the gentle guidance you need when trying to cope with your emotional attachments to your possessions. This book isn't full of intimidating, glossy photos of perfectly organized rooms. Instead, it is full of information you will use on a daily basis to both clean up your space and keep it that way.

Less really is more....
Being active in a simply living community I am always interested in buying books that discuss downsizing, decluttering, simple living. This book Scaling Down : Living Large in a Smaller Space by Judi Culbertson is helpful because unlike other books it gets inside the mind of the reader who wants to do something about all the stuff they have, but worry they will give away something they may need later, something that was a gift from someone, something that reminds them of something good, long ago, or a variety of other mind games 'stuff' evokes.

Thus the author walks the reader thru a variety of situations and gets the reader to think outside the box, as well as think about whether they own the item or the item owns them. Along with the real, often long-term costs of holding on to things one never uses, likes or needs. There is a reason that businesses that are storage facilities for people who have to much stuff are amongst the fastest growing businesses in the United States.

The author shows the reader how to get rid of things either by donating to a thrift store, yard sale, or Freecycle.com which is a national organization on the Internet. I loved her suggestion that old furs be donated to groups like PETA who can use them for educational purposes.

The author also goes beyond getting rid of things and brings meaning to the saying that Less is More, she also tackles the prevention issue so that the reader doesn't get back into the mess they just got out of. The author does all this without making the reader feel like a loser or stupid for becoming a pack rat, hoarder, or procrastinator.

Scaling Down : Living Large in a Smaller Space
Wow a most excellent and helpful book. As you read it the authors seem to be in the same room with you speaking about their own and others experiences on how to eliminate much of lifes unnecesary accumulations. Their suggestions and hints are choice. Whether you are making a big move, buying a new home, moving into an apartment/condo, or just going through everything once your children have left home and are on their own, this book is for you. I highly recomend it. Thank you authors.