The Empty Room Has Value Too

People apologize to me for their houses all the time.

I’ll walk into a friend’s house or a new client’s apartment and they’ll immediately start explaining the clutter. The boxes. The room that somehow became storage. Things they haven’t used in years but haven’t been able to get rid of. Occasionally someone will lower their voice and tell me they think they might be a hoarder.

I’m usually thinking: You should see my house.

Seriously. None of you are even close.

I don’t judge them for it. I understand how it happens, probably because I’m so good at it myself.

I was raised by people who could find a second use for anything. My parents, aunts and uncles all started out doing agricultural work in Hawaii: pineapple factories, sugar cane fields, things like that. They worked incredibly hard and gave the next generation opportunities they didn’t have themselves.

I’m enormously grateful for that. I also apparently inherited every bit of their parsimony.

A jar was never just a jar. It could be used for something else. A guest room could also be storage, an office, and now, a fairly committed foster system for other people’s furniture.

Being an interior designer probably hasn’t helped. I like things that work, materials that age well, furniture that was made properly in the first place. I love things made well enough that you can imagine somebody still using them fifty years from now.

Unfortunately, I’m also really good at keeping them.

I’m getting ready to do construction on my own house, which means a lot of stuff has to go. I’ve been making myself do thirty minutes a day.

Sell this. Donate that. Why do I own this? Why do I own three of these?

And then I get to the harder things.

But this is good.

I paid a lot for this.

And my favorite:

I could sell this.

Which is true. I could photograph it, measure it, list it, answer twelve Facebook Marketplace messages asking whether something listed for $200 is available for $40, arrange for somebody to pick it up, have them not show up, and then still have the thing.

Or I could give it away.

This is surprisingly hard for me, which is ridiculous because I love giving money to charities. Apparently giving away a chair in a pile of stuff is harder.

The other day I was looking at a room full of things I was trying to extract some last bit of value from and thought:

The empty room has value too.

And if I paid too much for something fifteen years ago, keeping it for another fifteen years doesn’t make it a better purchase. It just means I still have it.

Which brings me back to all those people who apologize to me for their homes.

I wish they knew I wasn’t thinking they’d made stupid decisions or wondering why they hadn’t gotten rid of everything years ago. As a designer, I really just want to know what they still love and what they want their home to be now.

I’m trying to ask myself the same thing.

And I’m starting to realize the answer isn’t necessarily an empty room. It’s a room filled with things I actually love, rather than things I’m afraid to let go of.

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