Where Am I Supposed to Put All This Stuff?!Even though the average size of an American home has tripled in the last 50 years, this is the question so many Americans find themselves asking. We feel trapped by all this stuff! And why wouldn't we when¿¿ Rented storage is the fastest growing segment of commercial real estate and 1 in 10 Americans rent an offsite storage space.¿ 3.1% of the world's kids live in the US, but they own 40% of the toys.¿ Shopping malls outnumber high schools.¿ The typical American family spends $1,700 on clothes every year, but the average American throws away 65 pounds of clothing in the same time frame.¿ The home organization industry is worth $8 billion, a number that has more than doubled in just twenty years.We all need less stuff! But how do you do it without losing your mind?That's where humorist and author Chris R. Weilert comes in. He'll take you on a tour of all your stuff: what it is, how you got it, why it needs to go, and how you can get rid of it without making the Earth's problems any worse. With both humor and heart, Weilert will have you chuckling at the cute collection of porcelain children you were convinced you couldn't live without even as you box it up to get it out of your house.What are you waiting for? Now is your chance to lose all this stuff...without losing your sanity

Getting a home ready for the market is a daunting task. Factor in packing, hiring local contractors and movers, organizing a plan to ensure all the right pieces fall into place can be extremely overwhelming, and yes expensive! Working with aging loved ones can add to the stress of it all. This book is here to help you: - Help a loved one who is not quite ready to move - Determine where & how to start - Determine what to sell, keep, donate or trash - Save money, make money and not lose money - Create your own custom step-by-step plan for a smooth move This book will be your guide as you move through the daunting task of downsizing your home, while keeping your memories, so that you and your loved ones can start the next chapter of your lives with love, joy and peace.

Less CAN be more! Today, people are downsizing their space . . . while remaining upscale in taste. Using examples ranging from 600-square-foot apartments to a small cottage-style house, as well as inspirational real-life stories from downsizers, home-style guru Leslie Linsley shows readers how to achieve maximum aesthetic results. She offers solutions to every problem--storage tricks, entertaining in small spaces, flexible layouts, and more--all lavishly illustrated with over 200 full-color photographs.

As life unfolds, things tend to accumulate. When older adults undergo health, residential, and marital changes, they will face a reckoning with their lifelong store of possessions—special, ordinary, and forgotten. Such a predicament now confronts tens of millions of Americans as the Baby Boom cohort passes into retirement and beyond. Despite what a thriving industry of clutter manuals tells us, for most older adults, downsizing is no simple task. Drawing on in-depth interviews with recent movers in over a hundred diverse U.S. households, David Ekerdt analyzes the downsizing process and what it says about the meaning and management of possessions. He details how households approach and accomplish downsizing, exploring the decision-making process and the effectiveness of different strategies. From an expert gerontological perspective, he considers the cognitive, physical, emotional, and social tasks that the process entails and the role of factors such as gender and class on the divestment of things. Ekerdt finds that despite the fatigue and emotional challenges people encounter, afterward they report satisfaction in having completed a downsizing and feel empowerment on the other side of the task. Offering an empathetic and practical look at one of life’s major transitions, Downsizing brings forward the voices of elders so that older adults, their families and friends, and practitioners working with older clients can understand and benefit from their experience.

In this trenchant analysis of American society, Thomas Naylor and William Willimon take an unabashed stance against the belief that "bigger is better" and contend that there is a price to be paid for our uncritical affirmation of bigness.