A few weeks ago, my husband was asleep in his spot on the couch. One of our grandkids had curled up right next to him, and they were both snoring a little.
I grabbed my phone and took a picture. It was so sweet, I wanted to keep it forever.
That night, I sat down to look at it again. I made the picture bigger so I could see their faces.
And then I saw everything behind them.
There was a stack of mail on the end table, two pairs of my reading glasses, and a basket of old magazines. A lamp cord was tangled up with a phone charger, and a bag from the drugstore sat on the floor.
I walk past that corner every single day. I sit in that room every night.
But I had not really seen it in years.
Some people call this clutter blindness. It means you get so used to the things in your home that you stop noticing them. They just fade into the background.
If you’ve lived in your house a long time, you probably have a few corners like mine. That’s not a bad thing about you. It happens to almost all of us, and it’s easy to fix once you know it’s there.
Here’s what I learned about it, and how I started to see my own house again.
What Clutter Blindness Really Means
When something sits in the same spot day after day, your eyes stop paying attention to it. It’s still there, but you look right past it.
Think about a picture that has hung on your wall for twenty years. You probably don’t even notice it anymore, unless someone asks about it.
Clutter works the same way.
A pile of papers lands on the counter. The first day, you see it and think, “I’ll deal with that later.”
After a week, you only notice it now and then. After a month, it just looks like part of the counter. (I’m sure some of my piles have been there longer than I’d like to admit.)
This is why clutter blindness happens so much in homes we’ve lived in for a long time. My husband and I have been in this house for more than 30 years.
Most of our furniture hasn’t moved in decades. The same baskets sit in the same corners, and the same little piles grow in the same spots.
When everything stays the same, it all