Empty Your Nest

Does your house feel bloated, overloaded, full of creaks and cracks, clogged with items? Burp.

The new year has arrived.

“Put your house on a diet,” suggests Alexandra Stoddard, a New York designer and author on how to live better. “It’s great to do sort of a spring cleaning in January. It doesn’t cost anything, and after the excess of the holidays and eating and drinking too much, it feels good.”

Gather all those bulging shopping bags, stuffed magazine racks and overflowing drawers. Clear all surfaces. Sort. Then scrub dusty baseboards and webby corners of the room before you put anything back. The idea is to spruce up your house; don’t buy more, fix up what you have and give some away.

Designer Mario Buatta is not known for his pared-down interiors. “I had one client who had 48 items on one tabletop in 1969. I counted it up again this year. She’s up to 79 items.”

Buatta can’t stop her. But stuck inside his New York apartment with a bad cold on a recent weekend, Buatta admits he took away a few things and hung some pictures that had been sitting on the floor for quite some time. “It made me feel better right away.”

Shopping has become a mainstay of American culture. About 82% of us agree that most of us buy and consume far more than we need. And we think it’s wasteful, according to a 1995 survey done by the Harwood Group research firm.

Retailers coming off the Christmas shopping season have gladly emptied store shelves into our living rooms. Now, we must find places for all of the stuff that is still sitting around in gift boxes and crumpled tissue.

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But there is hope. Improvements in the quality of everyday life often can be made by investing time, not money. Consider creating more comfortable and more functional surroundings without adding more stuff. The advice of experts: Rearrange what you have. Donate items to charity. Be more Zen. Let go. Start planning an April yard sale. Think minimalist.

Heloise, the syndicated columnist, says home detox starts in the kitchen. “How many plastic margarine tubs do you really need? How many mayonnaise jars? There are always more on the way.” She suggests working your way through the spice cabinet, the cabinet under the sink and then moving on to the medicine chest, tossing expired, outdated and empty jars, bottles and prescriptions as you go.

Stoddard, author of “Living a Beautiful Life” (Random House, 1986), also targets the kitchen. “I’ve never seen such junk piled in kitchens. Counters get completely covered with waffle irons, toaster ovens and coffee grinders.” She points out that even with all these time-savers, fewer people are sitting down to home-cooked meals.

Stoddard’s de-cluttering regimen in her Manhattan apartment is to take every single thing off her butcher-block counters, scrub the counter tops and then put back only the appliances and gadgets actually used daily.

In her latest book, “Gracious Living in a New World (William Morrow, 1996), she poses the question, “How much or how little do we need to be happy?”

This question could be asked when confronting a crammed garage, a bulging linen closet or an overflowing tool shed. Does your house have bad feng shui? Translation: Are there leaky faucets, shaky headboards, running toilets and creaky floors?

Nancy SantoPietro, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based psychotherapist and feng shui practitioner, has just published “Feng Shui: Harmony by Design” (Perigee Books). De-cluttering a home is one of the major parts of her practice of feng shui, which seeks to direct fate in a positive direction.

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The interest in feng shui has brought attention to many of the “cures” used to correct negative influences: Mirrors, wind chimes and hanging crystals, for example, are all believed to assert a positive force. Much of feng shui is common sense. If the sound of a clanging cabinet door bothers you every day, oil it. If you constantly catch your clothes on a jagged counter edge, sand it down.

Get rid of the small stuff so you have more energy to concentrate on life’s major issues.

Doorways play a crucial role in feng shui philosophy. “Make sure the entranceways into the house and into the separate rooms are clear and that they open as fully as they can,” SantoPietro says. “Make sure the doors don’t stick, that hinges don’t squeak.”

A proper floor plan for each room is often overlooked by residents. It’s frequently their guests who notice something missing. Jo Coveny, a Washington decorator, says she often encounters perfectly attractive homes that just don’t function. They don’t need more furniture, they just need realignment. “Traffic patterns are blocked, conversation groups aren’t good.”

She recommends studying the situation from the point of view of entertaining. Is there a place to comfortably sit down and have a conversation without shouting? Is there a coffee table or an end table beside each chair or sofa? Can you watch television without getting a stiff neck?

SantoPietro fears that the rage for warehouse shopping in super-stores is stressing out the storage capabilities of even the largest suburban home. Dozens of rolls of paper towels. Thousands of paper napkins. Quarts of hair conditioner. Gallons of mustard. Fifty-pound bags of dog food.

“It’s a wonderful business approach,” she says. “They found the vulnerability of Americans and are cashing in on it.”