Toss Out The Fat The New Year Is A Perfect Excuse To Put Your House On A Diet

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,” says Alexandra Stoddard, a New York designer who has published 17 books offering ideas 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.”

She suggests this approach: Gather all those bulging shopping bags, stuffed magazine racks and overflowing drawers in the center of each room. 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.

“The holidays are a time of excess not only for you but for your house too. This is the perfect time to reshuffle the cards,” says Washington interior designer Barry Dixon.

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.”

Shopping has become a mainstay of American culture. About 82 percent 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, a research firm.

Retailers coming off this year’s robust 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.

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

Heloise, the syndicated household-hints columnist, says home detox starts in the kitchen.

“How many plastic margarine tubs do you really need?” says Heloise. “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way through the spice cabinet, the cabinet under the sink and then moving on to the medicine chest, tossing expired, outdated and empty jars, bottles and prescriptions as you go.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, who has sold more than a million copies of her book “Living a Beautiful Life: 500 Ways to Add Elegance, Order, Beauty and Joy to Every Day of Your Life” (Random House, 178 pages, $20) over the past 10 years, also targets the kitchen as an overloaded minefield.

“I’ve never seen such junk piled in kitchens. Counters get completely covered with waffle irons, toaster ovens and coffee grinders. All of a sudden, the actual counter space is only four inches deep. Some people actually use their stoves as office space.” She points out that even with all of these pricey culinary time-savers, fewer people than ever are sitting down to home-cooked meals.

Stoddard’s decluttering solution, which she practices in her own Manhattan kitchen, is to take every single thing off her butcher-block counters, scrub the countertops and then put back only the appliances and gadgets actually used daily.

In her latest book, “Gracious Living in a New World (William Morrow & Co. Inc., 321 pages, $23) 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? To deal with all of these little home annoyances, you could study and implement the centuries-old teachings of feng shui, the ancient Oriental art of placement. Or you could spend a day playing home handyman as you finally fix all that chronic household deterioration.

Nancy SantoPietro, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based psychotherapist and feng-shui practitioner has just published “Feng Shui: Harmony by Design” (Perigee Books, 219 pages, $15). Decluttering a home is one of the major parts of her practice of feng shui, a series of beliefs that interpret the effect of natural forces and placement of objects in their physical surroundings.

The goal of feng shui is to direct fate in a positive direction. The 1990s’ interest in feng shui has brought attention to many of the “cures” that are 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. Bulletin board crammed with outdated invitations and school notices? Spend 15 minutes eliminating what’s no longer needed.

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,” says SantoPietro. “Make sure the doors don’t stick, that hinges don’t squeak.”

She mentions closets and junk drawers, places that shelter clutter that is invisible but concentrated. “You know, the drawers we stuff all the menus in. Those drawers start out innocently, and they start to grow.”

When she was a therapist, she says, she often would counsel depressed patients to clean out those drawers and make individual decisions about each item to help create a sense of control over at least this small aspect of their lives.

We don’t yet know of a handyman service that also practices feng shui.

A proper floor plan for each room is often overlooked by residents. It’s frequently their guests who notice something missing. Jo Coveny, a decorator with the Washington location of the Kellogg Collection design store, 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. Sight lines to the television are bad.”

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 buying in bulk and 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. Buy more.”