When she was married with kids and lived in a 4,800-square-foot home, Rhoda Atkins kept a framed wooden sign on the wall: “Simplify” — an ironic reminder in a massive house filled with possessions accumulated over more than a decade.
A Colorado Sun series. Read more.Colorado is getting older, rapidly. Are we prepared? We’re taking a look at how these shifting demographics are affecting housing, the workforce and quality of life, and whether Colorado has the services needed for people to age in place.
Follow alongThen the marriage dissolved, her kids grew into adulthood and the 58-year-old hair stylist found herself downsizing to a condo. After another move to Thornton, her quest for simplicity remained incomplete, stymied by the memories contained in the chest, boxes and bins taking up space in her garage.
And while Atkins may be a few birthdays shy of the baby boomers primarily fueling Colorado’s rapid demographic march to their 60s and beyond, she’s close enough to share one common challenge.
What do I do with so much stuff?
As Coloradans age — and the numbers show the state tied for third in terms of fastest growth of the over-60 population — many find their accumulation of possessions reaching, and often exceeding, the saturation point. That can present a problem for older residents needing to recalibrate to a more workable housing option, or for their adult children, who find themselves faced with the daunting task of decluttering the lives of their parents.
Rising to meet the challenge is a growing service industry of organizers, declutterers and downsizers.
The National Association of Senior & Specialty Move Managers, a trade group that launched in 2002 with 40 companies as members, counts about 1,200 members these days, in what Mary Kay Buysse, the organization’s Chicago-based co-executive director, estimates to be a more than $100 million industry. NASSMM currently lists 11 members in Colorado, five of which have launched since 2020.
These specialists, often for an hourly fee, help clients wrestle with their indecision and, even after they’ve resolved to let go of their stuff, distinguish the throwaways from the giveaways from the eBays.
That’s the dilemma Atkins is tackling with the help of Pam Holland, owner of Mindful Decluttering & Organizing in Westminster. Holland speaks with a gentle drawl that thoughtfully guides people while they sift through loads of everyday items, along with poignant, sometimes painful mileposts of personal history.
It’s a sentimental journey, one she navigates by harmonizing patience with practicality.
“So my biggest question today is, ‘Does this serve me?’” Atkins says. “And if it doesn’t serve me, it’s time to get rid of it.”
Holland listens intently as Atkins turns the pages of an old scrapbook. There are photos of former classmates. Wisps of childhood hair. A dime, taped to the page — and with it, like all the other artifacts, a story.
Atkins finds an album filled with mementos and photos from her school years. She decides to keep the book for now. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)In the sixth grade, one of Atkins’ girlfriends had a brother who was a few years older.
“And her older brother said to me one time, ‘When you turn 18, call me,’ and he gave me this dime,” she recounts, recalling the days when pay phones were a thing. “So clearly, he was enamored with me, but I was 12 or 13, and he was probably 17 or 18 at the time.”
Though flattered, she never called — but kept the dime, a sweet slice of her past. It shares the pages with other mementos of the sixth grade: a straw, a four-leaf clover, blades of grass, a wrapper from a piece of Starburst candy. All meaningful, all triggering childhood tales.
But is everything a treasure, she wonders. If everything’s a treasure, then nothing’s a treasure, Holland reminds her. How can she make a decision about her scrapbook and move on?
“Well,” Holland says, “how does it make you feel?”
Atkins smiles. It’s a keeper.
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One word: Relief
There are only a few things keeping Carolyn Colvin, a septuagenarian in Colorado Springs, from her new hillside senior living home. Among them: her shampoos, some plastic drinkware, a round breakfast table, her desk, a painting of a bird and a box labeled “yearbooks?”
Over the past nine months, Colvin has boxed thousands of photos, by her estimation, that once covered every inch of her walls, documenting nearly 30 years in the home where she raised two kids, two stepkids and 10 grandchildren.
Now her kids and grandkids are scattered around the country, her husband died 10 years ago, and, at this moment, she’s two short days away from moving into the new place.
“I can think of one word,” Colvin says. “Relief.”
Colvin boxed up most of her home with the help of her son and his kids. At first it was “overwhelming, exhausting, frustrating,” she says.
“What’s consignment? What’s Goodwill? What’s trash?” she asks, picking items up and setting them back down on her desk.
With just over a week until the move, she enlisted the help of Jennifer Brink, senior move manager for Things Forgotten Not Gone, a downsizing service offered by Goodwill.
“I don’t know what I would have done without her,” Colvin says. “She works so hard that she works up a sweat.”
In the kitchen Brink is, in fact, working up a sweat. She has swung every cupboard door open and is systematically wrapping every plate, bowl and cup in a piece of brown craft paper. She moves swiftly and mechanically, making easy conversation while she fills a box, occasionally pausing to sip from a 1-gallon water bottle.
To become a certified senior mover, Brink took four core classes through the NASSMM website, and proved that she’d facilitated 100 successful moves. To maintain her certification, she attends an annual conference packed with sessions on how to make photobooks out of old film negatives, special downsizing techniques and marketing strategies.
“There was one session about how to move really high-end clients taught by people out in California, so they went to all the famous people’s houses,” Brink says. “I don’t think I want to do that. They’re moving like basketball championship trophies. I don’t want to be responsible for that. I ran into my couch the other day and it’s been there for 10 years.”
(Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)I don’t know what I would have done without her. She works so hard that she works up a sweat.
— Carolyn Colvin, On Senior move manager with Goodwill of Colorado Jennifer Brink (pictured)
The association has seen the recent impact as the oldest baby boomers, born in 1946, bump up against 80 and others deal with changing housing needs in their 70s.
“So we’re just really kind of hitting critical mass on all of this right now,” Buysse says.
She notes that the NASSMM began as a grassroots movement in the early 2000s to help mostly older adults declutter their living spaces. Often, that can go hand in hand with a change in living environment — moving to an independent senior community, specialized care or an adult child’s home. It could even involve older siblings moving in together later in life as a cost-saving strategy.
“The common thread,” Buysse adds, “is that they are downsizing.”
Another industry trade group in Colorado is the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals, which currently lists 62 members in the state, according to Jalene Bowersmith, NAPO’s Minneapolis-based executive director.
One of those is Nancy Devlin, who left behind a career in electronics sales in 2009 and put her organizing skills to work with Efficient Living in Houston. She bought the company a few years later and now works out of Highlands Ranch. She notes that people who get to the point of calling a professional organizer have cleared a very big hurdle, just to pick up the phone.
“As far as emotionally, they really just kind of get to a breaking point,” Devlin says. “Clutter causes major anxiety, they just don’t want to live like that. They’re fed up and they’re physically tired, because clutter wears on your brain.”
That seemed true of Colvin, who likened her downsizing process to a cleanse.
“Ninety percent of that stuff I didn’t want to let go of,” Colvin says. “But once I did, wow.”
She sighed. “It just feels fabulous.”
Origins of stuff
Chip Colwell reaches behind him and lifts a baseball from its perch on his office shelf. It’s an unremarkable artifact, signed not by some Major League legend but by a team of youth league players his father coached in 1979.
That the ball wound up in Colwell’s Denver home speaks to both his father’s enduring attachment to a sliver of family history and Colwell’s academic — and real-life — understanding of the long view behind why we accumulate so many belongings. His empathy is born of having witnessed his parents downsize from his 2,500-square-foot childhood home to a smaller house, then an apartment and now an even smaller studio space at his sister’s house in Seattle.
“My parents, bless them, did their best to relieve the children of the burden of thinning out their stuff,” he says, turning his dad’s treasured baseball in his hand. “This has no relevance to me, but to him, it was this precious object that he just couldn’t quite bring himself to let go. And so he asked me if I wanted it. And I wanted to relieve him of the burden, so I accepted it. So now it’s on my shelf. I’ll figure out what to do with it when I’m ready to downsize.”
Colwell has an unusually expansive knowledge of people’s relationship to their belongings. The archeologist and former curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science won the 2024 Colorado Book Award for “So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything.” It’s a scholarly work sparked by an offhand conversation with his sister who, channeling her own struggle to live more simply, wondered why we have such a relentless tendency toward accumulating possessions.
Colwell’s research took him all over the world — from Ethiopia to Italy to Hong Kong to right up the road to Boulder, where a landscaper had stumbled upon a cache of 83 stone tools estimated to have been buried for 13,000 years. Turns out people hoarded their stuff even at the end of the last Ice Age.
Colwell, now the editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, a digital magazine about anthropological thinking and discoveries, identifies three “giant leaps” in our relationship with stuff. The first came about 3 million years ago, when our ancestors discovered they could make tools from the natural world. Then, maybe 50,000 years ago, they ascribed meaning to objects. Paint became art, for instance.
The last 500 years of global capitalism fueled what Colwell calls “an ideology of abundance.” The boomer generation, in particular, found itself squarely in its crosshairs, bombarded with the message that the more stuff you have, the better life you’ll live. And with that came the concept of planned obsolescence, reinforcing the notion that we should buy something new — over and over again. And then along came that shockingly accurate advice given in film to “The Graduate” Benjamin Braddock. “One word… plastics.”
“All of that, really, combined to push consumers to buy more and more,” Colwell says. “The boomer generation, that was the generation that was the target for this initial push for modern consumerism.”
When Colwell breaks down the psychology of accumulating possessions, he comes back to this assignment of value to objects, whether it’s an ancient stone tool for preparing primitive food or a child’s kindergarten artwork that’s just too precious to part with. And here’s the thing: That sense of value often tends to increase with age.
“It’s that accrual of value that happens to all of us as we get older in life, and it gets harder and harder to get rid of stuff,” he explains. “At the same time, if you’re transitioning to smaller homes, the opposite is required of you, and you may need to get rid of more.”
Colwell points out that humans’ propensity for accumulating stuff means much of it already is entombed in landfills, “and so our age of consumerism and plastics has become, literally, a geologic period.” Instead of crude stone implements, future archaeologists might discover comic book collections, books and signed baseballs — emblems of an age of extraordinary consumption.
“And I think they’re going to be frankly baffled by it,” he says. “Because we’re in this age of consumerism at the precise moment of being on the precipice of environmental catastrophe. That’s the main paradox they’ll be able to puzzle over. And I’m sure there’ll be some fantastic dissertations.”
Since Colwell published his book in 2023, readers have engaged him with thoughts on the value of the things they find it hard to discard. He sees a deeper, evolutionary history of how we create attachment to the things in our lives.
In other words, while we may perceive and project the value of certain objects, often that calculus is driven by identity and kinship. Something handed down from previous generations must have value. Professional organizers and move managers see the generational shift, particularly between baby boomers and subsequent generations, who may take a less enthusiastic view of their predecessors’ stuff.
“There is a kind of quiet tragedy when families realize that the values of these things mostly are values to them,” Colwell says, “and not values to the outside world.”
LEFT: Items to be sorted in the Colorado Springs garage of Carolyn Colvin. RIGHT: Home organizer Pam Holland, right, helps Thornton homeowner Rhoda Atkins sort through her stuff. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Who wants my stuff?
Some things that may have been cornerstones of a boomer household have difficulty finding a second life. Buysse of NASSMM notes that nobody wants pianos, unless they’re a high-end brand like Steinway or Baldwin. Mainstays of the ’90s like those giant armoire-like entertainment centers that could hold your hulking picture-tube TV? Nobody wants them, either.
Basically, any big, heavy, brown furniture is out. “It’s the kiss of death right now,” she says, noting that even some charities that help transition refugees look for just the basics: table and chairs, dresser, bed and sofa. Maybe an end table. No china cabinets or lighted displays for crystal. It’s just noise.
“Our kids don’t want our stuff,” Buysse adds, placing herself in the aging boomer generation. “They want to be more nimble. But here’s the funny thing. They may aspire to have less stuff, but because they are native Amazon people, IKEA people, Target people, they’re actually not going to have less stuff. It’s going to be different stuff, but believe me, they’re consuming at a significant rate as well.”
Trish Rice, owner of All About Ease Organizing in Golden, started her business 18 years ago in Chicago before moving to Denver eight years ago and rebuilding from scratch. Since then, she says, she has probably worked with more seniors than any other group — around 60% to 70% of her business is older Coloradans looking to downsize.
Older clients, she adds, tend to move through the process at a slower pace. Something she terms “decision fatigue” can become a factor.
“My method when working with seniors I describe as a gentler, Zen style of organizing,” Rice says, “because it’s not so much that we have to get through this entire room today. I enjoy hearing their stories about the items, but I also tell them that I will keep you on track.”
While deciding what to keep and what to jettison represents a big part of the equation, another crucial element — both practically and emotionally — involves what to do with the discarded items. To that end, Rice, like many organizers, has compiled a list of landing spots for donated goods.
They could be as commonplace as a Goodwill, Salvation Army or ARC stores or something local like, for Rice, the Golden Pantry and Thrift. Holland often suggests A Precious Child in Broomfield. It’s part of an overall strategy to view a downsize or declutter in a more positive light and make the separation not so much about personal loss as yet-to-be-realized joy for others.
“It’s kind of amazing when they find something that speaks to them, then they’re more able to let go of more things,” Rice says, “because it’s going to help somebody not just go fill a landfill.”
There’s another option some choose: self-storage units. Colorado is estimated to have more than 36 million square feet of self storage, further testimony to our rapid accumulation of stuff. But in terms of decluttering and downsizing, Holland calls storage units a slippery slope — both in terms of costs that may rise gradually over time and in simply putting off tough decisions.
“But sometimes it just feels like the best option,” she allows. “If (a client) can keep it to being temporary, then in that case, I’ll just need to go out to the storage unit with them usually, and help them sort through stuff out there.”
Every so often, the decluttering process unearths an artifact that warrants a special, if unconventional, disposition. Once, Devlin, of Efficient Living, was helping a man who had experienced a particularly nasty divorce. He had held on to a trove of vitriolic letters from his now ex-wife, initially thinking he might need them for legal purposes.
They’d disappeared amid his disorganization, though he knew they were buried somewhere in his mess of belongings. Devlin eventually came upon them. They were as unpleasant as he had recalled.
“We had a little burning ceremony,” Devlin says. “He did not even want to throw them away. We burned them — we took them outside into his outdoor fireplace. And that’s not really an extreme case. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and so I know a lot of organizers, and I’m not the only one that has a story where we burned stuff. It’s like getting rid of the bad karma once and for all.”
Saying goodbye to stuff
It’s the good karma that’s tough to let go.
A large framed print of a handsome man in a suit, with penetrating eyes peering out from beneath a stylish hat, sits propped up in Rhoda Atkins’ garage, awaiting its fate. The man is Harry Myers, an early 20th century Hollywood actor and producer with absolutely no connection to Atkins, other than she obtained the print from one of her hairstyling clients.
“There was something about this picture that spoke to me,” Atkins says.
Atkins has framed artwork of Harry Myers, which used to hang on a wall in her garage. During her divorce, the art gave her strength and served as what Atkins describes “as sort-of a guardian angel.” She has decided to sell or donate it, saying, “I don’t need it anymore.” (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)About eight years ago, when she was struggling with her divorce, she hung the picture on the left side wall of her garage. Whenever she pulled her car in, she would talk to Harry. She describes it almost as a ritual.
“Harry was this person who got me through a really hard time,” Atkins says, “so that’s why I’m having a hard time getting rid of Harry. I’ve hauled him around twice, moving to two different places.”
“He does have some eyes,” Holland says admiringly.
Atkins wonders if the picture might actually have some value, and Holland, noting some minor damage, agrees to do a little research on the matter.
“But the question is, do you want to sell it?” she adds.
Atkins pauses.
“I would say Harry served my purpose,” she finally says. “This picture served a purpose. Am I in that same spot emotionally? No. I now have an actual human being in my life, so I no longer need to go to Harry.
“So … yes!”
The dilemma resolved, she continues sifting through pieces of her past — dolls, hats, a stuffed bear made with material from her grandpa’s suit — almost visibly lightened by the decision.
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