It's a start...

Our new goal to minimize started out strong with sorting through our Christmas closet. I was able to reduce our stuff by two full totes, which I considered pretty good. I wanted to do the Christmas first because much of if will make money at a resell shop if I can get it there quickly.

One challenge I did  notice right away is the tendency to get distracted--such as while cooking, I found excess spoons. I had to remind myself not to stop and deal with them as we are taking it one room at a time.

I can also foresee a big temptation--post Christmas sales. That's when I buy extra cute ornaments and fun items. I'm nixing that practice this year.

Here's what we reduced from our Christmas stash:

50 ornaments
1 craft kit
8 decorative items
14 tea cups (I collected items for a tea time tree, which I never put up)
1 tea pot
6 saucers
11 Children's Thanksgiving books
9 misc. items

Total Stuff Reduction :  100

Total to date:  100

Learning minimalism

Although it is late November, I have settled firmly on my New Year's resolution, and my husband is enthusiastically onboard.  It was prompted, as these things sometimes are, by reading a story. This story in Christianity Today on the practical and spiritual value in decreasing clutter. 

Quite on my own, in October, I voluntarily decluttered by stash of fall/Halloween decor items (with an October birthday, I receive a lot of fall-themed items).  As much as I enjoyed these gifts, I was bursting out of storage totes and needed decluttering. My goal was to reduce the Halloween and Thanksgiving items to one (very) large tote each.  This paid off to the tune of thirty-some-odd dollars from my neighbor's home resale shop. The items I couldn't sell were donated.

Then this morning I read that story. And it opened my eyes to the sheer mass of stuff that we have in our home.  So. much. stuff.  And the truth is every season we donate stuff; yet we never seem to run out of stuff (we do, however, run out of storage space). 

After I read this story I was convicted to strive for a much more minimalist life--not extreme minimalism, but a lot less than we currently have.  

I made a list of some starting points:

• Give away or sell 1,000 items next year--that's about 83 a month.
• Stop buying books (this is the hardest one of all for me) For 2015 I will only borrow books from the library or friends.
• Stop buying craft supplies.
• Stop buying holiday decor items.
• Stop shopping as a leisure activity, to fill time, or relieve boredom.

That was my starting list. I put it aside and went on to the major event of our day: My family's Thanksgiving celebration. The meal was planned, but the second aspect of our family gathering was for my siblings and I help our elderly parents decorate their small home for Christmas.

I had no idea that my morning contemplation on clutter would be emphasized so clearly in sorting through my parents' stuff. Tote after tote pulled out of a storage closet that was overflowing with so much stuff that much of it was forgotten. If anything illustrated the effect of a lifetime of clutter this was it. 

I came home with a renewed determination to free our home, and lives, of excess stuff.  I discussed the idea with my husband and he surprised me by saying he had read a story on minimalism a few years ago, but didn't think I'd ever agree with it. 

So this is our starting point. We are not going for complete minimalism. We are in the midst of renovating our basement family room and plan to buy furniture, lighting and decor items. But we are going for less, a lot less. As in bookshelves where I can actually see the shelves. And a Saturday that doesn't require me organizing and finding more storage space in our home. The good news is that even though we have a lot of extra items, they are organized. It is true that I have several hundred markers, crayons and colored pencils, but at least they are neatly stored in their own containers. I have that going for me, but decluttering needs to happen all the same.  

As far as our goal, my husband says if we count each book as one item, we'll be able to give away a whole lot more than 1000 items.  So we've set a tentative goal of 1000 items to start with, and then 85 items a month for the following year. That would get us to 2,000 items. 

Here we go....