It’s quite
a scary concept when you first think of it: get rid of your stuff. You think
“but I like my stuff, that guitar is a beautiful ornament”, or “but I might
wear that shirt someday”. The anxiety
starts to build and your mind races…
Let me back
up a little bit, almost a year actually. One December 27th, 2013, my
husband and I decided to go on a vegan/raw food diet, which means to not only
cut out animals and animal products but to also cut out all processed foods. We
did it for health mostly, we both wanted to lose weight for our impending
wedding. It took some learning and some willpower, but we pulled through.
Looking back, something that was really hard for me was throwing out all the
bad food in our kitchen. I had the mentality of just eating it up to get rid of
it (my mother’s voice ringing in my head about wasting food), but my husband
had more willpower than me and just threw it out when I wasn’t home. This was
the first taste of minimalism I have ever had.
Coming back
to the current state of affairs, we have now run into a wall that we must
scale. I have graduated from college and I still hold the same part time job
that I had while attending school, my student loans are coming due, and we need
to downgrade our living quarters. We currently live in a 3-bedroom townhouse
packed to the brim with stuff, including the basement. Both my husband and I
are self-described pack rats so naturally we love our stuff. We decided out of
necessity that we needed to start culling our herd of unused items, starting
with musical instruments that we do not play. My $1200 guitar stares at me
everyday wondering why I never learned to play it, causing me a constant low
level of stress; the same goes for my husbands’ 2 guitars and keyboard. I put
the items on a local web classified site, and his stuff sold like hotcakes and
gave me the motivation I needed to put more things for sale. To date, I have
sold over a half dozen items and we have made a few hundred dollars from our
unused stuff. Having the money in the bank feels much better than unused stuff
stressing us out and cluttering our lives.
Our
ultimate goal is to get down to 1 bedroom, plus a few living room furniture
items. A list of the furniture we will have when we are done: 1 desk and chair,
2 tables for the kitchen (1 regular one with chairs and 1 long thin one for
more counter space and to place our TV on), 1 leather loveseat (wedding gift),
a papasan chair, and our mattress. In the future I would love to have a high
quality dresser for the both of us, we have promised ourselves to never buy
anything unless it is of high quality and we would use it all the time.
I am still
witling down my massive clothing and shoe collection. I have donated or given
away approx. 2.5 garbage bags of clothes and 10 or more pairs of shoes, and I
am not done. I want to end up with 4 pairs of high heels (nude, black, red, and
metallic), 1 pair of flats, 1 pair of sneakers, 2 pairs of boots (fashion and
winter) and 1 pair of sandals or flip-flops. This is a huge accomplishment for
me, seeing as I own more footwear than is ever necessary. I would like to get
my clothing down to half a closet and half a dresser (husband gets the other
halves), this again is a huge feat seeing as I started with a full 6-drawer
dresser and 2 (yes 2) closets jam-packed full of clothes, this doesn’t include
my night stand with my undergarments.
As you can
see, I had/have my work cut out for me. I find it’s easiest to do this in
stages, especially where I have about 1.5 months to perform this magic trick. I
look forward to a clutter-free life. Wish me luck!
