How to Get Rid of Stuff

As I surveyed our garage and home last Tuesday evening, I felt a happy peacefulness. We had re-homed 9 big boxes of belongings that day, in addition to the 1 Bin + 2 Boxes of recycling and 1 Bin plus 1 Box of refuse that was hauled away from our curb through our regular garbage pick up. I'm telling you, our space instantly felt a lot more spacious.

Even though we had been living with piles of boxes in our garage and lower level for almost a year now, in retrospect I'm glad we left those boxes alone for so long. We'd unpacked all the things we need and use regularly, so it was much easier to bid farewell to things we had not even seen in 12 months. I mean, if we haven't needed that toaster oven in the last year, are we ever going to need it? Or that coat that is now two sizes too big?

I also took a jumbo tub of new and like-new house essentials to World Relief, and 4 bags of books and CDs to the local library for their annual Book Sale in addition to these things that the Epilepsy Foundation picked up outside our garage. 

There are really two questions to ask yourself when you ponder whether you should get rid of something:

1. Am I using this?

2. Is it beautiful?

This simple litmus test is based on this quote from William Morris:

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

William Morris, according to Wikipedia, was a textile designer during the Arts and Crafts movement. I think these are pretty wise words, and I tried to employ them unsentimentally during our Great Stuff Removal of 2014.

Here's the thing. I'm sentimental. I like cute do-dads. I have had about 15 different apartments in my adult life. Les and I got married, and we both liked "our own" things. We had, and still have, a lot of stuff that we sort of like and sometimes use. But we've also gotten a lot better about scrapping things that no longer fit our present life. They may have been PERFECT in our living room 7 apartments ago, but they aren't part of our life today.

Here are some tips that I've found helpful when trying to clear out the clutter:

1. Designate a couple of boxes for "Maybes".   Maybe I'll wear this again. Maybe I'll decide to make creme brulee once a week in October and I'll need that pastry torch. Give your stuff a chance to prove itself. Put it in a box that's clearly labeled with the contents and tuck it into a corner of your garage or storage closet. MARK IT WITH THE DATE. If you haven't needed or wanted something in the box in, say, 6 months or a year, donate whatever is still in the box.

2. Use Boxes or Plastic Tubs as Visual Goal Posts. Decide "I will fill up this rubbermaid tub with like-new items to donate to the local refugee resettlement agency" or, conversely, "I will only keep as many photos of my chihuahua as I can fit in this shoe box". This was a tip I got from a friend who had had to clean out her parents' home after they died. She found herself wanting to keep everything, and knew that she would never need or look at most of the stuff again. So she told herself that she could only keep what she could fit inside 2 big plastic tubs, and promised herself that the lids had to close on both.

3. It's OK to Throw Away. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd all recycle everything or find a responsible charitable organization to reuse our old bed sheets for the Common Good. But let's face it: some of your stuff belongs at the curb. Don't donate junky stuff. And don't hold on to huge boxes of things because you don't know how to recycle all those CD jewel cases. Post your loot on Freecycle and see if anyone WANTS your old sneakers or chemistry textbooks from 1992. You never know! But if you don't get any takers, it's OK to throw things away. Let the pain of overflowing garbage bins be a challenge to you to be more judicious about what you bring into your home in the first place!

4. Get Inspired. Check out the Becoming Minimalist blog, read the book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, or other simple living inspiration to rev up your motivation to simplify, simplify.

5. Give Yourself a Break. Our home is always going to have roughly 4,000 books. I'll always have an overflowing stash of DIY supplies. We'll probably have actual DVDs in actual cases on actual shelves at least until Netflix starts streaming our favorites. We have bins of holiday decor in our garage. Auggie's little toy basket is ridiculously stuffed. That's OK. Those things are, in a lot of ways, part of who we are as individuals and as a family. It's unlikely we'll ever have a streamlined, mismatched-mug-free minimalist home, and we're OK with that. The idea is to put a stop to the accumulation of unnecessary things, and things that don't add any joy or beauty to our home, and to clear out everything that weighs us down.