Category Archives: Minimalism

I Shoulda Gone Into Sales.

I think I’ve mentioned a time or two how much I am bothered by owning stuff. I often go through these periods where that feeling surges and I’m compelled to get rid of everything. At the same time, I have some strong pack-rat tendencies that have me saving things “just in case” and because of sentimentality.

Add to this the fact that I’m so tired (always) that I often don’t have it in me to do anything about any of the stuff. There’s a whole section of my basement devoted to things I know I’m going to sell… eventually. Then there are the bins of things to go through, combinations of stuff from our old house, keepsakes, and stuff of my mom’s. When I get to thinking about all that, I start getting overwhelmed.

Also, selling stuff is an enormous pain in the ass. Craigslist means that I’m getting emails from randos. I’m not dealing with ebay. It’s too cold for a yard sale, as that is primarily an April through October thing. Usually, my go to is to sell on the Facebook online sale pages. There are tons of them where I am, which is great, but it’s a lot to maintain listings of so many things. Don’t even get me started on all the pictures I have to take and all the listings I have to create in the first place.

I finally got my act together and listed all of my jewelry for sale. I don’t actually like wearing jewelry and I never wear it so every day that I look it, I’m bothered by it all. I sold five necklaces this past week. It was wonderful.

I took a bin full of my kid’s old clothes to a resale shop and made $35. Trying to sell each individual piece would have taken me forever. I probably could have scored more money selling everything separate, but who has that kind of time? Not me.

Then I listed a ton of toys on Facebook. I now have four shopping bags of stuff sitting by my front door waiting for buyers over the next few days. I have a few pending sales. This makes me very happy.

I still have so much more to purge, but I’m so pleased by my progress this weekend. I hope I can keep up this momentum.

This is yeah write’s nomo writing challenge Day 8.

I Got Invited to a Friend’s House!

One of the things I love most about blogging is that it affords me the opportunity to meet many other writers all over the world. One such writer is Shailaja, of Diary of a Doting Mom. I got to know Shailaja during NaBloPoMo last November. Since then, she’s become such a wonderful part of the yeah write community.

When Shailaja asked if I would write a post for a guest blogger series she was starting, I jumped at the chance. I love how supportive she is of other writers and her kindness just blows me away.

You can read my post here and then be sure to poke around her blog and read some of her work. I hope you enjoy her writing as much as I do.

It Doesn’t Always Feel Like Progress.

There’s a line from The Glass Menagerie, or part of one anyway:  Please don’t think I sit around.

It’s important for you to know that when I think of that line, I think of it being performed by The State. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s really sad because The State is awesome.

So anyway, I haven’t been writing as much, but please don’t think I’m just sitting around. Quite the opposite actually, and I have the aching hips to prove it. And knees. And ankles. And back. And shoulders. Pretty much the only thing that hasn’t been hurting lately is my hair. What’s that? You’ve seen my hair? Oh, then you know that’s been hurting, too, just in a different way.

My word for 2014 is Purge. I’ve been working on purging our house of every inessential thing. That has made me very, very busy.

I recently had a yard sale. Here are two of my massive piles of stuff:

 

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And here you see it all on display on my front lawn. And my driveway. Not pictured is the other side of my lawn and my neighbors driveway. That, my friends, is A LOT OF STUFF.

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I’m happy to report I sold about 75% of it. I mean, who can’t do without a little extra income, right? I donated a full (and I mean FULL) carload as well, so I would say about 90% of what I started with did not come back inside. 100% would have been better, but there wasn’t any room left in the car.

After lugging stuff out of the attic, down to the first floor, and more from the basement up to the first floor, then outside, then some of it back in, then out, then even-less-but-still back in, it took me 3 days to be able to walk up stairs without wanting to cry.

This weekend I have to work on my son’s room which feels like a landfill sometimes. He’s sloppy and has a lot of toys and such, which becomes a deadly combination. You can have a lot if you’re neat. You can be a little sloppier when you don’t have that much. But you can’t be both. I mean, I guess you can because he is, but I can’t deal with it in my house.

The other task for the weekend is prepping my basement for a revamping of our French drain, adding an additional 19 feet to it, and installing a new sump pump and well system. I have to move everything from the walls (more than you’d think) and make sure the workers can get where they need to be. It’s more work than I feel like doing, but it needs to be done.

Why do I tell you all this? For a few reasons:

1. This is what I’m doing instead of blogging. Obviously I’m blogging right now when I should be doing those things, but give me a break, would you?

2. This is all part of my path to a more minimalist lifestyle which I’ve decided you all need to read about.

3. It’s all I’ve been doing and I’ve neglected the blog, so…

4. (Here we are, bringing it full circle back to the title!) Sometimes it just doesn’t feel like I’m making any progress. I do and I do, and I go and I go, and the next morning I look around and there is all this doing and going that still needs to happen. But that’s life, I suppose. If you’re feeling it, too, I guess it’s good to know we’re not alone. If you’ve got a story to tell me about how you were once like me and you ran out of things to do and reasons to go, I’d love to hear it.

The purge is on, my friends, even when I’m too tired to tell you about it.

 

I’m adding my post to the moonshine grid at yeah write. You can read more posts by clicking the badge, or you can add your own!

Emptying the House.

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My living room before we filled it with stuff.

My husband told me to stop telling people I’m trying to empty our house. It’s possible I’m getting a bit obsessive, but I’ve maintained all along it’s better than the alternative.

We had some friends over recently and the topic of my selling everything we own came up. We laughed that I probably wouldn’t stop until we were sitting on the floor eating food with our hands because I’d sold all the dishes, utensils, and the dining room table.

If my mother had been capable, she’d have been a full-blown hoarder. Mentally she was just the right kind of woman for it, and despite her physical limitations, we still had piles of crap everywhere. It took me many years to learn to live a lifestyle without towers of things threatening to avalanche. I’ve been told my house looks like people don’t live in it for the lack of clutter. But if they saw my home office, they’d know I’m just one mental slip away from my very own cable television special. The tendencies are there, people.

And since I tend to operate in blacks and whites with very few shades of gray, I’ve come to a point where everything must go. I’m tired of looking at this stuff. I started taking pictures of everything I can and listing it for sale on my personal Facebook page and a few online yard sales. I’ve donated bags of things to Goodwill and, when my friends were here, I gave away two vases and a gigantic container of dried bay leaves. My friend tried to convince her husband to give me fifty dollars for an old china closet I wasn’t even trying to sell, but unfortunately that didn’t pan out.

Nathan has witnessed all of these items exiting the premise.

“What’s that pile of stuff, Mom?”

“Someone’s coming today to buy it.”

It’s a frequent conversation we have. I don’t sell anything that belongs to him without his permission and really, it’s all stuff he’s outgrown anyway. He doesn’t get upset and he’s gone so far as to ask me for the money. I thought we were cool.

At some point the other day the conversation among my friends turned to children outgrowing bicycles, what with Spring arriving and all. My friend’s son, just a bit younger than mine, was possibly too tall for his current bike and we all wondered if he was tall enough for one the size of Nathan’s. So I pulled his bike from the garage and called the other kid over to hop on for measurement’s sake.

Upon seeing this, Nathan went white and exclaimed, “What?! You’re selling my bike, too!”

Haha. Whoops.

Maybe my husband is right. Maybe I’m scarring my kid for life with my drive toward minimalism. I guess we’ll find out if he ends up with his very own episode of Hoarders some day.

 

I’m adding my post to yeah write’s weekly writing challenge. It’s open submissions this week and next,  all in celebration of the challenge’s third birthday. Oh, and there are prizes! Click the badge to see what the fun is all about!

The Urge to Purge.

It’s December 29. It’s time to really think about what I want from the new year so that I can start it out on the right foot.

I don’t want to have 1,000 emails in my inbox. That’s 1,000 messages that I should have paid attention to the day each showed up, but I didn’t. I’m letting too much in. I’m not selective about what I promise my time to and then I wonder why I have no time. Next year I will be more selective about who I let in. I will delete the email subscriptions that are no longer important to me. I will not be bullied by my gmail.

I don’t want to have a house full of things I don’t need, want, use, love. I don’t want to have a house full of someone else’s keepsakes. I don’t want to feed into the culture of materialism or buy into the notion that if I just get more containers it won’t feel like I have so much stuff. I’m done with stuff.

I don’t want to be overweight, filling my mouth and stomach with fat and sugar and salt. There’s no pleasure in food for me anymore and, arguably, there shouldn’t have been from the start. At least not in the way I expected there to be.

I’m so tired. I think 2013 might have been my most tired year yet, despite the fact that I slept more this year than I have in the past six. I’m tired because of all of the excess. It’s weighing me down, both literally and figuratively.

On the road to minimalism, the road to simplicity, 2014 is going to be the year of the purge.

 

I’m submitting this post to the final moonshine grid of 2013. Click through to check out what other writers have shared.

Featured image credit.