This last year I and my husband downsized our home from a two story 2100sf house to a one story 1650sf abode. It’s not too drastic and it is still a 3 bedroom house but it’s also an opportunity to sort and declutter all our stuff.
This was a big challenge for me! I was born and raised on the mission field in Africa. We moved…a lot…so we weren’t pack-rats in the sense of accumulating things in the basement or attic for years on end. When we moved (on average every 2 years) we only took the bare essentials with us.
However when we were stationed in the field, we never threw ANYTHING away. We couldn’t go to the store and replace things or buy what we needed at the time so we kept things ‘just in case’. I even remember keeping the shiny gum wrappers from Wrigglies gum because we could use the foil for art projects. If something was broken we fixed it or re-purposed it – we had to be creative!
So the idea of getting rid of something just because we haven’t used it in 8 years is a tough go for me. I just know that as soon as I ditch it, I’ll need it…and honestly that has happened enough times that it has been reinforced in my mind. I also am finding that some things I have kept in case someone else might need them…so why am I the one to store them???
But for this move I was ruthless! Essentially, the mindset I cultivated was to only take with me what I know I will need in the next year or two. Everything else gets left. And if I move it and can’t find a place for it in the new house, it goes out the door again.
I heard about a 20/20 rule for decluttering. If you can replace it for under $20 in 20 minutes, it’s not worth storing. That is of course a first world mindset but I think I want to adopt that as a guideline for moving and storing accumulated ‘stuff’ in our new home.
My parents had the good graces to sort through all their stuff of the last 20 years just months before my dad died. I was so grateful that they had done that. It sure made the transition that my mom made a month later into a smaller home much less stressful. I had a friend who had been wanting to downsize their home for several years but it would mean some serious decluttering and her husband just couldn’t bring himself to do that. When he became ill and died, she was left with ‘the mess’.
Why wait? If you’ve been accumulating ‘stuff’’ set your sights on a leaner meaner life. Re-home the useful things and toss the rest. Create a life based on the essentials. You might even find that it opens up some inner space…which brings us to other kinds so decluttering we should do in SHOL…but that’s another blog post.
