May 10, 2018
Oh, you both have LAYERS. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. CAKE! Everybody loves cake! Cakes have layers! – Donkey from “Shrek”
The first step in minimalism journey was pretty straightforward: getting rid of junk. I don’t know about y’all, but there is little I find more satisfying than clearing stuff out of my house. For me, this was best done in layers. As I said, minimizing our lives is a process and mindset, not a one-and-done task to complete. For simplicity sake, we focused on one room at a time and made a schedule for tackling each one. Some rooms were easy and only needed one “layer” of cleansing. We don’t have anything in our dining room but the table, chairs, curtains, and photos on the walls, so we quickly assessed we still wanted/needed all of those items and moved on. Others were much more complicated. Like the basement. Ugh. I still shudder when I think about it. We took the harder rooms layer by layer over a longer period of time.
The first layer was the easiest: trashing (recycling) the obvious. I’m talking about things that clearly served no purpose in our home. Things like expired coupons, DVD cases without the disc, clothes with holes not worth salvaging, literal garbage (like the candy wrappers in Fox’s childhood boxes). Get a big, black trash bag or two or three, fill ‘em up, and Get. That. Stuff. Out. Even just doing that helped our house and minds feel lighter. But we still had a long way to go.
Layer #2 was getting rid of stuff that was still functional or appealing to someone but not to us. Our biggest source of this was baby items. We know we aren’t having any more children, so anything that our son no longer needs has no place in our home. I confess I probably saved a lot more baby outfits than I should have, but they’re just so dang tiny and cute. I am sure, in time, I will whittle that amount down to less, but I just wasn’t ready for that yet. The nice thing about baby items is you can often resell them to recoup some of your money. We sold quite a few things on Facebook Marketplace and made a couple hundred dollars. This layer of the process also involved getting rid of clothing that didn’t fit, duplicates (somehow we wound up with 4 pairs of kitchen shears), and décor items that no longer matched our style.
Now, for a lot of our rooms, two layers of purging was enough to get to a manageable level. Clearing out the clutter made us feel great and like we were really moving towards our lifestyle goals. Plus, we were able to make a little cash which is always nice. It was good to savor these victories when we could, because the next step was where things started to get daunting. But good results come from good efforts, not from good nights sitting on your duff watching Netflix. Check back soon to read about the next layer in our minimalism cake.
Home is Where 