Decluttering, Moving House & Living With Less
A Seed Of An IDea Grows
Sometimes something seemly minor will just wear me down. It starts small. A seed of an idea planted by some book I read, a conversation from a friend, or maybe a blog post or a YouTube video… From there it grows into an all-consuming obsession. It sits there in the back of my mind gnawing at me when I’m bored, procrastinating at work, or struggling to sleep. It starts to bother me so much that I’ll talk incessantly about it to my family and friends—and then on occasion, I actually manage to do something about it.
My latest all-consuming obsession is decluttering. I’ve done big clear outs of my home at least once a year for the past four years, but lately it’s never felt like enough. I’ll do a massive clear out, take a full car-load of items to the charity shops and instead of feeling satisfied (like I use to), I still feel overwhelmed by all the stuff in my space. I’ll open my closet in the morning and think it’s all “too much.” I question if what’s there is a true reflection of my personal style. My mind start noticing all the chotskies as I walk through the house and I lay in bed mentally tallying all the unused items shoved into high-up cupboards and catch-all drawers.
I’ve known something needed to change for awhile. It has bothered me for a long time now. Sadly, I still needed an extra little push to help me get started on the decluttering path.
Giving Up My Pack-Rat Habits
While my personal values skew to the side of minimal, eco-friendly, and quality over quantity, I am a natural pack-rat. Shocking to many people who know me now because I’m also clinically OCD (an OCD pack-rat seems like an oxymoron but remember, OCD doesn’t always manifest in the way it is portrayed in media). I’ve been like this my entire life. As a kid, I would drive my mom crazy by my “need” to take every pamphlet, postcard, and informational brochure that crossed our path. To everyone’s horror, I would stash them under my bed until it got so bad there was no other option but to bag it all up and haul it to the curb. I avoid watching any TV program about hoarding out of a fear that that would have been my life path if it wasn’t for solid parental interference as a child. While I broke my habit of hoarding what essentially amounts to trash by the time I entered high school, I was nowhere near the path of minimalism. I wouldn’t have even been able to identify minimalism on a map. I proudly avoided a life of hoarding, but I was definitely living a life of maximalism and consumerism.
Since 2016, I’ve gotten a lot better. I had moved to China for work the year before and boxed up everything I hadn’t packed to go into storage. Once I moved back stateside, I found myself sitting in my living room with everything I owned—boxes upon boxes of books and nicknacks, three (large) suitcases of clothes, and way more typewriters than any one person needs to own. Most of these things I’d lived perfectly fine without the entire time I lived abroad. Some of the things I’d even packed around the world with me without using once. Looking at that sea of stuff, I felt that same level of embarrassment and sham I had as a kid when my mom discovered I was hoarding tourism brochures.
This is really where my quest to overcome my natural inclination to own stuff began. Facing my mountain of possessions, I knew the time had come to let a lot of it go. During the big purge of 2016, I’d donated 3/4th of my book collection, all of my typewriters, half my nicknacks, and a little more than half my clothing. It felt good. Honestly, there isn’t a single thing I donated back then that I’ve missed. Since that experience, I’ve promised myself to do at least one big clear out a year and I’ve stuck to it! The problem? I didn’t stop shopping. It’s 2020 and I still own a lot of stuff.
A Goal and A Deadline
The feeling that I needed to own less really started to hit me mid-2019. I was beginning to feel like my wardrobe was a bit too big again, and I noticed I was only wearing a fraction of it. Then all the other little things started bothering me: The mess of rarely-used craft supplies in the drawers in the built-in dining room hutch, the mason jar collection that had grown so big it needed its own three-shelf cupboard in the kitchen, the basket of untouched sports equipment in the hall closet… It all started feeling like a weight I was lugging around. I’d made a lot of improvement over the years but I still needed to get better at decluttering.
I wanted to make a goal—2020 the year my decluttered life would begin. By the end of the year, I don’t want to own anything I don’t actually use or enjoy. I was struggling to figure out the deadlines and milestones for this goal when life handed me the hard deadline I probably needed. Mid-January I found out the house I’d rented for 8+ years was being sold. I would have about three months to declutter, downsize, and move to a new space. Maybe the gut feeling that I needed to start downsizing has been a premonition for the eventual move? I have my goal and now I have my deadline.
In my process of trying to declutter my space, there are a few books I have found really useful so far (and would highly recommend to anyone else who feels the need to own less):
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. At this point, most everyone is familiar with this book and the idea of asking if an item “sparks joy.” I read this a few years back and do still find some of the techniques to be really useful while deciding what I should keep and what I need to let go of. And of course, I still use Marie’s method for folding my socks.
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson. A couple years ago, my family faced the task of cleaning out both of my grandparents’ houses over the course of only a couple of months. The process of death cleaning the family home inspired more than one person in my family to start decluttering, and my dad picked up this handy little book along the way. It made my reading list just this year as I’m facing clearing out a large, old 4 bedroom home to downsize into a 2 bedroom apartment. While there are some great tips geared specifically towards making life a bit easier for the people who will tidy up all the things we leave behind when we die, there are a lot of really useful tips in this book for downsizing in general. I also really appreciate Margareta’s personal stories and practical approach to everything.
The Year Of Less by Cait Flanders. This was probably the best thing I could have read at this moment in my life. I really feel like it came to me right when I’d need it the most. Cait Flanders is a finance blogger and this book details the year she spend on a self-imposed shopping ban. Cait combined a declutter with the shopping ban and delves into the mental health around retail therapy—questioning why she buys something. For someone looking to declutter and shop less, I found Cait’s journey really inspiring and it’s helping me come up with my own rules for living with less. As I’ve decluttered (and fantasized about decorating my new place), there is one particular question from this book I’m starting to apply to everything I own: Did I buy this for the person I am or the person I think I should be? If I’m attracted to buying or keeping an item because it fits an idea of who I think I should be instead of the person I actually am, that is my red flag that I do not need this item in my life. I find these types of items hardly get used and often inspire more guilt in me than joy. Put it down and walk away!
Going forward
I’ll be following my process of decluttering, moving house, and my own version of a shopping ban on the blog starting April 2020 through April 2021. Nothing is better for forcing accountability than announcing your plan to hundreds of strangers online, am I right? The decluttering is absolutely necessary. I started this process in late January when moving still felt abstract. As of this week though, I have paperwork signed and a deposit paid for a historic 1940s, garden view apartment that I’ll be moving into April 15 (only one more month to declutter, pack, and move). It only gets more real from here! From now until moving day my goals are to: 1) take a load of donations to charity every week between now and moving, 2) sell all the larger rugs and furniture pieces that I will not be taking to the new place, 3) downsize my wardrobe by half from what it was on January 1st, and 4) not move anything into the new place that I’ll unpack and think, “why do I own this?”
Wish me luck and look forward to monthly updates on my decluttering and my shopping ban.