The term living a minimalist lifestyle is a new term to me and frankly is one that intrigues me. My wife and I are continually looking for ways to declutter our home and make living for us and our kids simpler. In our lives it seems like we go through peaks and valleys. Where there are times when we purchase a lot of stuff, cut the excessive spending, purge unused stuff from our house (goodwill, recycle, or throw away), and redo the cycle again. From my perspective this is how most people live their lives, or you will soon be appearing on one of those new reality shows “hoarders”.
Lately as I've been researching a minimalist lifestyle and I came upon this article on living an extreme minimalist lifestyle. https://www.unclutterer.com/2009/12/09/extreme-minimalist-living. This blog is very well designed and gives some great tips on decluttering your lifestyle, which most Americas can definitely benefit from. Here are a few of my personal ideas for decluttering your lifestyle.
- Go room to room and remove extra stuff that isn't needed
- Once completed then recycle, donate, or if need be throw away
- Go room to room and look at your efficiency of using your storage areas (closest, basement, garage, etc). See if there is another way you can manage and organize your stuff. However, if you don't do step one then by only doing step 3 you are only managing stuff. Not really living a minimalist lifestyle.
- Look at how you can compact the possessions you need. My neighbor is truly an inspiration to me and one example he did in this area is he took all of his compact discs and converted them to mp3's. He converted his entire collection to 6 discs and got rid of the CD's.
- Ask for someone to come over to your house and give you some suggestions that they might have. Others have a different perspective that you may have never thought of.
- Go back to step 1 again and see if you missed anything.
Hopefully by decluttering your home you'll be able to stock up on deals, and buy in bulk. This way you'll be able to both save money and run your home more efficiently.
3 Comments
What a coincidence; I’m copying my CD collection right now after finally buying a large enough hard drive to archive my music and DVDs.
I’ve been working on my own minimalist lifestyle for a while now. With an impending move to a smaller, cheaper apartment I’ve been trying to do at least one thing every day that gets rid of some clutter without adding to a landfill. The biggest task ahead of me a large comic book collection, 90% of which has no value, that I can’t bear to toss into paper recycling.
What a coincidence; I’m copying my CD collection right now after finally buying a large enough hard drive to archive my music and DVDs.
I’ve been working on my own minimalist lifestyle for a while now. With an impending move to a smaller, cheaper apartment I’ve been trying to do at least one thing every day that gets rid of some clutter without adding to a landfill. The biggest task ahead of me a large comic book collection, 90% of which has no value, that I can’t bear to toss into paper recycling.