A Shocking Thing Happened on My Way to Minimalism

So here I am, back in my minimalist's row house but, a shocking thing happened on my way to minimalism.... Apparently, while in the huge flip house we accumulated more stuff! I am shocked at just how much stuff! Much of it is attributed to remodeling left overs and stuff left there by our son and his crew who lived there while they remodeled. I knew it was there and we cleared out a lot but, my mistake was not clearing out enough on a weekly basis. I was so busy keeping the house looking showroom perfect, that I neglected to keep up my minimalist habits! 

Now that I'm unpacking, I'm thinking.... what was I thinking? Why do I have this much stuff? Believe me, it's not because I buy it! My sister loves to send my serving dishes for Christmas for some reason, enough that I could start a catering business! My mother in law likes to send my husband food home with him when he stops in to visit. So, those dishes and Tupperware pile up. We have all of these odd mismatched glasses... remember the gas station glasses? We inherited some of those and remember the Flintstones jelly jars people reused as juice glasses? Well, at least I didn't have any of those!

Luckily, unpacking is a great time to recognize what hasn't been used in the past year and all of those empty boxes make it easy to cart things off to charity too. So with: trash, donate, relocate, and sell boxes at the ready, we unpacked our kitchen last night and purged a good fourth of it!

Our kitchen was second only to the garage mess in sheer bulk that we had to move. Of course, the row house kitchen is about a fourth the size of the flip house kitchen. I guess we really spread out there!

So, it's back to my good habits which are: going through drawers and closets on a regular basis, keeping a box handy for items to go to charity, and going through one kitchen cupboard and one refrigerator shelf a week. If I had done more of this the six months before I moved, it would have been much easier on us!

Thankful to be a minimalist!

I apologize for neglecting this blog but it seems everything has changed rather quickly. In the past month here is how our lives have changed:

1. The substitute teaching job I described in an earlier post turned into a long term position until the end of the school year, (the third week in June.) More on that later in another post.

2. After months of the doldrums, our remodeling company has landed quite a few bids thus, my husband and son have been working their tails off for the last two weeks! Of course, the business picked up right after...

3. my husband took a job as a crisis intervention counselor.

4. We found a renter for our house that isn't selling and decided to move back to our minimalist town house next weekend.

No wonder I'm so tired. And yes I am blogging at 3:00 in the morning....

All of these changes are positive financial changes. However, they all require energy, and the hardest on the list is the move. Luckily, my little family all believes in minimalism. How else could we play musical houses when we need to? Our son will move from the townhouse to another house we own, the renters will move into the flip house and we will move to the townhouse. Here's the plan:

Will I have a garage sale before I move? No.

Will we be donating stuff before we move? You bet ya!

And although I don't really have that much stuff to get rid of, there are always things that no longer serve us. There is no point in saving this stuff because you might need it one day and you don't want to buy it again because most likely, that day will never come. So tomorrow I'll start packing and purging.

I have learned to move anything I cherish in my own car myself i.e. fancy dishes, technology stuff, art supplies, basically, breakable stuff. I have made a list of where I want everything put in the townhouse and will label each piece of furniture and box. My son and crew will likely move us while we are at work, so this is a must! Moving is no easy task no mater how organized we are, so wish me luck! Did I mention we just moved here in September?