Minimizing

In several areas of my life, I’ve been purging all sorts of extraneous things.


My apartment has recently undergone a huge purge. We’ve gotten rid of pieces of furniture that were just taking up space. After one of our snakes went to that big snake pit in the sky, we found someone to buy the massive extra tank we had sitting around. We boxed up books and clothes and knick knacks and all sorts of things and sold them at a garage sale.

I go between two extremes. Sometimes I really like being surrounded by stuff. I like the coziness of it. Other times, I hate stuff. I want only the bare necessities: Nothing on the walls, only one or two pieces of furniture - nothing extra that I have to maintain.

Right now I’m somewhere in between. Now that we’ve gotten rid of so much, there’s room to move in our house. I don’t mind having people over again, and I’m looking forward to Christmas because I have room for a tree and places I can decorate. It’s easier to pick things up and keep them clean and I feel more organized on a regular basis.

I’ve even hung some things on the wall, a fact that thrilled my mom when I told her (she hates bare walls).

This need to purge clutter has moved into other areas of my life. I’ve pared down my Google Reader to make it more manageable. You’d think that this wouldn’t be something I would worry about, but it was driving me nuts. After pulling out most of the things I was following, I felt so much better. Sure, I got rid of some of the funnier sites I enjoyed, but I obviously wasn’t enjoying them that much if there 150 unread posts for them. I also parted ways with a couple celebrities I was following and even gave up on some recipe and knitting pattern blogs.

I’m also slowly but surely getting rid of extra things on my computer. I have a ton of old files that are just taking up space, including music I really don’t like, eBooks I probably won’t read (I got a little crazy with the “free” options), and programs that I thought would be cool and then never used. Some stuff is being moved to the external hard drive. Others are just getting booted, especially because at some point, I want to purge extra stuff from the external as well.

Clearing out clutter is therapeutic once you actually do it. It took me forever to just break down and start moving. To tell the truth, the only thing that made me really do it was 1) the garage sale prospect and 2) the impending re-inspection of our apartment. Now that it’s done, I feel so much better. We still have things to do, closets to clean out, and some organization still pending, but minimizing the stuff we had was definitely a good first step to feeling less stressed at home.