Category: minimising

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Living more simply

As each box slowly gets unpacked I feel more weighed down by the stuff that we’ve accumulated over our lifetimes.

To be fair, it’s the accumulation of two lives and two households that couldn’t be sifted and streamlined before we left London because we were in lockdown, with no tips or charity shops taking anything.

And it’s also the result of lives lived fully, of travel, and children, and passions. Things just attach themselves to you as you move through these life experiences.

But oh lord, so much stuff. It feels quite overwhelming, and we’ve only just started.

Sensible me says just sort a box at a time. Keep, throw or donate. Do it gradually and you’ll get there. Don’t panic.

Overwhelmed me says why oh why do we have four thousand sheets all in different and unspecified sizes? I know that they’d come in useful as dust sheets for the studio or several other uses, but I am determined not to cram this house to the rafters. Determined.

We will streamline. We will simplify. We do not need all of this stuff. Someone would welcome it, I’m sure.

Deep breaths. I can see several trips to the local charity shops and a massive shed sale on the horizon very soon..

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Urban Life Pruning

Husband and I have what I think of as a typical, complicated, overloaded modern existence, made worse by the coalition of our previous lives into one when we married three years ago.

With the relationship came lots and lots of stuff accumulated over many years from previous houses, studios and flats. Far too much stuff, to be honest.

We have multiples of everything and many thousands of books. It became clear when we started planning the move to our croft that we had to start pruning our possessions before we moved. Because what we’re building is a small house on Skye which hasn’t got a hope in hell of holding it all.

So it began this week.

To be honest, after a long, hard day at work the last thing that either of us want to do is carry boxes up from the garage and sort through them, but we’ve set ourselves the goal of five boxes a week.

Every week for the rest of this year.

We’re already looking at bulk loads of bin bags and the local charity shops are going to love us 😂…..

It’s like a penance….

If this doesn’t cure us of a tendency to buy too much or hang onto things that we don’t need, I don’t know what will!