Traveling Team Fischer

Often the clutter sneaks up on you.  One day, your home and life are organized and uncluttered, and all of a sudden, you can’t fit your car in the garage.  Where did all this stuff come from?  How do we dig out of it?  How does one begin the downsizing process?

We invest time, money, and emotions into building our collection of stuff, and then have to find a place for it, often renting storage space for stuff we don’t use often enough to keep in our homes, but still feel the need to hold on to for various reasons.

There are so many books, seminars, articles, and posts about how to downsize.  Each proclaiming to be the best way to accomplish your goals.  At this stage of our adventure, we can say with 100% certainty, that there is no one best way.  For many, this is a daunting task, so big that finding the first step is not only a bit frightening, but can be incredibly emotional, too.

We often hear that people are holding onto items to pass down to their kids.  There is no easy way to say this, but you may want to check with your children to make sure they have room for or want those things.  Everyone has different tastes, living spaces, and visions of an ideal life (a big house, a camper, a boat, or maybe a hut on the beach!).    It may be better to donate treasures to a thrift shop that supports local animal shelters, or to a teen shelter, or whatever charity speaks to your heart.

Some people don’t know where they’d start, because they couldn’t possibly let go of anything.  That’s OK.  We each get to make our own choices in life, and do what is best for our own situation.

For those of you who are thinking about downsizing, or maybe want to get started on some deep spring cleaning, here are some of the approaches we took, and we hope you may find some of them useful:

• Have Fun!  What is life, if you can’t have a little fun?  Purging our liquor cabinet was one of the more entertaining categories to tackle.  We learned to make new drinks, hosted a few parties, and brought bottles to our friends.  We took our time with this one, and loved all the help we had along the way.  Our friends were great sports in helping with this one.

• Participate in a Challenge. Friends of ours are wrapping up a 30 day challenge, and they are doing an awesome job!  The challenge is straightforward: one item on day one, two on day two, three on day three….and so on.  They have been posting a daily photo of each purge, which is a great way to share the journey and maybe even inspire others.
• Get Organized.  Even if we weren’t getting rid of things, we were getting our stuff organized, and we started with the easy stuff – towels went into one space, coats and jackets in another space, those collector cups and plastic glasses went into a tote, and so on and so forth.  This makes it easy to see how many duplicates you have, and helps identify what you could donate.  Even when it was in small batches, it freed up space for us to do more.

• Start Small  Tackle a room or category that you can finish in one weekend.  One of my first purges was focused on the bathrooms.  We had toiletries, make up, sunscreen, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and hairdryers stocked up in each one.  The intent was to have supplies readily available for any overnight guests.  The reality was half used tubes, bottles, and dusty junk in each bathroom.  So we grabbed a laundry basked and collected this kind of stuff from everywhere in the house (& cars).  We disposed of items no longer safe to use (expired make up that could cause infections, expired medicine that was no longer effective, and lotion that smelled rancid), donated what we could to a local shelter (travel sized items), and opted for a small supply of items for our guests.  Removing this small amount of clutter was very noticeable, which provided enough inspiration to tackle more.

Another great category for starting small is the home office.  When we did ours, we ended up with boxes of supplies we were able to donate to a local school.  Everything from new file folders, to pens, pencils, crayons, construction paper, scrap booking items, tape, and the list goes on.  We loved the clean space, and it was great to know the teachers happily stocked up their desks and classrooms.

•  Set your own pace.  You have your own life to live, and it probably does not revolve around discarding the excess items around you.  Unless you have a deadline by which you need to vacate your home, there is no need to rush through this.  We started our purge years before we embarked upon our journey.  Sites/apps like LetGo and OfferUp were a great way for us to sell things at a pace that was easier to control, and much less work than a garage sale.  The closer we got to hitting the road, the faster we moved.

For us, all of this made the transition to our new tiny home much easier.  We had been learning how to look at things with a critical eye.  Our limited space meant that if we wanted to bring something new into our camper, then we had to make room for it, and that usually meant getting rid of a few items.  Having less stuff to worry about, or spend money on, has been great.  We used to have a kitchen full of specialized appliances, utensils, and pots/pans.  Now we have one of those copper chef pans that we use stove top or in the oven.  One.  It works fine, and we are getting pretty good at the whole cook an entire meal in one dish thing.  Having fewer dishes to wash is awesome, too.

What worked for us may not work for anyone else, and that’s OK.  Honestly, if you have something you really love, or it has significant sentimental value, keep it.  You are the only one who can determine when you are ready to let go of anything.  Maybe there is something else you could donate that would give you more space for your special things.  The point is, the decision is yours.  If you have clutter, but it doesn’t bother you, then this exercise simply isn’t for you at this time.