Making Your Life's Styleboard

When going through our stuff - clothes, accessories, knickknacks, decor - I've found it helpful to think of my stuff in terms of a style board. A style board is basically a collage of pieces that are put together to define a person's style. This can be super helpful to figure out how your various accessories go together to define your style, how your accessories work together, and identify anything that doesn't work well with the rest of the collection. This will also help you to identify how you might want to adjust your style.

For me, in defining my style as it's developed to the this point, I have a casual, but professional look. Jeans, a button down, and loafers are typical for me. So when I'm arranging my clothes in my mental style board, where do my old Converse fit in? Basically, they don't. These are a well-loved relic from a previous stage in my life that aren't adding anything to my style today. They're going to the garage sale tomorrow.

This can also be applied to a style board for your home. Are you leaning toward more of a sleek, modern kind of look? Then perhaps an ornate/vintage/country knickknack doesn't really fit in to your style. On the flip-side, if you're trying to put together a warm, comfortable, cozy environment, then maybe modern/mental furniture or accessories are actually preventing you from creating the space you want.

This can also be applied to the style of your life. What's the theme you want to dominate your life? What are your priorities? Family? Recreation? Sports? Hobbies? Learning? Try building a collage of these things in your mind, then ask yourself if there's anything that seems out of place. Do you have a hobby/interest that takes away from the rest? It might be time to cut this from your life - especially if your significant other has suggested this to you in the past.

Celebrating What Isn't There

I know that really influenced right now by my new focus on minimalization, but a theme struck me today. As we've been trying to be more intentional what we have in our home/garage/life, I've been struck by the power of what's no longer there. The things we've gotten rid of so far were items that we thought we needed to have around - they added to/strengthened/bolstered our lives in some way. Instead, we're finding that their absence is having a far better impact on our lives than their presence ever made.

Though this is a new realization for us, it's by no means new. This past weekend the world, or at least large parts of it, celebrated the absence of something 2000 years ago - we celebrated the absence of Jesus' body from the tomb. The Pharisees and the Romans thought that keeping his body in that tomb would serve as a form of a trophy - this rebel had been defeated and here was the proof. Even his followers thought that they would find comfort from being able to visit the body, by having it kept to decay in peace within those stone walls. What NO one could have predicted was the power that was found when Christ left the tomb.

The question I have then is this - what "trophies" am I keeping in my life that distract me from the profound place that the empty tomb should rightly hold? What are the things that I'm allowing to clutter my life such that I'm not living with the intentionality with which I would truly desire to live? My call to action is this - to expel these things from my life and NOT replace them with new toys/trophies/clutter, but to keep the empty place they so recently occupied clear as a testimony to the power Christ's victory. I'm not saying that decluttering is a pious work or a spiritual discipline, but for me at least it needs to be about focusing on the important and eliminating the rest.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.
                                - Isaac Watts

Original Photo: Flickr - emeryjl

Defining the Shopping Fast

Ok, so we've agreed go on our shopping fast and I think we're actually already on it (maybe I should confirm that...). Things we've been working on a little bit in terms of finalizing our plan for the fast is what exactly are the parameters of a shopping fast. Obviously, you can essentially decide for yourself how exactly you want to define the fast, focusing on what your goal for the fast really is. A few points we've been working on might help if this is something you're going to consider.

1. Duration. This is pretty much the first term of the agreement. I was originally thinking of making our fast 3 months long, but Kyra suggested stretching is through next June. I think this is where the purpose of the exercise has to be made clear. My thought was to go through with the fast for the sake of learning how little we truly NEED to add to our lives/household while keeping it at a manageable duration. Kyra was focusing less on experience for experience's sake, and more of removing herself from a dependence on shopping to deal with stress, boredom, etc. Since I'll be extra busy from this July through next June, Kyra wanted to extend it for that whole period. I've seen articles where people have tried a 1 month clothes fast and failed miserably, then I've seen (and shared) where whole families have gone a year without shopping for any non-essentials. The point of the fast is to challenge yourself to give something up and to grow through the experience, so if you're thinking about how do you need to go for it to be a challenge at all, then how long you're willing to maintain the challenge. 
2. Scope. The second part is to determine what you're targeting for your fast. Again, what you're hoping to accomplish is going to be the driving factor in figuring this out. Are you wanting to do a socio-political freegan experiment? Are you wanting to curb your dependence on new clothes? Are you wanting to stretch your self-sufficiency by only buying food? Are you going to only allow yourself non-consumables? We're focusing on stuff, we're essentially stopping all stuff-related purchases. We haven't gone to so far as to say that Zip-Lock bags aren't technically consumed by use so we won't purchase any more. Instead we're going with if we use something up we can replace it - food, ingredients (including for our homemade soaps & toiletries), cleaning supplies, etc. 
3. Pre-determined exceptions. We're human, and humans need some grace, so determining where you might be willing to allow wiggle room. One question we raised was about what to do with gifts at birthdays & Christmas. I found this excerpt from Joshua Becker that I felt addressed this subject well - "We have taken the approach of still allowing our relatives the opportunity to buy gifts... It is an expression of their love. They desire to show their love by giving gifts...We did not want to take that away from our family" So gifts of money/gift cards will be accepted and spent gratefully for the love with which they're given. Also, Kyra has a couple small, specific gaps in her wardrobe (don't even get me started on women and their low quality shoes), so she's perfectly free to spend previous gift money on those specific items. Also, we had a baby due in a few months and it's completely possible that a true need will arise that we didn't foresee, meaning we'll need to be flexible. 
4. What about the kids? This is another question to get ironed out early if you have children. The temptation may be to exempt anything child-related from the fast, but the truth is that their clutter adds tremendously to the mulch in our home, not to mention to new expenditures. We're already getting our 4 year-old son involved in our minimalizing efforts (he LOVED ranking his stuffed animals until we mentioned that we were going to bag up the half that were least favorite) and he makes occasional comments about us selling some of our items. It's definitely a goal to have them grow through this experience also, so we need to take a cue from some of Becker's points in the article I linked earlier. Letting them know what's going on, start with our items, let them know what to expect, focus on positives, and work in special, bonding experiences. Now, we're ok making gifts for the kids for their birthdays and Christmas, but we do want them to experience giving to others. We toyed with the idea of having them make all their Christmas gifts this year (something we'll be doing), but decided that rather than giving all their aunts a macaroni & finger paint masterpiece that we'll relax the fast for them so they can continue to focus on giving to other at Christmastime. 

Oh, and I had to resist my first purchase yesterday. It would have been a great book to read, but the point is to have to grow and practice a little self-denial. If you read it, tell me the high points :)

Photo: Flickr, hospi-table. Image altered. 

What to do with DVDs?

Flickr: bobbigmac

I'm not sure what your media center looks like, but ours looks beautiful - on the outside. But open the doors (and they always tend to hang open) and it's purely chaotic. There are DVDs stacked up that were haven't been put away since Christmas. Of '13! Really, you could argue that minimalizing our DVD collection could be extremely easy - just throw away all the DVDs that are sitting in our DVD racks! :P This situation is complicated by a couple factors. 1. I've never in my life been in the habit of putting my media (starting c/ VHS and tapes) away when I'm done. 2. Our kids watch the same cycle of about 5 DVDs day in and day out. Actually, that wasn't very many factors, was it...? It's hard to look at the media center and not get frustrated with the way we keep it, but that hasn't yet led to real changes in our system. 

Since starting to work on minimalizing our lives, I've developed this wonderful vision of ripping all our DVDs, storing them on an external hard drive, and streaming them to the TV. PC World has a good article here that describes how to accomplish this using a nice app called Plex. The problem is that doing with require buying more stuff.We could then get rid of all the cases, and just keep the disks in a nice disk binder. At a minimum I would need to buy another external hard drive, a large disc binder, and some way to splice a tablet to our TV.  I've argued with myself that buy more for the sake of minimalizing might be acceptable, but that argument isn't gaining in my mind. When you couple that with our impending shopping fast, it gets halted completely. 

So what options are left to us? The first step will be to do a minimalization just like we've started in the rest of the house. All the DVDs will come out of their racks - added step of going back in their cases - and then we'll decide which ones are really worth keeping. For the sake of ease we'll move the kids' FWDs (frequently-watched DVDs) up by the TV (in their cases!) and put the remaining disks back into their racks. 

The Minimalists advice for your DVD collection was basically this: get a life and stop watching the same movies all the time. Others have said to embrace Hulu or Netflix instead. I get those thoughts, but we're also trying to spend less time in front of the TV completely. We do really enjoy watching the movies we have and we found that when we had a subscription service we were spending WAY too much time watching it because there was always something new to watch. I think if we focus instead of having a core collection of movies that we actually value enough to keep around and watch repeatedly, we'll had the right things that we'll watch the right amount. 

Any thoughts/ideas that I haven't covered here? What have you done to try to mange your media? I'd love to hear some more suggestions!

Attacking the Kitchen

Flickr: rubbermaid

We started minimalizing our house about 3 weeks ago. We started in our bedroom closets and are gradually spreading out from there. I will admit that my closet isn't done, but I have several things still mentally tagged for the sell & discard destinies.

The biggest area of clutter in our lives is our kitchen, though our bedroom was a top contender until very recently. It was difficult to know where even to start, so I started with the most visible thing in our kitchen - the utensils canister that holds the kitchen tools we use on a near-daily basis. I took some cues from Leo Babauta to guide me. Here are some of his tips:

1. Do it in small chunks. One canister, shelf, or drawer at a time. 
2. Take everything out of a shelf or drawer at once. Dump it all out, and maybe take the chance to clean the drawer/shelf/canister while you're at it :) 
3. Sort through your pile, one item at a time, and make quick decisions. Put back the stuff you KNOW you really use. The other stuff sort into sell/give away and throw away piles. 
4. If you are on the fence with a lot of things, create a “maybe” box. There were some kitchen tools we weren't sure of, so we put them in a grocery sack so they could possibly be saved from donation/selling. These were things like the 4th and 5th spatulas - Kyra does a lot of canning, so maybe she really does need that many, but probably not :P
5. Celebrate when you’re done! Don't forget to admire your accomplishments!

After we'd gone through this process with the canister, we'd managed to take out 1/3-1/2 the tools without eliminating a single type or size of tool that we frequently use. Duplicates were an easy choice, as were damaged items. 

2 days ago we started in on our glasses. We had multiple sets of very nice breakfast glasses that we simply have not used. If we hosted more breakfast parties, then perhaps they'd get a lot of use. That's DEFINITELY not where we are in life. 

The first real difficulty we had was our mug collection. I was all for eliminating most of the non-matching mugs and sticking to the mug set that matches our plates and bowls. Kyra felt the opposite - she prefers to have unique/special mugs to drink from on a regular basis and wanted to get rid of the boring matching mugs. We were at a small impasse until later that day I realized what our family norms are. My mother's kitchen only has matching mugs, my MIL's kitchen only has random mugs. For their family, choosing your morning mug is almost a part expressing your feelings about the morning. 

One thing we've learned in our marriage is to respect family norms, then work around them in a way that works for our little family. So with that we got rid of the random mugs that just didn't have much significance or were just plain ugly as well as about half of the matching mugs. We decided to keep 12 mugs. That number might end up going down in the future months, but it's still a good step. 

Other high points from the kitchen so far - if you honestly can't remember that last time you used a kitchen knicknack - no matter how useful it seems in theory - get rid of it! 

We're going to have a great garage sale in a couple weeks :P

Anyone need a couple sets of barely-used breakfast glasses?