Uncluttering with Joshua Becker

I have been slowly, slowly, starting to try to pare down our possessions. I started last year with my closet, trying out the capsule wardrobe idea from project 333. I didn't quite make it to 33 items but I really liked it and want to redo it now that summer is coming. It's harder because I am continually changing sizes (I just finished losing the baby weight from P and am now 5 weeks pregnant so...). I know that I'm more motivated because our garage is chock full of Adam's physical therapy equipment for his new clinic which just points out how much other stuff we have. It's frustrating because I can't very effectively go through the kid clothes we have - we (thankfully) get lots of hand me downs but I KNOW we have too much of several sizes, I just can't access all the bags of clothes easily. Anyway, I'm rambling. The point was that I just bought Joshua Becker's book The More of Less because it got me free admission into a 12 week "uncluttered" course. My friend was doing it and told me about it. The book was pretty good and a quick read. It provided lots of the "why" and a few of the "how"s but hopefully the course itself will provide even more.

I find myself more deliberately thinking about how much stuff we actually need. How many towels per person? 2? One to use and one to wash? What about beach/swim towels? How many cups should we have? How many pots and pans do we actually need? I also want to start a list of things I want to or need to replace in the semi-near future. Among the things on that list - the blender, the vacuum cleaner, our mattress in the master bedroom, my purse.

The first assignment for the course was to come up with my own "why" of why I want to declutter/minimize. My reasons:

• Less Cleaning 
• Clear Space = Clear Mind (super true for me!)
• Not feel weighed down by STUFF
• Teach my kids that we don't need to own everything
• Waste less
• Save money
• Create a healthy learning environment
• Be more deliberate (in our choices for family activities, in our purchases, etc)

Two days ago I spent a good amount of time decluttering our downstairs bookshelf and little 9-cube storage thing. It's hard because we don't have many places downstairs to keep things but we spend by far the bulk of our time down here. Nonetheless, I managed to get a bag of garbage and a few small bags to give away, plus several stacks of stuff to take upstairs and find a new home for. Now I don't have stuff stacked on top of each other. No more moving my scriptures to get out my recipe box. No more moving my laptop to get Lydia's Math U See manipulatives off the shelf. It doesn't really look too different yet, but it's much more functional. Okay, well some things look nicer, like on top of the 9-cube storage I cleared off a lot of clutter, but for the most part the bookshelves and cubes are still full, they just have less on them so they're not as tightly packed and therefore they're easier to use. We still have a long way to go (don't get me started on Adam's papers... lots of papers...)