Minimalism - January Update

Got rid of our entertainment center, which freed up lots of space in our living room.  Also served as a catalyst to finally start going through our photo albums in preparation for digitizing them.  I don't want to scan a bunch of photos we don't need, so part one of this project has been to go through and get rid of all duplicates, blurries, photos of people we don't know (!), and tons of unflattering pics or pictures that just don't need to be immermorialized.  We are about half way through with the first edit.  Once we're done, I intend to go through them again and see if I can't get rid of some more photos, leaving us with not more than half the stack we started with.  At that point, we'll scan and organize digitally the pictures that remain, and then get rid of the hard copies.  Two exceptions to this:  our wedding album, and a scrapbook I made about how Alex and I met.  I also want to create a photo album specifically for Natalia with up-close photos of people we want her to recognize and know.  Other than that, no more paper photos or photo albums to take up space. The second project will be to digitize videos that we have.  There are several homemade VHS tapes that need to be converted; We will allow Walmart to do the honors.

We have an ongoing large plastic tub that we fill with items we collect from around the house that we can part with, and as it fills, we take it to be donated.  We've had this system going for the past year, since moving into our apartment.  As soon as the tub is empty, we are motivated anew to start filling it again.  It did finally occur to us to try to sell some of the items, and we've been able to do so with our Ikea wardrobes and some cloth diapers.  Several additional items are waiting to be claimed on Craigslist.

The goal of our minimalism efforts is to make room in our lives - both physically in our home, and psychologically in our minds - for the things that matter most to us.  I'm finding that as I've gotten rid of old letters, cards, newspapers and other mementos (several tubs of stuff!), I don't miss it, and what remains is much more meaningful now, because it has become a representative sample of times gone by.  Also, since we are/will be homeschooling Natalia, we need to make room for tools we'll need for that.  Part of that will be being able to find random items that we can actually use in our homeschool. The other part will be to simply have the room for new items as they become necessary.

My wardrobe is pretty bare at this point.  I was able to get rid of bags of clothing and shoes that I simply don't wear anymore.  I think there are a few more items I'll need to part with, but I will also need to go shopping (something I despise) for new items.  This will be the part of minimalism where getting rid of excess stuff makes room for fewer but better quality and more useful items.  I'm not there yet.  Paring down Alex's wardrobe is another story!  He's been participating, though because he works outside the home, he actually requires more clothing than I do.

There are a few more large items we need to part with, as well as acquire a few more.  But since we are undecided about our long-term living arrangement at this time, we don't want to take in anything. We're making do with our old sofabed that won't be moving into our new place, wherever that will be, and our dining room table has been with us since our first apartment 14 years ago, and is barely holding on.  But that's our table while we're here because it still gets the job done.  We're also going to be parting with our TV, which Alex has had for over 16 years!  We don't have cable tv; we watch our shows online.  We may consider a projector or a wall mounted flatscreen in the future, but again, that is not a priority right now.

I've had to stop getting rid of books because I realized that most of what's left are children's books in Polish, and I don't want to limit what Natalia has access to when she gets older.  For English books, there's always the library, even many Spanish books may be available that way.  But I'm not going to reorder and pay for all new Polish books when we already have them.  I've cut my original library size by at least half since I started parting with the written word.  I'm quite proud of that accomplishment, and I'm now able to actually reference and reread my favorite books because I can easily get to them!