The problem with having a blog about decluttering is that people give me a hard time when I buy something.Then I feel I need to justify the purchase to them and myself. I guess I’m not like most guys and I actually have always kind of liked to shop. It’s probably from growing up on a farm a hundred miles from the nearest shopping mall. Making a trip to Fargo to go shopping was a treat that usually happened only a few times over the summer. Back then, I could spend hours walking around the mall and looking. Later in the day, we would go to my aunt and uncle’s house and have dinner which usually consisted of a large bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. How else do you feed a bunch of kids on a budget? We had such a big family that sometimes there weren’t enough seats for everyone. I remember many trips just sitting on the floor in the back end of the Suburban or whatever we drove. On the way home from shopping I would be surrounded by the day’s purchases. I still don’t mind shopping. I just don’t want to take my kids with.Most of our shopping is done online now because it’s tough to find time to actually go to a store. Recently, I wanted to replace my stereo and DVD player. Of course my wife rolled her eyes until I pointed out that our stereo was about 15 years old and had no modern connections like HDMI or USB. In the end, I bought a new stereo and Blu-ray player and was able to reduce the number of things I had connected since the Blu-ray can stream Netflix and Amazon. The old stuff will be sold or donated. I guess you could call it the turtle technique to decluttering. Don’t buy extra and as you replace things be sure to get rid of the old. If you can reduce what you have, you’ll come out ahead. Slowly, as you send more things out the door than you bring in, you will see progress. I still think a large purge now and then is good. Minimalism for me isn’t about living without things I love or never buying anything fun like a new stereo. With my new setup I can listen to a CD in the living room and stream Pandora out on the patio - and control it all with my phone. That makes me happy. That and watching my teenage son try to figure out how to open and play a cassette.I once told my dad that when he died we were going to have a huge dumpster outside his house.I recommend against saying things like that to your family. Even for me, it didn’t take long to realize how mean that sounded but it seems I still haven’t quite learned my lesson. My wife constantly reminds me that I need to bite my tongue instead of telling the kids I can’t wait to get rid of their toys. Sometimes I’m a slow learner.I know that if your family members are resistant to letting go of things, then the best way to convince them is usually to show them. You have to first purge your own excess stuff and hope they see the benefits of owning less. Then they will want to follow suit. Easier said than done. We can look at someone else and wonder why on earth they’re keeping something as useless as a spoon collection. Yet, it never occurs to us to get rid of the dozens of shot glasses we accumulated in college collecting dust on a shelf. In the back of our mind we know we should get rid of those shot glasses, but it’s a lot easier to point out someone else’s junk than to get rid of our own. Matthew 7:1-5 Here’s a suggestion and I’ll try to follow my own advice.The next time you’re looking at someone else’s stuff you think they could easily live without, instead of pointing it out to them, take a look around at your own things and find something you can purge. Keep doing that until you can’t get rid of anything else. Chances are, you’re still not done. Hopefully, those around you will see you spending less time taking care of all that extra stuff. They will notice the extra space and free time you have that comes from owning less and will want that too. They might even ask for your help. How much is all that stuff worth that you have shoved in storage containers? Have you ever thought about how much the space in your home is worth? According to Realtor.com, the median price per square foot of homes in Michigan is $61. For desirable neighborhoods though, it can easily surpass $200 per square foot. Is that box of old magazines worth that much? Let’s keep the math simple and assume your house is 2000 square feet and cost $200,000, or $100 per square foot. When we talk about square footage for a house, we generally discount the basement and garage where people often store the most stuff. If we want to include these, let’s assume a 24 ft x 24 ft two car garage (576 sq ft) and a basement of 1000 square feet. That’s a total of 3,576 sq ft. I guess the math isn’t quite as easy now, but that comes to $56 per square foot. The storage container of choice in my house is these 18 gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck storage boxes. They are about 24 inches by 16 inches, or a little more than 2 1/2 square feet. By our cost per square foot calculation, whatever is inside that container should be worth about $140. Admittedly, ours are generally stacked about 3 totes high so let’s say each one should hold about $47 worth of stuff. We could get carried away and go into cost per year over how many years you store this stuff, depreciation, loss of use for that space, but that’s too much work. Incidentally, if you are looking to buy some storage containers, I can’t necessarily recommend the 18 gallon Rubber Maid ones. They are definitely sturdy and have held up well over the years, but unless you label the container, you will have no idea what’s in it later. Personally, I would recommend these Sterilite containers so you can see what’s inside. They’re made in the USA and about the same size as the Rubber Maid. How many people have a garage filled with stuff so that they have to park their car outside? I see it frequently. From our estimates above, a 12 ft x 24 ft space for your car (288 square feet) should be worth about $16,000. My own car is worth less than that. I don’t want to scrape ice off my windows in the winter and I hope I never have $16,000 worth of crap filling up my spot in the garage. The point of this little exercise was to get you to think about all that stuff you’re storing and its real value, given the amount of living space it occupies. Most of us don’t need a bigger house, we just need less stuff in the one we have. They say success leads to more success. Often the most difficult part is getting started but once we find ourselves building some momentum on something, we find it gets easier and easier to achieve our goals. With some projects though, we fly out of the starting blocks at a full sprint only to find out that we’re actually running a marathon. Then we lose momentum. We can get stuck, or worse, abandon the race altogether. The marathon example is how it feels when we’re decluttering. Lately, I’ve felt like we weren’t making progress. Not that there wasn’t more stuff to get rid of, but it was getting more difficult. There are some things I’m having a tough time removing from my life and the kids still refuse to let more toys go, even though it seems all they do is play video games. We also have some things identified that we are going to sell on the local Facebook group, but just have trouble making the time. I don’t want to post them for sale on a Friday if we’re not going to be available all weekend. I finally found some renewed motivation.About a month ago, we were going through some of our old textbooks still in the basement. We have an app on our phones called BookScouter, that we checked each book on to see if it was worth any money. We identified about 6 books that we might actually be able to get some money for and put them for sale on Amazon. If you’ve never sold used books on Amazon, give it a try. They make it very easy, although as we found out, you pay for that convenience when Amazon takes their fees out of the sale. They took about $8 in commission for a $38 book. The Amazon Seller Central dashboard makes it easy to see all of the products you are selling. It will show you if you are the lowest price and if not, you can easily see what is the lowest. Then, you can quickly adjust the price to match the lowest one or set your own. When selling books, I suggest you read up on how to rate their condition so that you don’t mislead anyone. Pictures are a great idea too so that potential buyers can see exactly what they are purchasing. In the end, we’re getting about $30 for the book. It was a little bit of a pain to pack it and take it to the post office on a Saturday morning, but we probably would have just donated it otherwise. It was a book we both used over 20 years ago for undergrad. Now, it’s out of the house and the sale has rekindled (Amazon pun intended) my motivation. Incidentally, I re-purposed a Barnes and Noble box to ship the book in. If you’re interested in selling on Amazon, here’s the link to the seller homepage. There, you can get started by placing your products for sale and setting up you bank account information so you can get paid. Note that you can sell almost anything and not just books. Getting money for stuff you don’t want anymore is nice, but just remember the goal isn’t necessarily to make money, it’s to make more room in your house.That’s why I keep checking the seller page and have lowered the listing price for my books several times. Good luck and thanks for reading. I recently started a new hobby because i think everyone should have at least one and until I started blogging I didn't really have any. I have tried golf but still can’t figure out how anyone can justify blocking off 3-4 hours on a Saturday without feeling guilty you aren’t hanging out with your family. I was terrible at it anyway. I was better at brewing beer but again, it’s difficult to set aside a few hours in one block. I gave up on hobbies for years but reading about the health benefits to having some kind of relaxing activity in our lives (like here, here, and here) motivated me to find something. You may know that I like books even though I keep talking about getting rid of more. When I was on a trip a few months ago I found myself wandering around O’Hare airport in Chicago with some time to kill. Naturally, I wandered into a small bookstore squeezed between two hallways and there I discovered some nice journals by a brand called Moleskine. I’m still not sure what it was about them that I liked so much but they were good quality and came in several different sizes and colors. I was tempted to buy one but the anti-stuff side of me teamed up with the travel-light voice and prevented me from doing so. Later, I started thinking there’s no reason I couldn’t make my own. Why not learn a new skill and bind my own journals? Shortly after returning home, I picked up two books from the local library and looked through them for ideas and a supply list. It didn’t look that hard to cut, sew, and glue paper. As it turns out, one of the main stores in the country that sells bookbinding supplies is close by and I had no idea. If you’re interested check out Hollander’s store or website. You can also find a lot of supplies on Amazon. So now, aside from the never-ending hobby of getting extra junk out of my house, I’ve turned my basement bar into a bookbinding station. Don’t worry, there’s still room to mix up a drink or pour a beer. I didn’t have to buy that many supplies. I bought some special needles, a roll of waxed linen thread, an awl to punch holes, a good paper cutter, and a cutting mat. We already had a sharp hobby knife and a metal ruler although I’m already replacing them with better ones. I bought a stack of thick 9”x12” paper on Amazon. Here’s a couple pictures of the first thing I made. It’s nothing fancy. It's small at 4 1/2 x 6 inches but it fits in the side pocket of my backpack nicely. I made the cover from an old folder I had laying around and attached a bookmark made of the same folder. Right now, I’m making a smaller journal but the cover will be thicker and hopefully I’ll do a better job sewing this time. I enjoy bookbinding and it’s usually very relaxing for me. I like the precision of cutting the paper and yet, the freedom that you can make pretty much anything. The book can be large or small, thick or thin, open spine or covered, plain cover or wrapped in paper. The biggest irony of this all is that I hated art class when I was a kid. I thought it was a big waste of time sitting there coloring, painting, cutting paper, or whatever. I was never interested in any sort of art. I liked Math and Science and that was pretty much it. I remember missing many recesses in the first grade just to finish coloring some stupid picture that I didn’t complete during class time. I still hate to color, but I have gained an appreciation for many other forms of art. Maybe it started when I went to bartending school and saw the beauty in a perfectly poured drink like a bloody brain (OK, maybe not the best example) or one of the variations of a pousse-cafe. Now, I appreciate the artwork in good photography, quality writing, music, and in a well constructed book. I’m not saying everyone should start binding their own books, but you should try to find some activity that’s relaxing and exercises your artistic side. There's always knitting, crocheting, painting, and lots of other "-ings" to try. Pick one and give it a shot. If it's not for you, try another one. I think most of us could stand to slow down more often and stop trying to multi-task. Maybe you can start by getting out your kids’ crayons and colored pencils and go make something. |
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Copyright Dave Lubke and www.davelubke.com, 2022
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