Do I really need that?

While we are waiting for the great strides that the laneway house will be making in the next few weeks, we are busy doing some decorating for the new place? Compensating? Maybe, but the tasks have to be done and we will do them.  Ordering lights.  Arranging for a headboard to be built.  Checking out the bed situation.

Plus this evening DH told me that he would like to go up to the storage space this weekend and see if we can winnow down the amount of, well, crap that we have there.  Even if we just organize a couple of boxes to be carted off to the Salvation Army we’ll be further ahead.

As if to emphasize the point, tonight I managed to break the coffee grinder.  Not the whole thing, just the lid.  Necessary to grind coffee as it contains the switch to turn the grinder off and on.  Do we have another grinder?  Of course!  Plus another lid.  But not here.  No, they are put away in the storage space.  If we are lucky we will run across them when we are rooting around the storage space this weekend.  If not, we will have to buy our coffee pre-ground, because we must have coffee.

At times like this, it’s good to review a few rules for thinning down our belongings.  Here, we see “10 Decluttering Principles to Help Anyone Clear the Clutter”.  Things to remember:

1. Stop the Flow of Stuff Coming In.

We’ve already started cutting back on the papers entering the home, switching to emailed bills that are stored online, and we refuse to buy anything new.  New books go straight onto the Kindle.  But that doesn’t include furnishings for the new place, we have boxes of lights piled about.  So there’s still a little work to be done there.

2. Declutter at Least One Item a Day.

OK, noble aspiration.  But it’s difficult to find one item per day.  I have managed to get rid of some decorating magazines by passing them along.  And I’ve been throwing out my shabbier socks.

Let’s skip ahead.

5. Decide to Not Keep Things out of Guilt or Obligation.

This is the tough one, isn’t it?  Especially since I’ve got so much of my parents’ things to dispose of.  What is an extra dish or glass, what is a relic?  Something to work on.

But it’s all summed up with the final suggestion:

10. Do Not Waste Your Life on Clutter.  Every item you own takes time out of your life: time to manage it, clean it, repair it, and maintain it; time to choose between objects of a similar category; time spent shopping for it… and that doesn’t even mention the time spent earning the money to pay for it in the first space. Decide to sacrifice less of your precious life on the pursuit and ownership of stuff.

That’s the goal.  to live life with the minimum of belongings to weigh us down and complicate our lives. Because you can get trapped by your extra stuff.

It not just clutters your life, it can cost you money.  We are paying for a storage space every month.  But some people pay a lot.  

In the basement of Tribeca’s newest luxury high rise, the storage wars are underway. 56 Leonard just sold a 200 square-foot storage unit for $300,000 — that’s $1,500 a square foot.

More than we are paying.  But why pay anything?  Better to just rid ourselves of the stuff we aren’t using.