that girl jen

Downsizing. It’s a trend. It’s all over the YouTubes. All the cool kids are doing it, what are you waiting for?

Welcome to a quick post about the past 3 months with downsizing our lives and our home.

My Uncle Thom made a great comment about downsizing that sums up how I’ve been feeling about living in a smaller house. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), ” You aren’t downsizing you’re RIGHT SIZING.” That statement clicked with me. CORRECT!

We had a large 2400 sqft house, that was really just a bit too much space for the 3 of us. Had it been actually build FOR us ground up, we would have planned the space and floor plan much differently. And while we’re not quite ready to purchase a plot of land, create a blueprint and break ground, we were in a position to make a healthy decision. Deciding to live a bit more mindfully made perfect sense to us at this point of our lives. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll have that 5000 sqft NYC penthouse life, but for now we’ve decided to just live with what we need.

That’s actually a liberating feeling. Having only what you truly use. In theory, we should be using less resources, so lower utilities and rent is a positive thing. But getting to that position takes a bit of work; mentally and physically. This past few months have been sometimes overwhelming and exhausting.

Round one of our downsizing was to purge before the actual move. We managed collectively as a family to move with about 20% less stuff. It was a good start, but we knew that realistically we had to get rid of more once we moved into our new “cozier” space. We decided to initially get rid of stuff that we were 100% good with never seeing again, or wanting to replace. The rest came with us to the new place, and has been going through it’s final judgement.

We donated a lot of stuff. Got rid of a few bags of useless stuff that wasn’t worth donating. It’s funny when you think the house is fairly clean, that you never realize the little things that creep in and find a way to junk up the house. Especially when you have extra closet space.

So many boxes and so much stuff actually made its way over to the new place. Lots of memories, and some guilt and burdens came with us. We’ve been going through a box of stuff every week to attempt to better plan a place and space for each item. Like most people we do have a few things that we don’t want to part with just yet, so they’re finding a new home in the garage for storage. The MAIN goal is to keep what we need and will use, and to get rid of the “What if I’ll need this 3 years from now” stuff.

No use to hold on to things because you MIGHT find a used for them one day. Chances are if you haven’t made that thing useful by now, your won’t ever find a use for that thing, so get rid of it. That’s been where I’ve hit a bit of a brick wall, and so I took a break.

Thanks to Youtube I’ve been watching a ton of different motivational and inspirational videos about minimalism and downsizing. Of course a new space means a bit of shopping, so we’ve been getting a few things that will work in our smaller space. It’s definitely motivational to get rid of a bunch of stuff to make room for a few new and necessary items.

We opted for a smaller dining set. Letting go of oversized furniture that wouldn’t fit the new space allowed us to redecorate for the place we’re currently in.

Between the Marie Kondo “Spark Joy” method, the Minimalist Mom “container theory” we’ve been setting up for our last and “final boss” of our house organization overhaul. Next will be Swedish Death Cleaning. It’s kinda like the “always wear clean underwear rule” LOL – KINDA– more like if your friends and family had to take care of getting your “estate” in order after you’ve passed, would you want to burden them with all your unnecessary and useless crap?

I’m hoping that by the end of January I’ll have done the first round of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Then the house will HOPEFULLY be closer to a constant state of “SHOW READY!” I can’t wait for that!

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