Homemaking Tips 🌷 6: Defining "Home"
Homemaking Tips 🌷 6: Defining "Home"
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In Homemaking Tips 🌷 3, we learned that an average American home contains a few hundred thousand items. That sounds like a lot to have, for any individual to upkeep.
Let's take this opportunity, and define what a home is meant for.
A home, is a shelter to protect us from weather elements and danger, it is to hold things that are essential for our daily lives, in order to provide support for the residents, so we can perform our best.
When we start having more things that a home should hold, more management/upkeeping than necessary, then we've converted our home into a storage of things with no purpose and we're forced to work extra hours and energy for without any return, thus, we become more stressful.
If you think your home has been filled with more things than you should really have, and need to start decluttering, but unsure where to begin, here's the trick for today.
One should always begin with the apparent discardable items.
Out of the few hundred thousand items in our households, there must be quite a few old, unuseful, expired items, that we know for sure, aren't needed for the current lifestyle or in the future. For example, computer related things that were popular 10-20 decades ago, but definitely not applicable in the current age. Expired medicine / can food. Things we've kept from our childhood, or those that belong to our kids who are now already grownups. Gifts we received from families and friends that we never got a chance to use.
If we ever laid out E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G from all around our home, into 1 spot, I bet we'll be surprised about how much our homes were holding all this time, and how little portion of it, we actually use. (The 80/20 probably applies in this case)
Obviously it's gonna be an intense labor if we ever tried to to gather every item from the house, so my first suggestion is, as stated above, to begin with the apparent unusable items - - the things that no longer support our current lives or in the near future.
Here is a corner from my home that I worked on. ↓
Let's take a closer look:
A tall shelf and a cabinet, to stored various kinds of knickknacks since my husband and I started living in this home, for about 5 years. Basically for all these years, it was all about accumulation. Then came our first child, and a couple year later the 2nd, but now adding on no longer made sense, even though family members had increased.
It's simple math, if we keep adding, and discard less as frequently, then we'll have surplus, and then be swallowed by the quicksand of things, and anxiety will hit.
As I've mentioned in several of my other posts, giving birth of my 2nd was a turning point to start living more intentionally, because at that what when I felt my home was filled up 100% with things/furniture, but my house wasn't going to expand, so naturally my next thing was to creates more room for my kids to play, rather than adding or keeping things, especially unused ones.
Since my kids were my priority, and they were my motivation, therefore getting rid of excess/old items of was relatively easy. Things in good condition were donated, and other times I would leave by my driveway for passerby to freely pick up.
Homemaking 🌷 8: Decumulate (part 1)
Homemaking 🌷 9: Decumulate (part 2)
My husband didn't understand at first, but I kept going because I knew this action would eventually bring benefits, and it's been about 2-3 years into the life of decluttering / living with less, and he completely got used to it. It's all about routine.
Stay tuned for more inspirations!
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