It’s been 10 days since my last entry on here. Unfortunately work and life has taken over and I didn’t have time to update the blog. However I’m still making a lot of progress.
Last week we sorted out our dressing room (a spare bedroom where we have clothes rails and my wife has her makeup). It’s not as posh as it sounds. We both went through our clothes racks. On our first pass over the racks we tried to look at everything we like and didn’t like or wear anymore. On the second pass we took out a couple of items to give to charity. Mostly older stuff and clothes we hadn’t worn for ages. We did a third and forth pass each time removing things we could part with. Doing this allowed us both to cut our collection of clothes in half. We donated them all to charity and rather than feeling sad about giving up some clothes, we are overjoyed at how easy it is to see what we have.
Each morning selecting clothes is so easy. We haven’t kept any old clothes, many that we had been keeping for gardening in or fixing the car or painting in. I got rid of three extra pairs of trainers. I was keeping them because they where still good. I just didn’t like them anymore and couldn’t bare to donate them because I’d spent a small fortune on them.
My wife was also really disciplined and donated a load of stuff. In total we filled two massive bags for charity and a third bag for landfill. The landfill bag was full of ruined clothes we kept for posterity or some kind of nostalgia.
We have also listed a ton of stuff on eBay. Some of it has already sold and some of it is waiting to sell. We feel like we have moved into an even larger house. We have so much space and it’s so much easier to organise things. I thought it would be a difficult process but it has been easier than I expected. Each day for example when choosing a pair of socks (I have far too many socks) I choose a pair to wear and I bin an old pair. Whenever I go in my desk drawer I scout it out to see if anything else can go. Whenever I go in a cupboard or the garage I’m assessing what I see and seeing what fat I can trim. It’s a really therapeutic process.
Our garage now resembles a storage unit. But the upside is we are making money from it. Everything is up for sale or in the process of being listed. So we are making space & money.
We calculated by downsizing into a one bedroom apartment with no car (from a 4 bedroom townhouse with a car) we will save around £7k a year in rent, bills and car costs. That’s a lot of money. We are also hoping that by minimising our belongings a one bedroom apartment will feel more than sufficient for our needs.
I’ll update the blog again tomorrow with some more details of our downsizing. I’d love to hear your thoughts so feel free to comment.
John
