The march towards Minimalism continues...

[MissAnnersleyismyhero]

Hey all, thought I'd make a new thread to encourage us all to keep going on the journey to minimalism!

Welcome Natalie.
Minimalism this week has involved throwing out a pair of socks that were developing holes! That. Is. All. (so far)

Well - when I say throwing out - I actually mean stuffing in the plastic bag of similarly holed items in the spare doom - waiting to get a bagfull to take take to chazzer as rag.

Hi Natalie :) welcome!

Arti that's very virtuous of you! I used to collect all the rags (started when I volunteered at BHF, I donated soooo much stuff then - not that you'd know it if you saw how messy the house still is!) but ATM I am just chucking everything. The only things I'm keeping aside are some educational toys to give my best friend (a reception teacher who has already said she would love anything going)

I've managed nearly two bin bags today. I'm still having to take it easy physically (decided to stop now) but I'm finding it a little easier to be ruthless with toys etc.

Hello Natalie This is a good place to start getting into the swing of things!

Just to confuse you all (oops ), this is jellyfish here, aka delasi from way back, I had to re-register yet again, but, I have a good reason!...

...I have finally decluttered my digital space! One thing I have really been burying my head in the sand with is email and newsletters and the like, I have several emails that get used for different things and I let a couple run wild and it was starting to get a bit much, with lots of plain rubbish coming through the inboxes. So, I have fully cleared our regular accounts and completely abandoned/deleted one account as unsubscribing would have taken ages... I deleted something like 3000 emails My previous MN account was with the abandoned email so I just created a new account instead but made sure to untick all of the communications boxes.

I can't do too much still, basically just on rest for a few days (hence I am now much more active on MN!), so at least I feel this has made me a little bit more productive.

So, I am setting myself some goals for the next week or two or three, to slowly ease into with DH before DC2arrives:

• finish packing the hospital bag (just needs some extra clothes)
• put away baby clothes and put bedding on the cot
• put away the Jumperoo/play gym, but easy to access for when the time comes
• deal with the DIY bag of mess
• sort through the random warranties/certificates
• throw out just about anything I find that isn't properly useful/lovely (sounds so vague but I'm bound to stumble on some stuff in our bedroom, I just know it)
• develop some better system of toy storage

Not all entirely minimal, but it all helps. We have a loft but we have banned using it, as it's difficult to get into, so I've decided that if we have stuff stored it's only because we will access it again at some point relatively soon and that access must be handy (eg suitcases under the bed, winter bedding in hall cupboard). We have very little in the way of storage outside of the loft, but I really can't be doing with all this precarious climbing into the ceiling business and I don't see the point of storing things I don't need to access easily. That has been quite the mental shift!

Any tips on toy storage? I like the concept of Trofast but we can't get to Ikea anyway, we currently have a bookcase type thing that we were given but it's just no use to us, DC1 loves clearing a shelf or six and it hasn't actually held any toys in months... on the other hand, I have an old basket and empty nappy box that all of the toys have now gone into, which is much easier to manage and DC1 actually puts stuff back in there (very, very occasionally). So I think I want something like open tubs... do I?

And fuzzpig great news on the 2 bags!

Hi again Larry :o

Totally agree on the loft. Ours is tiny, and you can only get to it by hauling yourself through a hole by balancing on the banister - there's not even a ladder I think there's some random crap in there ATM but long term I want it empty TBH. It's a far cry from our first place which had a fab attic, we used to go up there with the DSDs and make it into a den!

For toy storage I hate to say it but Trofast is excellent :o do you have any friends or relatives who might be going near one soon?

There are similar products available online though I think - sometimes plastic buckets, sometimes fabric (although personally I would stick to plastic as easier to clean - one day if I'm less slatternly I might upgrade!)

Ikea do deliver some things. It's cheaper than the petrol and hassle for us a lot if the time. I'm pretty sure we've had Trofast delivered.

It's great. We have a mix of deep drawers (Duplo, cars etc),medium (jigsaws) and shallow (sticker books, drawing paper)

You do need to go through it every couple of months to cull the broken bits of plastic toys which lurk at the bottom. But otherwise it's great.

Hello new people, returners by the way!

We decluttered our garden this weekend - mammoth pruning and tidying session plus we ate our leeks and carrots :)

Tomorrow i'm taking the big tub of foreign coins to our local charity shop. We never rummage through before a holiday so there's no point keeping it.

Baby clothes slowly keep heading out of the door. My bro and his wife now need to crack on with giving me nieces and nephews so the big baby equipment can go (Moses basket has finally met its match in sleep-refusing cuddle-bunny DC3)

And we had a regular cull of the crap that accumulates in the kids bedrooms too so they're looking streamlined.

I'm focusing on books soon. I want a better way of storing fewer children's books so they can see what we have and I can rotate them properly. The bookshelf is tall and behind a door so we just don't read as much as I'd like and if they take books off the shelves they're in the way of the door so I get very antsy about the doorway bring cluttered! I want them accessible and in a cosy corner. Finding Pinterest is great for bookmarking ideas. I have a minimalism board for general things I find and then boards for projects like this reading corner.

Oh and re digital clutter - unroll.me is a great way of in subscribing quickly from mailing lists.

Trofast is brilliant for kids toys.
Funnily enough we have two units which I need to de-sticker and photograph for sale, after 9 years of good service. We have just emptied them of Lego as the buckets were too big for the different types of bricks and there was lots of wasted space. We've purchased something with smaller transparent drawers which is better suited to Lego storage. Sadly we are in France otherwise I'd have done a very good deal for you fuzzpig.

We still have Trofast in younger DCs room!

Thanks for the info on Trofast, I feared I'd be told how great they are! I checked out delivery following your post everton but it's £39 and we really have nothing else to buy from there, so it nearly doubles the cost of the unit I was looking at.

I've had a look on eBay and Gumtree for second hand closer by but nothing at the moment, and most people we know don't drive (we live fairly central in the city, it's really hard to drive here), the ones that do almost never go to Ikea as it takes forever getting out of the city and then there's the usual Ikea busy-ness. I wanted some Malm drawers for our bedroom when we moved but couldn't for this reason, so we had to go for some slightly less attractive Argos ones

Hmm, will have to get creative... I do like a bit of repurposing! And y'know, look at less interesting solutions from places like Wilko and Argos...

In other news, I actually did some stuff this evening! I previously put all of our DVDs (the ones we actually chose to keep) in a big disc wallet thing, instead of having individual cases, but all of our games (maybe 30-odd that we kept) stayed in their cases because, um... DH is a gamer and games need to stay in their proper cases, or something... which was fine, they didn't actually take up a lot of room, but now DC1 has figured out how to get into just about everything which has resulted in a lot of cases and discs and booklets on the floor/in the bedroom/with the toys etc. So I just put all of the discs into the remaining slots in the wallet and all of the cases and booklets have gone into a carrier bag, DH's job is to decide if he wants to keep any of it (it's not important, but this is basically his only hobby so I don't feel the need to strip it completely bare). But the result is we have an even further streamlined disc situation, and I have a feeling DH probably doesn't care about the cases and booklets now as he gave up when DC1 kept running off with them!

Oh and thanks everton for the unroll.me recommendation, I remembered seeing something earlier in the thread but couldn't remember what it was, I'll be trying that out shortly for remaining stuff

£39? Ouch! It was £15 when we did it and we bought various bits of Malm too so it ended up fairly reasonable

What about clubbing together with other local friends to get one delivery of all the stuff you all want?

Can you tell I really want you to experience the joy of Trofast???

everton I like the enthusiasm! Alas, it's not to be on this occasion. I am waiting for the day that we get a car and driving licences, and we move (yet again), and then I shall delight in all manner of flat pack fun.

Only in a truly minimal way though, of course

Aww that's a shame clear :o I decided we are going to replace all our drawers when we move. Assuming we are less slatternly by then. :) They are a bit worse for wear now so it'd be nice to start from scratch and then keeping them clean will be easier (but there's no point doing that yet as I'm not clean enough!)

Oops, just seen it's actually Larry who is looking for some right now. The offer would extend to any fellow minimalisers, if it were possible.

.

Ah I see, I was trying to figure out whether I'd already said I wanted more :o

I've spend hours over the last few days entering the modern era by ripping loads of CDs to MP3, so I can get rid of the hundreds I have. A few years ago I minimised my CD collection in the sense that I binned loads, and put the rest in one of those CD file thingies rather than keeping them in their cases, but now it was finally time for the next step...

I was getting really fed up with the process of ripping them all (very tedious as each one takes about 5 mins before you have to come back and put the next on in the CD drive, so couldn't really get on with anything else properly), until my DH pointed out that I wasn't being very minimalist about ripping them all, regardless of whether I've actually listened to them in the last few years. I'd been telling him to get rid of books he hasn't touched in a few years earlier, so I guess my own advice was coming back to bite me on the arse... But then I just took half an hour to blitz through all the remaining CDs, forcing myself to make an instant 'keep' or 'ditch' decision, and I've reduced the pile by 2/3 so less to rip and less computer memory taken up too with music I'll probably rarely listen to (and can always find online if I have the major urge, I suppose). Funny how sometimes I can be so blind to a knee-jerk 'keep this thing' tendency around some types of possessions, even though I'm very good a chucking out other types of clutter!

Everyone is very quiet here! I hope it's because you're all busy minimising rather than accumulating ;)

Bag of clothes going to a friend today. Gearing up to a wardrobe sort out for myself too.

DH and I appear to have got into the habit of a quick declutter of crap twice a week (it wasn't a conscious decision, we just seemed to both get sick of stuff) - so we find a home for things or we bin it. It means we're keeping on top of broken toys, dried up felt tips, weird accumulated crap with just 15 mins effort.

Also just been given the date of the local church bazaar. We shall be contributing to the bric a brac for sure! And the local charity shop as an appeal out for new stock :)

Being v minimalist in the kitchen at the moment - the crockery is still operating at bare minimum although we have topped up cutlery and it's working fairly well. Also focusing on meal planning to minimise food waste - we're v good at this generally but trying to be even better. We now only plan 5 meals a week as we always have enough for 2 'scraps' meals - bits of veg, a leftover chicken leg etc. Hopefully we'll start to see a budget minimisation as a result too

I lost you all! Well, dropped off my TIO... anyway

Haven't been doing too much as we've been either resting or sorting out some stuff pre-DC2 arrival. However I chucked all of the boxes and booklets for the computer games we have that I put in the disc holder, DH said he wasn't bothered so they're gone which is good. I suspect we'll get rid of quite a few of the discs in there at some point, but it isn't really a priority right now. I will however be clearing out some tops that are getting holes in and some maternity wear that I had from my first pregnancy and ended up not wearing this time (despite being the same time of year). Still have my boxes and laundry to sort and the DIY mess Hoping DH will help me out, probably not tomorrow but maybe Thursday or Friday during DS' nap.

We've bought some bits, but nothing much or unnecessary; got a potty for DS (eek) and a step stool as he's been standing on the bathroom bin to wash his hands in the sink, but I'm not sure the bin will last too long like that!

I've been on the Konmari thread and I think it's distracted me from here. Still, it's all about getting rid of stuff however you choose to do it.

No Gumtree interest, boo, but my friend will take the highchair for her new grandson. Might try the other item, a baby walker which is also a dolly pushchair on Ebay. It's waaaaay too nice to take to the chazzer without a further attempt to sell.

I am seeing clutter everywhere but have realised that DH and I are very guilty of doing half a job. So we have 3 boxes of children's clothes to go in the loft...but they're sat in the front room. I put DD1's dollhouse in our room so we can pack it up for the loft (she's not that interested in it but I think she will be when she's a bit older)...and it's still in our room. We have also slid backwards on the paperwork front I think DH working from home hasn't helped makes me feel better to blame him as he has cluttered our bedroom (his office) with work stuff.

However, the DDs' bedroom is a delight. Even if it gets messy it takes no time to clear up. Just shows that we can do it. I can't wait till every room is in the same state.

Hope you are all well and larry I know what you mean about DIY mess!

Hi there
I am slowly making my way through this thread as I am desperate to live in a less cluttered state.

I was wondering about children's clothes. I need to buy some winter clothes this weekend for my 2 dc's as they have nothing that fits.

Can anyone help me with keeping this simple as I normally buy far too much and the piles of washing it creates just adds to our mess. I have one ds 7 and a dd 2.5 if that helps.
What do others do to try and apply minimalism to clothing but still ensuring you have enough?

Hi jemster.

I try to stick with colours that go together so their clothes are mix and match rather than loads of individual outfits that don't go with each other. I make a list of how many things we need after a proper try on to see what still fits, and I do their clothes shop in one big hit so I'm not tempted to keep adding a bit here or there which risks you buying too much of one thing.

DS is at school so needs relatively few clothes as he's in uniform or comfy (i.e. old!) clothes Monday to Friday, so only really needs nice clothes for Saturday and Sunday.

I also only have one winter coat, one hoodie and one rain coat for each of them. One pair of shoes and one pair of wellies. I know lots of people buy several of these but they're the bits you can easily minimise. It also keeps the house much more streamlined and minimal!

Thanks everton that's really helpful, i will start by getting out what they have and making a list of what they need.

I also try hard to buy unisex to pass clothes down. Fortunately 4yo DD has never got into pink much (I'd like to claim credit for not fuelling the pink monster but I think it's just her!) so she does wear a lot of hand me down tops and jeans. All her winter coats have been her brother's. And when she's done it will be passed on to her baby brother.

Boxes of clothes are in the loft. The dolls house wouldn't fit through the hatch!!

DH has tidied his 'office', hurrah. Going to put all our stationery items in the bureau he works on as it is everywhere at the moment and you can never find what you need despite knowing that you own it.

Need to do a big tidy as friends are visiting in half term (I invited them to 'make' me tidy ) Going to take our front room rug to the tip as it looks revolting. Want a new one but all the ones I like cost £££££ and the existing one has been slowly ruined by the DDs so daren't fork out until they are at the less sticky stage (does that ever happen??!)

I have discovered minimalism and I'm in. (Work full time, DH, 2 DC, 2 cats and an indoor guinea pig with piles of tat all over the shop and a big book habit.)

I have been gradually decluttering over the last couple of months - still lots to go, but I am starting to see impact.

Half term means I will have some time for charity shop runs and deep cleaning.

We will reduce!!!