Vacation day one: No real clothes until around 4pm when Kevin had to take out the garbage and I had to go downstairs to pick up a prescription. In my books, that’s a huge win. The only better outcome would have been no real clothes at all.
We spent the day reading, drinking coffee and reading some more. We also spent some of the time decluttering and reorganizing.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you may be stuck in the WE part of those statements. The Minimalism Challenge was MY project and Kevin has not professed to be any part of it. That remains the same – he will not be participating and as I told myself, though I never said it to anyone else, I won’t include his things in my daily totals. Our things, perhaps, but nothing that was his alone.
Today, though, he got himself involved and sorted/decluttered his toiletries and similar products. It’s funny how less than an hour with your stuff can reveal so much excess. Here are his two separate hauls.
For me, the challenge has been rolling along. I’ve been working at it daily and the goals have remained easy to meet. I credit being able to work from home two days a week as a contributor. It would be much more challenging and I’d probably have to play catch up on the weekends if I didn’t have that opportunity.
Day 11: I didn’t even really have to hit up my bathroom for these because 8/11 of the products had never been opened or used. They’re primarily things I was sent in subscription boxes and it wasn’t that I planned to never use them, I’m just not really a product kind of person.
Day 12: A collection of randoms pieces from different areas of the house – things that had been sent to me, old pieces of jewelry that I don’t/won’t wear, a clutch that a fantasy version of myself would use, but that the real version couldn’t even match to anything in her closet.
Day 13: Again, random pieces from all over.
Day 14: On this day, I decided to dive into my craft storage. Coincidentally, I’d just started a book about slow living that touched on decluttering and one of the authour’s statements hit close to home on this day.
We fear the loss of identity that comes from realizing were no longer the crafty person or the snowboarder, the suit-wearing corporate or the comic-book collector, so we keep the things that tie us to that story, afraid to look too closely lest we see how much we’ve changed.
Keeping that in mind helped me to blast through some things I’d been hanging onto for way too long, planning projects that I knew I could do, but that, when I was honest, I didn’t even want to do.
Day 15: More miscellany. Some keepsakes from when I was a kid, more craft supplies, some painting took, some no longer needed cleaning supplies, a trillion candy canes and a really nice wine set – but I don’t even drink!
As I told the friends in my Facebook group, I’m blasting through the days and I know it’s going to get tough, but at this point, I just can’t imagine it.
You can read up on days 1-5 here and days 6-10 here.
