Dealing with to much stuff

Hello again!
It has been a quiet week here on the blog again. As usual, quiet weeks on the blog generally mean that it isn't so calm and quiet here in real life. It has been a good week, just full.

 On Tuesday we started our homemakers group up again for the summer. We are meeting weekly in June, July and August. This first week was a kind of introductory one and the friend and I who are leading decided to have a discussion time on Simplicity or Living Purposefully. That is something I have been thinking on a working towards for a long time but it has become something I feel even more passionate about in this last year.

  More journey towards living more purposefully/simply is a work in progress but I do feel that I am making progress.  My goals are to cut out those things (whether physical items or things that take my time) that don't help me in me in my walk with God and to focus on Him and the things that help my walk with Him.

  I have felt led to have less stuff in our lives which is why I made the choice not to buy anything this year other than what we need (food, gas and a few things like toilet paper mostly) and a few other selected items (like a water purifier and other things that we are trying to have so that we can be prepared for possible emergencies) and instead put money into an emergency fund.

This week to help in our quest to have less stuff we held a garage sale. A portion of the money that we made from it went to help buy a good bike for Jonathan. (Good bikes for the whole family is one of those things that we like to have for fun and recreation but also something that we use for transportation to help use less gas. It was an item that I put under the being prepared category.)

   The garage sale kept us pretty busy much of this week as we were going through stuff, setting up, running it and then putting everything back to rights afterwards. I had talked to a friend who is knowledgeable about running garage sales and her advice was to have it on Thursday and Friday and that close to the first of the month was the best time. She also advised having nice signs. I think I could have done better in the sign category but we followed her advise on the other items and I think it was good. The sale went well and we made more than I expected. What a blessing! Along with the money that Jonathan had already we had more than enough to get him a good (not cheap) bike.

   Here are some of the principles that are helping me (I am still working at it!) get rid of clutter:

• Realizing that we can still remember a person or an event just fine even if we get rid of an item that came from them/that time. I struggle with sentimentality about stuff. It is fine to keep something that I really enjoy and use but to keep something that is basically useless to me just because it came from someone special is silly.
• Realizing that I can make things do double/triple duty if necessary. I didn't need that plastic cake stand (that had been given to me and I never ever used) because if I ever need a stand for a cake I can put a (pretty)platter on some sort of platform (like a big vase or some wood chunks) and it would look nicer than a plastic stand anyway. This applies in so many areas!
• Realizing that not all clothes look good on me and since I don't need them, why am I keeping them??!
• Realizing that just because I enjoyed a book (magazine, whatever) once doesn't mean it is the type that I want to read often or even have available for everybody I know to read. Some books just aren't worth keeping around to take up shelf space. In my opinion many books are very worth shelf space - we have tons of books and I love that - but not all are.
• Setting some "rules" that if things don't fit in the space that is available for it then something needs to go.
• Working gently and patiently with my children to help them see what they really want to have and enjoy and what is just making their life more difficult because it makes it harder for them to keep their room neat and tidy.
• Being willing to listen to my family about what they want to get rid of and not make them keep things for silly reasons. I have been known to have a child keep a shirt that they didn't like just because I did and I thought they might need it to go with a certain skirt but instead it simply stayed in their drawer for months making it overfull. There have been other stories like that in my life.

There are so many other silly reasons that I have kept things and I am learning to have a little less and truly enjoy that. I am striving to only have what I find either useful or beautiful. I do still try to be prepared for most situations but I am beginning to realize that it takes a lot less to be prepared for most things than sometimes we might think. Sometimes when I have that being prepared mindset and have trouble letting go of things we don't use I have learned to think about what they had 100 years ago (most likely not whatever thing that I am dealing with) and they generally lived just fine without it.

Do you struggle with dealing with stuff? What are your methods?