The change to minimalistic living

[quin]

Love it!
I am in the process of doing the same thing. I live at home with my parents but now that I have finished Uni and started working full time I want to move out on my own. I'm determined to only leave with possessions that I love, that I use and that make me feel better about myself!

I have become so much more of a conscious consumer.

Thanks for the extra inspiration!

[kattsand]

Here's a nice little article I found yesterday. The translation isn't perfect but you get the point.
Google Translate

[Gazzali]

Originally Posted by kattsand

Hope this is the right section to post this in.

My dorm room is 22 square meter (including the toilet)

This is what it looked like about 6 months ago

What you see is:
Two arcade machines
One pinball machine
Surround System
Hundreds of dvds
And loads of crap stashed away in the closets

(I almost grasp for air looking at that picture)

One day I came to the conclusion that I don't need that stuff. So I started to sell everything I didn't need.

This is what my home looks like today. Pretty much everything serves a purpose and I feel a lot better without all that stuff.

For all the money I got I bought a bigger bed (Love it!)


I still enjoy playing some Xbox occasionally so I kept it with just the one game I play. Without the Xbox my TV would not have served a purpose so I would have sold it too


My coffee corner and the glass cabinet that contains some stuff that I really enjoy.


Closer look on the cabinet. I like whisky so I've got some glasses. Thinking of selling the ones in the middle because I really don't need 8 glasses.


Other than that I pretty much only own clothes, books and some random stuff in the closets that I don't need but I haven't found any buyers or people I can give them away to.

People ask me all the time why I got rid of everything. All I say is that I didn't need it. They usually think I'm crazy but I just love it!
I really enjoy the stuff I have and the new things that I buy because now I only buy things that serve a purpose.

All the furniture is from IKEA btw!

I hope some of you people have made the same change and are willing to share you experience.

well rather than throwing the old things away you can re sell to get some money...in singapore we have cash converter shops

[kattsand]

More than a year has gone by.

My little "quest" is still going. I now move around a lot. At the moment I live in Gothenburg, Sweden in a friends apartment while he's on a trip to the States for two months. I sold all my furniture, Tv, xbox and so on about 6 months ago. I own 5 boxes and 1 suitcases of stuff. I had a car for a couple of months while working in northern Norway but I sold it when i moved to Gothenburg. I'm thinking of selling all my books (1 of the boxes). That's almost 20% of everything I own (haha).

Anyone else doing any progress?

[nonexistent]

Fab Kattsand. Way to go!!!

I used to live like this with just the bare essentials (l remember only having 2 glasses, knives, forks, spoons, mugs, plates in case l had a guest!), and then l got married and had kids! Managed to sell my ex husband off before he past his 'sell by date' and now l just live with my kids who own all the clutter in our home and l still possess almost nothing

[votoshka]

Very inspiring! Now, I have no desire to be a complete minimalist, but I do have wayyyy too much "stuff" bogging me down. I find it very difficult to get rid of it too. I think I need to work on my thought processes here... I am a hoarder in some ways (well not like those people who hoard so much they can't move around their homes) but I get a sort of sentimental attachment to stuff and find it hard to let go of... I still sometimes catch myself thinking back to stuff I don't have anymore and feeling nostalgic, or wondering what happened to it... which is probably why I don't dump more of the stuff that I DO have!

All that being said, I would love to be able to walk into a tidy, uncluttered living environment! Stuff gets messy very quickly when you've got a lot of it (not helped by living with 3 kids LOL).

If anyone out there has managed to take themselves from a nostalgic "pack rat" to someone who has decluttered and streamlined their lives, I'd love to hear how they did it . It's the emotional attachment/guilt etc. that gets me. I tend to anthropomorphise EVERYTHING which doesn't help either!

[Liveformx64]

Almost without exception, the less I come to own the happier and lighter I feel.

Since it has been over a year since my last post in this thread, I have since sold everything I own that wouldn't fit in or on top of my car and moved from Pennsylvania to California.

Now, the things I do buy I make sure they are of exceptional quality and will last, as well as remind me of abundance and the passion that went into their construction.

By the way, in my experience the fastest way to change the way you live is to change WHERE you live. Nothing breaks old habits faster than completely and utterly changing your surroundings.

Life is too short and the world is changing too fast to worry about "should have dones", and "could have beens." Get off your ass and create the life you want today.

[metamorph]

Originally Posted by Liveformx64

Almost without exception, the less I come to own the happier and lighter I feel.

Since it has been over a year since my last post in this thread, I have since sold everything I own that wouldn't fit in or on top of my car and moved from Pennsylvania to California.

Now, the things I do buy I make sure they are of exceptional quality and will last, as well as remind me of abundance and the passion that went into their construction.

By the way, in my experience the fastest way to change the way you live is to change WHERE you live. Nothing breaks old habits faster than completely and utterly changing your surroundings.

I feel exactly the same. Moving houses/cities about 6x in the last 10 years and between 2 countries was just perfect to declutter. Everytime I moved it was a big "chuck it party". If it did not fit into a car, I either gave it to friends or tossed it. The best is starting a paperless life. Those bloody books take so much space and weigh so much. Now everything is ebook or audiobook except for maybe 10 paperbacks. I scan invoices and then toss them. I could live in a very zen apartment, but for the sake of guests, I put some pictures on the walls

[Aine]

:Like: Looks good, kattsand!

I have been on both sides of this spectrum before, ironically. As a child, I had every material thing I could ask for but never felt like it was "enough". As a teen, I was given free reign with my parents' credit cards and, well. I had all kinds of cool stuff and no concept whatever of its value or cost, relatively speaking. Then I got pregnant, and found myself getting married and booted out. I thought I knew minimalism at that point. More than once I had to sell numerous possessions to scrape together enough cash for rent or food. We never had anything nice for long.

Then I got divorced, and he kept most of my things. I had no bed, very few clothes, only a few DVDs (what I'd managed to stash in my purse). I had a PC and the bare necessities for my children, but virtually nothing else. We lived in a 1000 sq ft apartment for a year, and we thought it felt huge! No couch or chairs, no lamps, I slept on the floor, cocooned in a comforter. No bookshelf--we had piles of books all over the floor. We didn't even have a trash can for months and months.

It was profoundly freeing and deeply maddening, all at the same time, LOL.

I think that experience made me a little mental, because I really overcompensated once I had the funds to do so. It was as if I was on a mental crusade to never feel a want for anything material in the world ever again!

Since then, it's come full-circle and we have downsized considerably--but this time it's voluntary. It's coming from a place of generosity, and a desire to live more harmoniously with our surroundings, instead of feeling owned by them.

It turned out that the fabulous couch I bought fit even more perfectly in my friend's lvr than my own, so we sold it to her. I only got a fraction of the purchase price, but that's okay. I like to think that I really bought it for her all along.

Just some random insights of mine on the topic!