Becoming a Minimalist: Day 6

Today I wanted to fill you in on a little tip I read in Lorilee's book. The first thing that I shared from her that I loved was the recommendation to dream a little dream of what you wanted your life to be like. Your home. Your schedule. The second tip I loved and can't change is this... 
Just say "no" to storage! 

My gut reaction to this little nugget was "um, yeah... how do you expect me to be organized when I don't have anything to store it in?!" None the less, I got to cleaning and organizing and when I was done with round two of my decluttering I had actually emptied about a dozen clear plastic containers. And then it hit me... I have held on to so much of our "stuff" because it had a nice home tucked neatly inside these bins. Had I not had these bins, I would have been forced to decide whether or not I wanted to try and make a home for these things to begin with. So for me, storage containers just became a means to make my clutter easy on the eyes. That is not what I was aiming for. And so the storage bins are slowly disappearing. Hubs actually choked when he saw me shipping out some plastic bins I had hung on to for years and, from deep within his frugal soul, cried"but we could always use more storage!" This gave me the perfect opportunity to explain that if we don't have storage lying around we won't look for things to store and since we are trying to stop storing and start cleaning, this is a perfectly logical step.
He's a smart guy. He gets it. 
Now don't get me wrong... we have and enjoy some storage. We keep only a few toys in the kids rooms and those are gathered into a shallow bin slipped under the kids' beds. We also have Christmas decorations, clothes waiting to be worn by the younger siblings, and toys that aren't quite age appropriate yet. Those things are stored neatly in tubs in the basement. To be honest, I wish they weren't. I wish we could pare down to zero excess but alas, Hubs and I agree that it would be wasteful to put ourselves in a position to have to re-buy in the future so, for now, we wait.
So today is simple... once you empty a lovely, lid-ed storage container, give it away to someone who actually needs it and then... don't buy more! That stuff is not made from particularly environmentally friendly materials and is expensive anyway! 

For more minimizing tips, check this out.