Over the course of my marriage we’ve gone through stages where we just had to get rid of the junk and so we’d have a garage sale or donate things. But in the past year or so we’ve really just wanted to down-size. We had accumulated so much stuff, our house was full and cluttered; and that made it too overwhelming for me to deal with. We decided that we would have a sale. Not just a garage sale, but one that encompassed most of our living space. We would go through the bottom levels of our home (we have a split level house) and bring the things we wanted/needed to keep upstairs. Everything else we had decided would be up for grabs. We thought about doing this for the whole summer before following through at the end of September this year- even though we really wanted to do it, we had lacked motivation to follow through.
Finally, we sat down and planned. We organized our house and put the ad in the paper, motivated by our job and income loss. Through doing the sale, I’ve discovered a few reasons I’m so glad we finally did it!
- The first and most obvious one is that it can make money! We made more during this sale than we’ve made in any of our previous garage sales. It was a good feeling to get rid of things and make money at the same time.
- The next thing I realized was that I feel free! I didn’t realize how much of a hold things had on me until I decided to give it all up. But in deciding to do that, it has given me a freedom I didn’t know I lacked. All the stuff I own is now just that: it doesn’t have a hold on me anymore.
- Choosing to declutter and have less stuff has lessened how overwhelmed I feel in my home. With it there constantly, I didn’t realize how much it was my stuff causing me to be overwhelmed. Decluttering and simplifying our home has lessened the stress and anziety I used to get from looking at the crazy messy living room and not knowing where to start cleaning.
We still have a ways to go to get our home clutter free (it’s a learning process!), but I’m so glad we decided to start on this journey. It has been an exciting road to walk and already we’re seeing wonderful things come from it.