The Heartache of Decluttering: What to do when every decision feels HARD (Minimalist Living)

well today I wanted to apologize to you because there's been some comments that said you know sometimes you just make it look really easy and I'm struggling with all these decisions that I have to make when I'm decluttering and simplifying and I don't know if it's just me or if I'm missing something or what's going on and so it's not just you there are a lot of tough decisions along the way I always say it does get easier but I was surprised even we're just cleaning out our basement last weekend that there was a few things that hung me up so I'll definitely show you what they were and also the logic I used to move past and to be able to let them go [Music] well I am done from the minimum mom and honestly I'm sitting in the car because I need a little bit of a break from the kids so we still have about a month before the kids go back to school I'm not sure how it is where you are where you go back pretty late right after Labor Day and so we have had a really great summer it's been going really well but we just kind of hit that point where I was like okay we've all had a lot of time together and a lot of each other normally I would send them outside to play but actually wanted to finish getting the stuff together that I'm gonna take to the donation center from when we cleaned out the basement and also when Adeline was going through her clothes I do like to donate it right away because otherwise people around the house they start to pull stuff out of it or I start to second-guess things so like many of you I decide as soon as it's loaded up get it out of here right but there is a reoccurring comment that I wanted to address today that often says something to the effect of am i doing it wrong is there something wrong with me because these feel like hard decisions and a lot of this feels like hard work and some days I just don't even feel like I'm up to the task and so I did want to kind of try and think back in time to when we were really doing the bulk of simplifying her house and remember what that was like and as I thought back to it more and then also kind of revisit it when we were going through our basement recently I remember there were a lot of really tough decisions because most of us don't hang on to stuff we don't need or don't think we'll need right I mean as we're going through our stuff we'll find a little bit of garbage some of it is really even easy obvious decisions but a lot of it is stuff that we've hung on to because we think we might need it and that's why we hang on to it so it's not like we're just hanging on to random stuff that doesn't matter we're hanging on to stuff that could serve a purpose that we might need and we certainly don't want to pay money to have to replace and so I totally understand that I get where you're coming from so I'll show you a few things that hung me up when we were cleaning out our basement and then also kind of reiterate how awesome the benefits are of simplifying our house and hopefully inspire you to be able to keep going even though yes there are a lot of tough decisions involved in this process so let me show you a few things that hung me up okay this Tom Brody to our marriage so we've moved this for three different houses it's just a power strip it's nothing I mean I have no idea what this even cost to replace like $15 it's a it's a high-quality one I don't know and so but what was my thought when I saw it I was like we must need it for something right I mean it powerstrips you kind of use them especially in an older house where you don't have a lot of outlets I could not think of a single use for it I asked Tom do you have any use for this kind of hoping he'd be like oh yeah we'll use it for that then I could just like pass it on and I don't have to think about anymore he's like I didn't even know we had that and the funny thing is though I didn't remember we had it either so even if there was an occasion where I would have needed a power strip in the last year or literally ten we've had this we've been married almost 11 years 11 years I didn't even remember it was in the box in the basement so I would have went and bought one because I didn't know it was there so I had to remind myself if I have not used this in 11 years I know a lot of times we use like the one year guideline friend if I have not used this in 11 years what would you tell me you'd be like of course get rid of it that would be so silly to story but this really caused me to stop and think about it so this is getting donated another thing I'm probably gonna forget about look at this very nice cutting board it's it's actually glass another thing we got for our wedding that we registered for so I had had a bin of extra kitchen stuff in the basement and I I don't know like cutting boards they kind of wear out right so I had been hanging on to this because I thought I might need it but the problem is I don't know if you can tell the scale of this it's not very big and so there's probably a reason I've never actually unwrapped it and used it is because I have plenty of cutting boards and they're bigger so they kind of function for everything I mean they show cutting up like a lime and a lemon on here so I guess for little things it might be nice but again I haven't needed it in 11 years but also if I put this back in a storage bin I almost guarantee you that I'll forget about it again and should I need a new cutting board I'm I'm not gonna remember it's there so that's kind of video see every current theme my memory basically but if I'm not gonna remember it's there that means it's too much inventory to manage and so why not share this with a friend at a donation center who might be actually really excited to come across it and might have a use for a smaller cutting board and be excited that its brand new a cylinder wrapper okay let's talk about kids clothes I was just talking to my sister and she was lamenting over the fact that Adly is over a year now so she was kind of going through all of her old clothes and she was like do you know many things I took the tag off washed it so she could wear it and she never wore and I said yeah I have four kids right I've been there done that we've all been there and so in the video with Adeline about school shopping we talked about this orange shirt how many things have we bought for our kids thinking either they look really cute in it or they love it or it'll match something we're gonna wear you know all the different things on clearance or somebody handed it down to us and so kids clothes we're gonna talk about kids clothes more coming up next week and how we store it so we don't forget about them but the biggest lesson with kids clothes I'm realizing is that they don't need as much as I originally thought I did talk about this a little bit more in the video so you can watch that to see little more of my logic about why I can get rid of it now but kids clothes it can be tough but let's cut our losses let's bless somebody else who could actually use it and use it while it's either still in season or still in style okay here's another one so this is a white sheet set I thought for a while when I first became a minimalist that I thought it would be really nice to have white sheets because you can bleach them they just seemed like it would be easy to take care of and you know they're just nice and simple and plain what I didn't realize is that one person in our relationship would get white she's really dirty I I won't name names but even we lived in our townhouse white sheets weren't actually very practical and I'm not good at the whole bleach thing and all of that and so I've gotten two sets because that's also back when I still thought you needed two sets of sheets now we have one set which is good for people like me who aren't really like on top of things like this because if I take the sheets off the bed to wash them they have to get washed that day and put back on or we don't have sheets to sleep on so it's amazing how that keeps you accountable so we literally have one set of sheets from our bed I had kept it because I thought oh well it would be nice when we have guests stay at our house then I would put the white sheets on well we have averaged having guests at our house maybe once a year and I have never taken the time to pull these sheets out I just wash our sheets and put them back on the bed and so these have never gotten used but what's even a bigger disappointment is that the plastic actually broke off and now I just noticed that the corner of it is all dirty just from being in storage and so I'm like oh that's so frustrating because if I would have just donated this a few years ago when I decided that I wasn't going to use it somebody could have got like a perfect sheet set at the donation senator and now I did I don't even know what I'm gonna do this do I donate it like this or do I take everything out and try and wash it and get that spot out that's a lot of work right I mean we've talked about it before but stuff deteriorates when it's in storage it's just it's not worth it and so I don't know I I I'm not gonna think about that so my point today though is yes there are a lot of tough decisions as you're going through this process my encouragement too is that like many of you have said once it's donated we totally forget about it over the last five years we've donated 80% of our possessions and I've said it before but the number of things that I wish I won't have is under five and under $100 and so I think the reason why we sometimes can kind of gloss over the simplifying in the decluttering process or make it sound like it was really easy is because we forget so quickly we adjust so quickly to how our house feels to be simplified and the benefits are so great that we forget the pain in a way I think it's kind of like having a baby because F once the baby's here and in our arms that we forget about the pain that was involved but I've been mostly most of it right and so I kind of feel that way about our house is that I've totally forgotten about the hours and hours I spent going through stuff but now our house is so enjoyable it's so easy to keep clean it's so peaceful so it's really easy to forget about all the tough decisions that I had to make and the money that we wasted and all the things that have been donated now and the things I thought we'd use and didn't use and so it's amazing how quickly it you forget about these things and you just move on and you start enjoying the benefits of having a simplified house and so that's my encouragement to it's not always easy we all go through this we all have tough decisions I think it's different for everyone like I had no problem getting rid of my clothes but then when it came to kids clothes I kind of got hung up I don't know it's it's funny I think different things mean more to each of us and that's okay but I do think it's worth it and I think you're gonna be really glad that you did go through this process and so I do have other videos on the topic especially regarding gifts that have been given to us and sentimental items so I'll I'll link to all of those videos down below kitchen items so hopefully whatever is hanging you up we have covered it before and you might want to revisit those again even if you've watched them in the past sometimes it can be helpful just to watch it again and remember the different questions we can ask ourselves or you know the different logic that we can use and so I will link to all of those down below thank you so much for watching and yes some of you have mentioned we did hit a big milestone this week we did hit a hundred thousand subscribers I'm gonna cry I'm not ready to talk about it yet we'll talk about it next week I'm still just like totally surprised kinda waiting for like people to unsubscribe to be like oh why subscribe to the wrong channel but like they're all gonna go away or something I don't know I know that silly it's not logical but thank you so much for your kind words we will celebrate properly I'm just gonna give it a few days because I think I can talk about it without crying so I'm so grateful for you and then we can go through this journey together so thank you so much for watching a thumbs-up is the best compliment you can give us I do hope you subscribe so that we can keep in touch and spend more time together and I look forward to visiting with you again soon [Music]

Channel: The Minimal Mom

Views: 228,282

Keywords: minimalism, family minimalism, minimalist, the minimal mom, the minimalist mom, minimalist home

Id: EiUikJU-L5o

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019