Too much stuff

I recently read The 100 Thing Challenge by Dave Bruno.  He also has a blog.  He managed to live with a whole year with only 100 personal items.  I don't think I could do that myself.  It seems far to minimal. However, many of his ideas are smart and I should adopt them because:

I have too much stuff!

There I said it, it's true.  I live in a small house with my husband, baby and two cats and we are drowning in stuff.  The house is full.  And it's only going to get worse as my little man gets bigger.  The solution is to get rid of stuff.  That's the hard part though.

So my first step I think is to avoid bringing in more stuff.  The problem with this is that I like shopping and see things all the time that I want/think is useful etc....  Mind you at the same time, I am on Maternity Leave which means a reduced income so that will probably help with that.

The second step is getting rid of stuff.  This part is harder I think because of a few factors

Time

Lack of time.  I have a small person now.  He seems to take up all my time now and who wants to sort and clean when their child is napping?

Ease of Removal

Small trash/recycling is easy.  Out the door it goes.  Anything bigger is harder.  It often gets stuffed in the basement to wait until we go to the dump (rarely).  It was easier when we had a truck, now we have to borrow a trailer.  Then there are all the items that aren't trash.  Some of it goes to charity, some we should sell and some we should give away.  All of these things take time and effort.  Items to charity isn't so bad.  We just have to get around to dropping it off.  Still the messy pile waits until there is enough to warrant a trip.  Selling items can be a pain in the rear end so i put it off (although I did list something on cragislist this morning).

Emotional Attachment

This I think is the hard part.  And the emotional attachment is even....I will use it some day.  I find for many items you aren't going to actually use and it is the idea of using you are attached to.  Mr. Bruno addressed it in his book and I found it super useful to think about while going through things.

I think we have to attack the idea of less stuff with a vengeance this year as I think I'm going to go batty tripping over everything we have in our house.  I'm hoping it will free up some of the clutter in my mind too!