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07-28-10

Things to consider when you’re moving out.

I only grad­u­ated 7 months ago, and my par­ents have been gra­cious enough to let me stay with them until I got myself estab­lished.  That time is draw­ing near, and I have plans to move out in Sep­tem­ber.  I’ve been able to get a taste of liv­ing on my own by house sit­ting for a fam­ily the month of July.  It’s been eye-​​opening for me, and I’ve come to real­ize that min­i­mal­ism is a lot harder on your own than when liv­ing with others.

Liv­ing at home, my room is a min­i­mal­ist room, and I don’t have much.  Liv­ing on my own this month, I’ve real­ized I may not own much but I use a lot of the stuff in my parent’s home (i.e. util­i­ties, food, fur­ni­ture, kitchen­ware, etc).  In some ways, I’m still doing that in the this house sit­ting job.  When I get out on my own, that’s not going to hap­pen, and I’m left try­ing to fig­ure out how this is going to work out.

Here are some of the con­clu­sions I’ve come to:

I don’t want 100 things or less. One of my main rea­sons for mov­ing out is so I can have peo­ple over to my place all the time.  If anyone’s ever seen the show 7^th Heaven, than you have a pretty good idea what I envi­sion my place being like.  I need to have places for peo­ple to sit, plates to serve every­one food on, and cer­tain other things to acco­mo­date people.

It may not be 100 things but it’ll be effi­cient. I do want to have the flex­i­bil­ity to get up and go and I want to have as lit­tle stuff as pos­si­ble.  So, I’m try­ing to think­ing of ways to kill 2 or 3 birds with 1 stone.  Things like hav­ing a futon, using col­lapsable dishes (x mug or bowlz dish), use dish soap for dishes and hands, using cloth nap­kins to save money, etc.

I don’t mind hav­ing items that won’t fit into a back­pack. I know some peo­ple like the idea of hav­ing every­thing in their pack so they can go any­where, when­ever.  Truth is, I plan on stay­ing where I’m at for awhile.  I’m going back to school for 2yr to get a nurs­ing degree.  I think some min­i­mal­ists are com­pelled to do what they do because of finances.  The real­ity is, money won’t be an issue as a nurse (don’t get me wrong, I’m not all about the money), so I can afford to have a lit­tle more stuff.  As long as everyone’s happy, it’s all good, right?

I’ll have to pri­or­i­tize my time bet­ter. No one else is around to do the dishes.  I have to do shop­ping and pay for it, so I want to find ways to buy the least amount of food and get the most out of it; that requires plan­ning and time to make it. I’m very clean and orga­nized, but there’s more up keep than just a room when I have my own place.

That’s it so far, I’m sure there’ll be more stuff I find out after the move.  I don’t know where my read­ers are at in life, but I hope this gives those of you who haven’t moved out some­thing to start pon­der­ing.  If you’ve already flown the coop and maybe you’ve been our for awhile, there’s always need to reeval­u­ate where you’re at.

As a guy who’s new to all this, are there any vet­er­ans who have some tips/​tricks of their own?

07-10-10

Top 10 Links of the Week

10. Deal­ing with an unwill­ing spouse

For those of us try­ing to sim­plify and declut­ter, we may want to throw every­thing out, cut up all the credit and debit cards and take dras­tic mea­sures to end our never end­ing cycle of con­sump­tion — but our spouse may be on a totally dif­fer­ent planet when it comes to these things. So what’s the answer?

I talked about not car­ing enough for your things so you can avoid bring­ing in more stuff.  I still stand by that, but some­times tak­ing too much care of your items can also be a detri­ment to your time, energy and wallet.

6. How to Make Money No Object (With Very Little)

I hon­estly think the idea that you need to wait until you have a large amount of resources is hold­ing peo­ple back from achiev­ing a real­ity where they can live and work from any­where — or what­ever your plans are.

5. Lessons From a TV Free Life (1 week in)

How could I aban­don some­thing that enter­tained me, and made me laugh and cry? And then, of course, the TV offered so many learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for my daugh­ter, that I couldn’t pos­si­bly give it up! (not)

4. 6 Things You Should Be Maximizing

If you’ve min­i­mized your TV watch­ing, pos­ses­sions, email-​​checking and all other point­less dis­trac­tions, what are you left with? After all, min­i­mal­ism is not about clear­ing every­thing out of our lives in order to spend all day sit­ting alone in an empty room. So what are you doing with all that new found space and free­dom in your life?

3. Do some­thing crazy and break out of that rut

I’ve grown com­pla­cent in my quest to grow this blog. I’ve got too much going on and there­fore, I have noth­ing going on.

2. 7 Steps to a Min­i­mal­ist Wardrobe

I wanted a wardrobe that was sim­ple, ele­gant, and func­tional — and I wanted to be able to retrieve the pieces, and put them away, with­out any push­ing, pulling, or wrestling. The reward: a spa­cious closet, and a well-​​edited wardrobe that per­fectly suits my needs.

1. The Clean-​​Slate Guide to Simplicity

When we think about sim­pli­fy­ing, we usu­ally think about sub­trac­tion. Get­ting rid of excess stuff. Clear­ing away oblig­a­tions. Delet­ing old emails. If you’re hav­ing trou­ble decid­ing when to hold on to some­thing and when to let it go, try doing things back­ward. Learn to add respon­si­bly instead of subtracting.

07-07-10

What would you do for a Nike shirt?

At work we had this chal­lenge where for 6 weeks, each employee had the oppor­tu­nity to run 50, 100, 150, 200, or 250 miles.  The miles were tracked using the Nike+ Sen­sor.  I’m a swim­mer, not a run­ner, but I decided to do the 50mi chal­lenge since those who com­pleted their goals got a Nike dry-​​fit shirt with a really sweet cus­tom design.

I had slacked off quite a bit the last cou­ple weeks, and the next thing you know, it’s the day of the dead­line and I still had 14mi to run.  Well, I hate run­ning, and I was not about to let the 36mi I had run go to waste (not to men­tion all the swim­ming I had given up for those 6 weeks).  So, I deter­mined I was going to run a half marathon that night.

It was about 10:30pm, and I had just fin­ished eat­ing a whole pizza and watch­ing a movie.  Need­less to say, that was not the smartest idea before run­ning.  I still got out there and started run­ning and I was pretty sick the first 2mi.  Finally after run­ning around the whole neigh­bor­hood and feel­ing a lit­tle bet­ter, I decided to take it out on the main road.  I ran out into the hill coun­try where it was pitch black and I had no light.  Dodg­ing cars was only part of the adven­ture.  I also had a Rot­tweiler come out of nowhere after me, but a mix­ture of run­ning (faster than nor­mal) and yelling I think ceased his attack.

The whole run was 2hr 20min. I don’t want to run for a long, long time.  But it was a huge accom­plish­ment for me. I’ve never run more than 5mi but to be able to get up and run a half marathon taught me a lot about what I’m capa­ble of.  If I can endure some­thing like that for a t-​​shirt, it makes me won­der what I’m capa­ble of for some­thing even bigger.

I’m in the plan­ning stages of cre­at­ing a busi­ness and there’s been a lot of inhi­bi­tions, but after than run, I have a lot more con­fi­dence and moti­va­tion.  Every­one has dreams for their lives, and the biggest dream crusher is the per­son them-​​self. Go hard and be pas­sion­ate about what you want to do, don’t let your inhi­bi­tions keep you in bondage.  Peo­ple respect extremely extra­or­di­nary, hard work­ing, indi­vid­u­als.  For those peo­ple, where there’s a strong will, there always seems to be a way.

Get out there. Metaphor­i­cally speak­ing, dodge the cars, run from the attack­ing dogs. Persevere.

If you think and live like every­one else, you can’t expect to some­day live like no one else.