My house is too small….
How often do you hear this crib? Or your wife tell you “We must get a house with at least one more room” from your wife?
What really happened? when you bought this house, it did not feel small did it? You moved from a 2 bhk with 6 members to a 2 bhk with 3 members you felt this was big, did you not? Then what happened? The house grew smaller? NO.
You bought too many things. The cycling machine which you did not use. The treadmill which your wife uses for drying small clothes. The bicycle which your society does not allow you to keep on the staircase. The extra wardrobe for your daughter’s clothes. The bookshelf that has books that you have read, hoping to read, will never read. What is the solution?
DE-CLUTTER. Throw away things that you do not need.
1. Clothes: 84 shirts – formal and informal, 37 Tee shirts, 13 running tee shirts. 31 pants, 4 cycling tee shirts. 4 running shorts. Leisure clothes – shorts, tee shirts, etc. Honestly for a 47 year old male this is too much is it not? Come on start with the head of the family. Come down to 20 formal shirts, 5 black pants, 10 Tee shirts, and see how your stress goes down along the need for storage!!
2. Give away one thing every day: tennis raquet, Golf kits, books, dresses, furniture – over a one year period you would have given up 365 things, and life would be better.
3. Boxes idea: Pick up 10 things that you think you need absolutely and put it in a box. If for 6 months you do not open it, give it away.
4. Many old things are connected to us emotionally: long play records, cassettes, cds – music all we ‘hope’ to listen or watch. I know somebody who has 15,000 Movie cds. He hopes to watch them when he retires. I bet by the time he retires he will not have a cd player. The technology would have changed.
5. Donate things: I have found it easy to collect bicycles for a rural school far more easily than asking people for 1k to buy a new cycle for a rural kid. Almost every house has 100 things to give away. Be ruthless. Stationery, books, vessels, clothes, electronic things, ipods, old phones, data sticks, cds, cd player, – just give them away. Of course Olx is an option, but not sure how successful that will be.
…and suddenly your house is fine. See I save you a few crores. One crore on the RE and 20L on the furnishings!!
lakshminarasimman
sir the line The treadmill which your wife uses for drying small clothes was very funny when i am imagining it
i used to have 2 10kg dumbbells most of the time my wife used it as weight to keep the vadams from flying away in the terrace
Vasantha
Excellent! 90% of what you have said I keep doing from young age.But
one thing we must remember that the whole family has to cooperate.I am now 60 yrs.I used to say the same thing since young age.It was very difficult to make the older members agree to it. On many occasions it hurts the sentiments.I used to live in Mumbai till 2008.Due to my attitude of
clearing up periodically and giving it away, after I have moved to Bangalore to a much bigger apartment , my house looks relatively empty.
Moreover whichever servant I engage, they love to work in my place.
shankar
Remember reading that Sudha Murty used to have this rule that for every new thing that her children want, 4 old things have to be given away, no wonder her children though born in a billionaire family have their feet firmly in the ground.
Amit
A few years ago I came across minimalism, tiny house living and de-cluttering and it dawned upon me how ridiculously we have crammed our houses and lives with practically useless things.
All we have to do is divide the entire week into weekdays and weekends and then start listing the time that we actually have to use the things that we have collected over the years.
It turns out that we have at most, time and energy to follow only a few hobbies and activities that require very few things.
Once I actually kept a track of how I was spending my time(on weekdays and on weekends), for an entire month, it pretty quickly dawned that I had time and energy to enjoy only a select few things.
Thanks to Olx, I have stared to prune things from my life, that is giving me more time, peace and a clutter free house and life that just is so easy to manage.
I haven’t purchased any new clothes in the past 4 years. That could be because of my regular exercise and home cooked food that results in no change in my body shape, resulting in the same clothes needing just altering rather than outright new purchase.
Also once you stop trying to get external validations for your lifestyle choices, there is far more peace and calm that surrounds your life.
De-cluttering has far reaching positive consequences in a persons life.