What Moving Reveals About your Minimalism

When you a packing to move, do you just moved the unopened boxes from your last move or do you open them and go through them?

We recently moved into our forever home and I couldn’t be happier. This was the third time we had moved in 8 years, and it was the toughest move. We had two children to juggle during the move. My oldest was three and my youngest had just turned one the weekend before we moved. I was working full time and my husband had also just returned back to work full time after finishing his paternity leave. Needless to say, life was busy and then we added moving into the equation.

As with all our moves, we couldn’t get the move out and the move in date aligned. This meant we were homeless for a week. Luckily we had family in the area who graciously allowed us, and literally all our baggage to stay with them while we were in limbo.

The silver lining was that we had a long closing date so we had lots of time to pack. I thought we lived a fairly minimalistic lifestyle but I was rudely mistaken when I started packing. We still had unopened boxes from when we had moved five years before!

As I started trying to pack, I realized I couldn’t get very far without decluttering first. I needed to decide what we should continue to own and what we could part with. I didn’t want to move items we wouldn’t use into our next house. And I definitely wasn’t moving the unopened box to the next house. 

A simple question I would ask myself is: do we need this?

This was the longest we’d lived in one house and had acquired many things. We also had two children in this house and as people with children know, they can have a lot of things. Even when you are intentionally trying not to.

Your minimalism style might vary from mine. That’s okay. How you incorporate minimalism into you life should be fine tuned to meet your needs. 

Gradual minimalism is what works best in our family and seems to be characteristic of most mamas. You have an awareness that you have too much stuff and are focused on getting rid of the excess to free yourself of the physical and emotional burden of so much stuff.

Clothes
I had been through two pregnancies while we lived in this house. My body had changed and my clothes were a mix match combination of pregregnancy, postpartum and everything in between. And despite the vast amount of clothes in our walk in closet and dresser, none of it really fit well. Since we would be living out of a suitcase for a bit, I decided this would be the perfect time to trail a capsule wardrobe. Guess what, I liked it and have continued with it!

Belongings
I moved systematically through the house, decluttering as much as I could from each room along the way. I took the time to look at the things and decide if this was something I wanted to keep in our lives. If it was, I packed it. If it wasn’t, it went into the donation pile. My nursing school books, the 13 inch television I had bought with my own money as a teenager, the second set of used pots and pans we had been given were all on my donation list.

All duplicate items were donated. Broken items were either fixed, recycled or sent to the dump.

Sentimental items were a bit harder for me to part with so it’s an ever evolving journey.

Baby Items
We had boxed up baby items from when my littlest outgrew them. I thought about the practicality of moving them to another house so they could sit there and not be used. This led me to reach out to my network of friends and family to offer these items to someone who could use them. I also donated or sold items as well.

You don’t need to wait until you move to start your minimalism journey. Minimalism is a broad term. The premise is to make room in your life for what matters most to you. 

What things are distracting you from achieving the things you value? Let me know in the comments.
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