The Year of Less - The Little Things

 

 

I am really focused at the moment on simplifying our lives, clutter busting, looking at things as they are now and thinking of how I can change them to make our 'Year of Less' a good and constuctive one.

 

 

Sometimes it's lots of little things that when added up make the whole, and getting rid of clutter can be an all out sweep of the house that takes a couple of days or weeks as I did last year, or a slow and steady trawl round little parts of the day to day areas as and when you use them and live them.  It is this second type of clutter busting I am doing this year, getting down to the real nitty gritty of what we use and why, and seeing what we need to keep for here, to save to take to our new home (we will have two homes on the go for at least a year so we will need some duplicated basics to set up the new house) and what can be cheerfully dumped into the car boot boxes ready for selling in Spring to raise money towards the new house.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday the top of the microwave looked like this, a bowl of eggs for our use (we eat all the Bantam eggs and sell mostly the larger eggs) and a tin full of salt and peppers.  We had the two tall grinders for Sea Salt and Whole Black Peppercorns and a spare black pepper grinder that I used when cooking if I had already laid the table with the tall ones, to save my legs fetching and carrying.....lazy oink that I am,  a squeezy black pepper grinder and two each of salt and pepper shakers.

 

WHAT!! - way too much and totally not necessary!!

 

 

 

 

These two were filled to the top with the contents of the others....

 

 

 

 

....and these have been washed and dried and have gone into the car boot sale box....

 

 

 

 

...along with the tin they had all been standing in, luckily I had the lid tucked in the cupboard.

 

My reasons for keeping what I did - the tall grinders we use day in, day out and from now on I will walk to the table to retrieve them if I have already laid it!  The cute cat salt cellar because it is full of memories, I bought it as part of a matching set when we had a gorgeous cat called Pepper who looked just like them.  The pepper shaker got broken in a house move and so we find it amusing that we now have salt in 'Pepper'.   The pepper is part of another set that also got broken but that holds so much it is really useful.

 

My reasons for getting rid of the rest - although I love them and they are useful I don't need them, the same for the tin, although it has been useful I have another that is almost the same size that I prefer so it is going.

 

 

 

Now the top of the microwave looks nice and simple and much more pleasing to the eye and it makes me smile when I see it.

 

 

It's the little things that make me happiest sometimes.

 

 

Things sorted this way are going to be listed on the stand alone page at the top of the Blog called '365 Going, Going, Gone - Less Stuff' so I can keep track of what we have decided to sell and try and reach the minimum number of things that we want to let go.

 

Sue xx