Intentional Reduction of Stuff

Travailing through my FB newsfeed, I came across someone's post about minimizing.  This is not the first one I've seen.  This one is actually one of my favorites and was posted by a friend a little over a month ago.

I love the one about little houses because it resonates the most with me.  We don't have a LOT of stuff, I don't look around and think, "geez, I have a lot of stuff I need to get rid of."  I am still going to be getting rid of the unused exercise equipment and the dressers that we don't use.  We all have closets and when you hang things up, the dresser becomes rather obsolete.  We use one of these for things like underwear and socks. The girls use the open spaces for stuffed animal storage.

After all this clearing out of furniture we're not using though, we have, and I'm not joking; a mounted TV, a tv stand, a couch, and a chair in the FROG.  All of which, I could easily relocate to some other spot in the house, effectively eliminating the need for the FROG at ALL.  This is maddening to me because I realized that I am paying for quite a bit of square footage that I don't need.

So what?  What should we do about it?  I would truly love to move to a teeny tiny house, just big enough for us to have a place to sleep, cook, and gather.  Well, and bathe and wash clothes, but that's it.  With such a large family you'd think that'd be impossible, but really it's the American idea of what we should have that seems impossible these days.  For me, practicality and reality often win out.

I like the idea of living with less house and less stuff, so I can send my kids on missions trips or on summer Europe tours, so we can give and serve together to those in need, so I can send them to ballet and soccer, and piano lessons, and violin lessons, and sword fighting lessons(Star Wars anyone?  <----- ok, not to get too side-tracked here, but trying to explain to a 9 yr old that there aren't really real light sabers is nearly impossible).  Ok, you get the idea.  We really do want more of life and less of the stuff. We're ready for it!!! Maybe we can make that happen before the year is out.