Last December, when our family prepared to move from a home with a large, unfinished basement to a home with no basement at all, we knew we had a lot of purging to do. Our older children left boxes behind when they moved out on their own, and we’d accumulated in a way that reflected our seemingly unlimited storage capacity, which in the end felt more like a curse than a blessing.
We donated over 300 boxes, including lots of hand-me-down clothing we no longer needed. We rented a dumpster and filled it to overflowing with things that held no real value; it was more than our weekly garbage service could handle. We loaded a U-Haul with desks, furniture, and exercise equipment we had quit using and dropped them off at a local charity, hoping they’d find new homes.
Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t just purging my house; I was purging my soul. All that stuff had become an emotional burden.
In a perfect world (my children say I use this phrase a lot), we would have disposed of everything we no longer needed before the move. It was certainly the goal. But painting bathrooms and baseboards, calling in contractors, attending home inspections, and scrambling to find another house when we terminated the first contract we signed took too much time.
I wanted a fresh start in our new home, a chance to break habits that created more chaos than comfort and to discover if less really was more.
Please join me today at (in)courage for the rest of the article and how keeping less has led to experiencing more for our family.
