Downsizing the onion!

I have talked about clutter a number of times.  It just keeps popping up again and again and again.  On my blog I have 13 (now 14) postings about de-cluttering.  It pops up in my mind way more than that.   It is like a baby chick picking its way out of a shell - something in me just wants to be something else.

So I have been cleaning out again.  This time the intent not to make more space in my current home, but to live in less home somewhere else.  We don't use the 2,100 feet of living space we have now.  We live in about 800 to 1000 feet of it.

And what is the rest of the space doing?

It is a close, cheap storage unit for stuff that is never used, or touched, or seen, or even remembered!!  We cool it in the summer and warming it in the winter and collect dust on it through all the seasons (dust that it heated and cooled as well.)

I grow very weary of it all!

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love my dear town house.  It is located in a lovely safe neighborhood.  It has housed growing children, adult children who bounced back briefly, and two mothers who needed help at end of life.  It has been the home for 7 of our cats over the 25+ years and a regular second home for my 3 grand dogs.  In the next year it will house my son and his wife for awhile as they spruce up their own town house, sell it and move closer to jobs.  This home has been a safe haven for more than just my husband and I.

I have always said, "Oh, we will be in this house another 10 years probably."  Now ... maybe a year or two.

I will be sad to leave this house as it is filled with many great memories (and a few not so great) ... but I won't be sad to stop:

• cleaning 4 bedrooms
• cleaning 3.5 bathrooms
• cleaning all the other spaces
• climbing steps, steps and more steps
• heating and cooling 1000+ feet of living space we don't need filled with things we don't need

I want to spend my time differently. 

I have also shifted my focus in other ways.  Over the last year I have discovered an unintentional mind shift away from these faulty ideas I nurtured for so many years:

• more is good (we had 6 functioning TVs - now we have 2 and we seldom watch those)
• newer is better (used is cheaper - saved $250 dollars on a used loom - "used a few times" kind of used.)
• expensive must mean quality (we used to have a $100 coffee maker - now we have the $30 one - they break at about the same speed)
• "want" must be "need" (I used to have a melon baller, had to have a melon baller ... seriously, who really needs a melon baller, I ask you.) 
• pricey vacations are the only way to unwind (pricey vacations require pricey salaries with headachy strings attached - fewer headaches mean less need to escape.)

Those are small changes in attitude that indicate big changes for me.  

So like pealing away the layers of an onion, I am making changes and sorting through the stuff of a life time - in both my mind and my environment.

And this time my de-cluttering is a sign of a root change in me.