I admit that storage is a problem in apartment living. At our home, we especially have a hard time finding a place for my tools and my wife's gardening stuff. And I'm never sure where to keep the charcoal. She would love a potter shed and me a wood shop, but instead we have a gardening bucket and tool boxes... stored on shelves. It is a bit inconvenient, but it works.
Sometimes I wish for a basement, but then I visit a relative's house and see the basement full like this:
Do we need to save all this stuff? I've seen whole basements full of just holiday decorations! How much holiday decorations do you need? In my opinion is it just best to get rid of all this junk. Give old furniture and clothes to people who need it now. Get rid of the dusty books and magazines. Yes, someone in your family may someday need those toddler clothes. But is it really worth hording this stuff in your closets and basements for sometimes decades, when you may never even use it? We received lots of hand-me-down clothes from relatives for our kids, and the best thing to do after a year of wear is to hand them down again to the someone else.
A 2008 related Citykin post: Smaller Homes = Happier Homes
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4 comments:
Do you have any kind of criteria for saving books?
I am single & have a zillion books I probably will never open again but you have a second generation at home & they will probably spawn another generation that could use your library.
The greatest thing I ever did was downsizing to a small apartment. It wasn't thought out before hand but after we unburdened ourselves with a houseful of things we rarely saw or used it was a huge weight off our shoulders.
Another benefit of a small place, we're not constantly shopping for things we don't need anymore.
It's crazy that you wrote this, because we were initially both overwhelmed and elated at the multitude of closets [and big ones, too!] in our current apartment. They are, of course, now stuffed to the gills with lots of things, some of which we could probably edit out of our lives, of course.
garage sale?
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