The Friday 15

A couple years ago I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. If you haven't read it, you should. It'll change your ideas about "stuff". Marie also now has a show on Netflix called "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo". I've been binge-watching the show this week and realized I've been doing a lot of the things she proposes long before she ever wrote about them.

Pile all your clothes on the bed and then decide which ones bring you joy? (Joy = keep.) Yep, I did that back in January 2014.

I can report I got rid of most of that pile. While some of the keepers from back then have now since been replaced with others, the number of items are still low. In fact, if I were to create a new pile of all my clothes today it wouldn't even take up a quarter of the bed.

Go through all your books and only keep those you wish to take with you into the future? Look at what we had in 2012...

Oh, my. We had a lot of books!

Here's all we have left now...

Now when we want to read something new we check out an e-book from our local library.

Clothes and shoes and books and kitchenwares and garden items have been pared down. Christmas decorations are much more manageable and a huge salt and pepper collection has been sent on its way. 

We're getting closer but aren't there yet. While I've been on a minimalism path for several years, hubby's kidney failure in 2012 helped us re-prioritize our lives. Simpler is better. Less is better. With that in mind I keep looking for items that don't bring joy to our lives. 

Here are 15 more this week. More Christmas and clothes. Where does this stuff come from???