100 Things Challenge
I’ve read about the 100 things challenge on several blogs before and was intrigued by the idea. In the beginning most of those blogs were from single males traveling somewhere in Asia so I didn’t relate at all to their lifestyle nor did I desire a similar one, but recently I cam across more blogs by women who are living minimalist lifestyles. That inspired me to start my own 100 things challenge.
It’s happening now because it had to happen eventually. I knew I needed to eliminate the majority of the crap I hang on to for the move to New Zealand in August. I can’t exactly afford to take a ton of stuff with me. And currently I do have a ton of stuff. I have lots of clothes I never where. I have clutter that I never use, it just exists to comfort me. I like the comfort of clutter, but I think I need to move past that.
I look at my shelf full of about 20 pairs of jeans and I know I need to get rid of most of it. I can live well with just a few items of clothing. I wear the same things over and over again anyway! I have so much stuff that I never, ever use. Now it’s all going to get cleared out.
The guidelines for the challenge:
I can only keep personal possessions that belong to me and are not shared with someone else. That means I’m keeping all my furniture and such, because it will be given to my mom or sold when I move. So I will count only the things that are specifically mine.
I’m not sure yet how I will count multiple items, but things like socks will probably be multiples that get counted as “one” item. I’ve got to first assess what I have and what I can easily get rid of now. This process might take a while as I’ve accumulated a lot of useless stuff.
I’ll create a list of my 100 things once I get everything cleared out and know what I’m keeping. I’m pretty excited about a spring cleaning and a challenge.
Wow. I could not do that. 100 things only? Well, scratch that, I probably DID do that. When I moved from boston to SF, I came with 2 suitcases and a cat. I shipped maybe one box of stuff. The rest I got rid of. Its good youre starting now, because roomie and I started WAY too late. We always pack last minute. Since we started late, no one wanted to buy the stuff off CL and ebay. So I was stuck doing a free sale..and even free, people were picky! We had lots of stuff left over. Then goodwill wouldn’t take more stuff for some technicality. And then it was the night before and we had waaay more stuff than we could get rid of. Sadly, we ended up throwing most of the stuff away because no one would take it and we had to be out of the place. And it was so many bags, it filled the street in front of our building, so we had to leave a bunch more bags in the apartment, which I’m sure our landlady wasn’t too happy about when she found them. Oops. At least in case you cant get rid of your stuff, you can leave it with your family, so that’s good. Every so often now, I get rid of random clothes to goodwill. And every time I move within SF, I throwout/giveaway tons of stuff too. But it is so weird only owning a couple things. It does make what you have way more special though. Nowadays I love to own tons of clothes and would hate paring them down to almost nothing like I did almost 4 yrs ago.
Awesome Mary. Leo would be proud.
Haha! He will only be proud if I actually manage to do it. I have so much more stuff than I realized!
[...] of lifestyle that lends itself to having a lot of stuff hanging around. When I decided to try and complete the 100 things challenge I didn’t think it would be much of a problem. That’s until I started taking photos of [...]
I loathe Ebay! They stick us with way too many fees. Put me out of business. When they first opened, I earned twenty thousand a month with them. Now, fees are so high, I only use free listing websites now like GoodForge.com and a few of the other freebies. Ebay lost my sales for good!