My wife and I have been working hard to de-clutter our house. In lay-person’s terms, that means “getting rid of stuff we don’t need.” A very large part of this process has been inspired by The Minimalists and their podcast. It was my wife that first stumbled across these guys and I genuinely think they have changed both of our attitudes to “stuff”.

When we moved to our current home we bought a whole load of stuff that, when we came to unpacking, we just didn’t know what to do with. It all just sat in the largest spare bedroom. There was a lot of it. This is surprising considering we came from a 1.5 bed flat in London. To this day I have no idea where we kept it all.

The majority of my stuff falls into two clear categories. One is stuff I kept “just in case.” The second is sentimental knickknacks. So, things that I might one day need or things that I might one day want to look back at. Will that one day ever come?

On the first category, The Minimalists have a simple rule. If it can be replaced for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes, get rid of it. This might seem like a horrible path to disposable consumerism but really it’s the opposite. Once you have this maxim fixed in mind, it stops you buying things “just in case” too.

By far the biggest volume of “just in case” stuff I have is PC hardware and equipment. Some of the stuff is at least 15 years old and so completely obsolete but I’m having hard time letting go of it. This has been really frustrating. I look at it, I know it’s basically junk, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

So, rather than set myself the goal of getting rid of it I’ve instead decided to focus on WHY I don’t want to get rid. I’ll use this blog to look at just a few of the items I find it hard to let go of and try to capture why it’s important to me. With that done, I hope I’ll then take the next step.