One month without the kids toys, games, action figures, lego, books and craft materials (ie. clutter) has gone by very quickly. We moved all of their belongings into the shed to see what it would be like to live without clutter. Their rooms have been clean other than a few clothes on the floor that are easily picked up. They really enjoyed their time without their stuff. I didn’t have to ask them to clean up their rooms or remove toys from the living room. They had no troubles finding things and they had a wonderful attitude about our decluttering experiment. Each time I checked in with them, they were totally happy and they were NOT itching to get their things back. But alas, the time came to bring there things back. And this is what happened.
a short bit of background information first:
Just In Case
Just recently, I found an awesome website about living with less stuff and clutter, called theminimalists.com. I was thrilled to see a very similar 30 day challenge on their site ,where you give away 1 item on the first day, 2 items on the second day, 3 items on the third day and so on. After a month, you will be on a roll wanting to get rid of the items in your house that you do not need and do not bring you joy. In their podcast, they say “Just In Case” are the three most dangerous words in English. We hold onto things that we don’t need or use, “just in case we will need it” in the hypothetical future. This gave me something to think about.
So I told the kids that if they use the phrase “just in case”, we should not keep the item in question. That was my 1 rule for this final part of the experiment. They seemed to understand what I said and they enjoyed the new challenge.
Bringing Everything Back From the Shed
Before we looked in any of the boxes, I had a little check in with the kids. Blake said he only wanted to keep his cars and car tracks. Jaida said she would only keep half of her things and then she would try to give away even more things because she didn’t even miss very many things.
We had marked on the calendar the date that we would bring everything back into the house. Much to my dismay, this date came quickly. It was spring break and we had no plans on that particular day. So, the kids thought it was a sign to go ahead with our experiment and bring all of their boxes of clutter into the carport to sort through it and bring some things back into the house.
Things did not go as I had hoped.
Blake
Blake had no problems. He decided to keep his cars, car tracks, swiss army knives and he dumped all the rest of his boxes into the “give away pile”. He decided he didn’t want to keep any of his lego so we put it in the shed and we will have a LEGO sale day. Done.
Jaida
Jaida had a little more trouble. She meticulously sifted through each little item in her boxes, remembering who and where she got each item from. She was sentimentally attached to many small things that are not useable. Hours flew by and Jaida was sitting in a pile of her stuff in the carport with about 8 unopened boxes still to go. She felt overwhelmed with the amount of stuff around her, all of which meant something to her. She said to me that she did NOT want to bring this stuff into her room but she didn’t want to give it away either. It started to get stressful.
I tried to be clear that she is allowed to keep anything she wanted. She did not have to give up 50% of her stuff as she said she wanted to. It is her stuff and she shouldn’t give away anything just to make me happy. I wanted her to know that this was an experiment that could end any which way. You can never totally predict the outcome of a good experiment.
After 4 hours, we had to start packing the things into boxes and bring them into her room because we had to go out for dinner and I didn’t want to leave all of these loose items in my carport overnight. Reluctantly, she helped me bring everything into her bedroom where it still sits, 5 days later still in the boxes or spread out on the floor.
We still have to decide how to move forward from here. Her room feels more cluttered than before we started the experiment and she is stuck and is having trouble putting things away.