At the beginning of May Mr. Roamer and I decided to give the #minsgame another try.  I am more and more drawn to minimalism and the idea of simplified living.

We didn’t make it to the end like last time. Actually comparatively  we did a lot worse (as you can see in the picture). However, I am still happy with the results as the changes still yield compound benefits. In the sense of now I have less to clean up and I’m never going to have to organize that item(s) ever again.

When I’m purging sometimes its very difficult. I can easily convince myself to keep stuff. I think someday I’ll use it. But I have a secret weapon….

When I get mad

On the good times when I get really upset I get cleaning whether its dishes or finally scrubbing the toilet when I see something and I’m really mad this pretty much runs through my head ” what the hell, why is this still, ruined, messy, dirty,( insert blank), FINE! I’LL JUST DO IT MYSELF!  ROAR!!”

This happened twice this month and the result was a big purge!

You see in the dinning area we have a desk that houses crayons, markers, pens, pencils as well as recycled paper the kids can use for doodling. But it has no drawers so all these items sit in stacks on top of the desk more or less as organized as possible.

But we had so many crayons!

So many pens! pencils and dried out markets! I knew there was more then one still there.

As you can see in the picture that clear  bin was full of crayons. not just one compartment. ALL of them. Easily more then 100 crayons.

oh and did I tell you my kids like to accidentally as well as  purposefully break the crayons and peel their skin off. Which pretty much means the crayon quantity just keeps multiplying. :). ( well at least the count was)

Anyways one angry day I said I’ve had it and I started recycling papers, testing pens and markers and separating crayons. Trimming stuff down. Seriously they never used all the colors anyways.

In all honesty I probably got rid of enough crayons to satisfy the quantity for the whole challenge but we just counted it for a few days around when the mad purge happened.

Mad #2

In this instance I attacked the clothes in my closet. And the anger fueled me to say stuff like”why are you keeping this? you never wear it. Or when was the last time you wore this. Or sure this is your high school band sweater but you never wear it!!!!” or “this is such a cute blouse I wish it fit me better… but it doesn’t! so why am I keeping it” The underling message I was giving myself was wake up! stop lying to yourself! are these items really worth the extra work if you aren’t going to use them?

The answer was of course ….no.

There were really some things that I separated that were nice or new and I really liked them aesthetically. but they just didn’t fall on me right. Now I’m not scare of a bit of sewing but I was lying to myself saying that I was going to go and fix all these items. I wish, but it just didn’t make sense to make that a priority with all my other goals.

Now I’m not telling you to go on a mad purge or anything but hey its got to be better then yelling at your spouse and loosing your temper at the children and going around breaking stuff instead ( I know people who have done the latter).

Everything else that got cut.

Mr. Roamer doesn’t take pictures but here are some pictures of the other items I purged through this month’s journey.

Stuff included

• receipts
• event stubs
• knickknacks
• my 2013 pay stubs
• Clothes
• Baby stuff
• Papers ( lots and lots of papers)

The Math

Doing the math 31 days on track equal 496 items purged and with 2 people that is 992 items. Seriously almost 1 thousand items.  An amazing feat when you can reach it.

With all the days we missed we got rid of 402 items. Sure crayons are small but I’m still counting. After all its all the little stuff that goes unnoticed and start to accumulate filling empty spaces in drawers and getting in between couch cushions.

We still have some items hanging around because I think they are in nice enough shape that I’d like to sell them on craigslist. How long do you hold on to items in the sell pile? Let me know in the comments.

Confession

Now we were clued into this 2nd hand store that gives you store credit when you make a donation. So we dropped stuff off and planned to get Jr. Roamer a sweater. We had a list of other items we thought we might need, but were thinking of postponing. However, we ended up going on a day with a 50% sale so we picked up everything else.

We are not cheap, we are just frugal so making sure the kids have what they need even if we end up bringing more stuff into the house is ok with us.

So I am super motivated to continue stripping out the excess. I have some clothes bins I am going to clean out and I am just going to work in the practice more routinely instead of just the intense bursts for a month.

Have you played the minsgame? Have you regretted getting rid of anything?