Tag Archives: Minimalism

Inventory

At our first meeting with an insurance agent 20 years ago, she gave us a booklet for new homeowners that included a form to help us do a very basic household inventory. Being a lover of making lists and filling in forms, I started right away to go around the house and write things down, and had planned to do a more, but never did. I remember later downloading an app that prompted me to take photos and record serial numbers, cost, age, and many other details. I probably used it for 15 minutes, got overwhelmed with just how much stuff we had, and never finished it.

Today, looking over my ongoing list of household projects, Household Inventory is still lounging there, taunting me, reminding me that, despite years of paring down and purging, I still have too much stuff.

Then suddenly I realised that if, heaven forbid, our house and its contents were to disappear, I would be content to not reacquire everything we have now. The family mementos (I nearly wrote heirlooms, but our family was too poor to pass on anything of much monetary value) would be the only things I would possibly miss, and they couldn’t be replaced no matter how much insurance money we received anyway.

Household Inventory is now “take some photos of the stuff you have in case it disappears and you might miss it later, (but you probably wouldn’t).” That should take about five minutes and not 20+ years it took me not to do an inventory.

I would miss this clock, the heartbeat of my great-grandparents’ house (that’s them, Ernest and Eva Hardy, in the photo).

Goldilocks

It’s sort of remarkable that I’ve reached this point in my blogging life and not really talked much about decluttering or minimalism. I am not a minimalist – far from it – but love the idea of it, and aspire to live with fewer things cluttering my house and mind.

Just as life is too short to eat terrible bread, it is also to short to use a terrible pen. Once upon a time I would pick up free pens wherever I saw one, and they were almost all terrible. The ink never runs freely and smoothly, they don’t last, and generally tend to be better advertisements than writing utensils.

The result of all this was that I used to have a drawer full of pens, but as most of them didn’t work or worked poorly, I usually grabbed the same one every day, most often a blue ink retractable Papermate Flexgrip, which I bought by the box.

I finally came to the conclusion that keeping things I would never use was silly and a waste of resources. If someone else can use it, then pass it along or, better yet, don’t acquire something I will never use or never really enjoy.

So the obvious first step was easy: stop taking free pens! Next, I took the pens I didn’t want and that worked ok to meetings with me, where someone usually forgot to take a pen and wanted to borrow mine. “Here, take this one, and keep it,” I would say, like Daddy Warbucks. Little did they know they were helping me out more than I was helping them.

Over the dozen or so years of this whittling down, I’ve made myself use pens that worked well but didn’t like until they finally ran out of ink. Now I can take the dead pens and throw them in a recycling bin at Staples, where I am optimistic they actually make something with them and not just greenwash them into the local landfill.

This morning the last Flexgrip I have gave up the ghost. I am left with a Bic Round Stic that Steven got at a conference. When it wears out, I have the Sheaffer pen someone gave me when I graduated high school in 1984. I was able to buy a new cartridge for it, and it will likely be the only ballpoint I will own.

Going going gone