have nothing in my house that I do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful

The kitchen is finished now and the living room is nearly complete. I should be done with it and on to the guest bathroom and the guest bedroom shortly.

I want to have nothing in my house that I do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful…

...because I want to live a life of purpose, and this will be a visible facet of that life-long mission.

I’m moving into my new apartment this weekend. It’s decorated in sort of an Asian fusion style (since I’m Buddhist) so in the spirit of the thing, I want it to be as minimalistic as possible.

I totally want to do this! My problem is that I trick myself into thinking things will be useful “sometime in the future” and as an artist, I think lots of random junk is naturally beautiful.

I’ve got to pare down to the basics.

The Utility Room (laundry room) is completely done now and the kitchen is about half way done. I still have to catalogue the food in the pantry cabinet and go through the cookware. We’ve gotten rid of a LOT of stuff. Mostly trash (stuff we don’t think anyone would want), but a lot of it will go into a yard sale later this summer and what doesn’t get sold will go with the other stuff we will be donating to Goodwill or the local clothing drop off at one of the churches down the road.

I recently read an article online about someone who is limiting their self to 100 items. If you’re interested, here is the link:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html

Took longer than I originally thought, but the master bedroom and the master bathroom are completely done. Now onto to the utility room. :)

I feel like I cheated almost for snagging this from someone’s list, but it is something I’ve wanted to do for about 14 years now. Maybe now is the time to start – but where? I will read some simplicity sites and see how others are progressing on their goals. I’m not good at this in a lot of ways, but if I was already good at it – I wouldnt need the goal, would I?

We’re calling this: Operation Get Rid of Stuff We Don’t Need. We started yesterday and went through the master bathroom and half of the master bedroom. We are going through and getting rid of everything we haven’t used in the last six months or won’t use in the next six months (unless we find it truly beautiful… nothing has landed in this category yet). In addition to actually getting rid of stuff, we are writing down everything we are keeping (down to the extra bottles of shampoo and bars of soap… everything is getting written down) and where we are keeping it. So when we get done we will know exactly what we have and where it is at. It is a very slow tedious project, but I can already see a difference. We got rid of a garbage bag full of toiletries just from the masterbath. Most of the stuff we are getting rid of is just getting thrown away, but some of the stuff is going to go into a yard sale or get donated to a local clothing drop off. Hopefully we’ll finish the rest of the master bedroom tonight. :)

for many years but I love the intention of it. In some ways it eases the pain of prioritizing and it makes perfect sense to me.

This actually requires more work than I have time for right now. But I am minimizing and organizing.

Consolidating, trimming, and letting go down to half of what I had, and now all goals feel alive and beautiful.