A Minimalist Dude

I think a good way to go in life is to live simply.

I found a dude who is doing that to the max.  Or is it more accurate to say minimum?  Anyway, you know what I mean.

I found him when I googled "how can I convince my hubby not to buy a new TV" and his blog came up.  Why was I searching for that phrase in the first place, I suppose you may be wondering - well, I'll tell you.  We had this TV, it was new-ish (4 years old?) and this last week or so it started smelling like a meltdown electrical burning toxic puddle of explosion.

Yay, hooray, I say!  The TV is dying!  Finally I can rearrange my living room furniture! GLORY!  No more TV!  Freedom, freedom, freeeeeedoooom!!!

But somehow that was lost in translation.  A broken, un-fixable TV to my hubby meant that he was going to buy a new one.  Wha?  A new one?  We don't even have cable, my peeps.  We HAVE AN ANTENNA.  We get something awesome like 19 channels.  Five of them are PBS.  So you can see how vital TV is to my life.  When The Office was on, I watched TV once a week.  Now the series is over and so is my TV watching.  

So, back to the minimalist guy.  He certainly doesn't have a TV.  He has 416 things that he carries around in his RV.  He has a kid, a wife and they have a Jeep.  His blog is called http://manvsdebt.com/.  He advocates selling all of your crap, keeping minimal stuff (see the difference between crap and stuff?  I do hope so.) and doing what you love, in a debt-free manner.

He literally inventories all of his stuff and takes a picture of it.  (Or I think his wife takes the pictures.)  He has nothing superfluous whatsoever.  I do not know how he makes a smoothie (since I don't remember seeing that he had a blender), but I suppose it is a small price to pay for his care-free life.

What would you get rid of if you were going to really think about all of the things you needed - and just kept THOSE things?  He has 5 pairs of socks, 10 undershirts, 2 or 3 pairs of pants, a minimal amount of books, 17 total silverware pieces.  His daughter has two coloring books.  His wife has one dress.  (This I could not do.  Are you really going to wear the same dress to church every single week?  What about your girls night out dress?)  I like this, though, however nose-wrinkled I get on it.

Some people I talk to sometimes say they live (or used to live) in a small house.  (Okay, I'm not talking about people who lived in China in a 12x12 room or my friends who went to the Peace Corps and lived in a hut.  I'm talking about people who are mentioning their house here in the U.S. of A.)  Then, after I furrow my brow a bit and ask them to clarify, they say something like, "Oh, yeah.  Not as small as this."  (p.s. "This" = my house.)  No, it's not the 234 square feet at Ikea, but it's an itty bitty cute cozy home and if it isn't organized and minimalized, it looks like a cross between those hoarder people and the world's largest trash dump.  Let me give you a glimpse - I have 22" of closet space (half of it is behind a wall).  The depth is exactly one standard hanger.  My hubby gets the other 22" (although sometimes I squish him to 20" and I take 24", sorry honey.) and we make it work.

But even with what most would consider keeping a minimum, I know we could do with a lot less.  

As I've been reading about this, I've (obviously) been inspired to purge (how could you not!).  I bagged up some books I know I'll never read again (off to the Friends Of The Library they go), some kitchen utensils I don't use, some decorative candle holders, some magazines I thought I'd re-read (but didn't), and the purge continues.  I'm going to hit the undies drawer for all the peeps in my fam because when I thought about it, unless you're in the very middle of toilet-training (which, imho, should be done way earlier than most people do it), you don't need more than 5-7 (you are doing laundry more than once a week, no?).

So what could you do without?  Would you like to be more minimalistic?  Do you long to live more simply?  Or do you think it's bunk?

Gotta go pitch some undies (that's knickers and pants for my Brits).

Peace, love and cheers to making it easy on yourself,
Ms. Daisy