After Decluttering Comes Mindfulness, or Never Shop Again

Before our current renovation I spent about six months decluttering to remove approximately half of our possessions so that we could fill up our house with plasterboard, drop saws, cans of paint and a set of stairs that came in kit form. It went against all my natural hoarding instincts to get rid of all those really indispensable treasures, but I honestly can't remember any of them now that they are gone.

Now that we are (mostly) done with renovating and refilling our house with furniture and stuff that was packed in boxes, we are having to be incredibly tough on our acquisitive instincts. If there is no cupboard space for it, it has to go. I now have a smaller, but much nicer kitchen. All the storage space is taken up, and there is simply no room for any new kitchen doohickeys. Well, I could buy a new spatula, but not the salad spinner I was thinking would be nice, unless I get rid of something else that is the size of a salad spinner. While I contemplate what else we could do without, I continue to pat the lettuce dry in a tea towel.

I moved out of home at nineteen with hardly any stuff, and have spent twenty years accumulating it, with the happy assistance of family and friends. Now we realise, we're kind of done with stuff. We're going to need to replace towels and broken crockery, but lots of our stuff will last longer than we will. So barring the house burning down, I can contemplate a future without shopping. I am very happy about that.

All we have to do now is somehow dispose of a shed full of boxes that we haven't unpacked yet. Maybe we could just burn it down...