Avoid more stuff, Minimalism without thinking.

I think I’ve always followed this principle, even before I knew what minimalism was. I guess originally as I just didn’t have room to store so many things. The houses I lived in to start, were small terraced houses, only the two bedrooms, and were far from spacious. Storage space, was an unused phrase, there wasn’t any, so no need to give it regular use, as Kirsty and Phil do now. Thats how it was.

So when you brought something new into a house that was already tight for space, it could only occupy the room of something that was already there. Hence the view that if you wanted to be able to fit the new thing in, something of equal space had to go out. So the rule of one in, one out, was formed.

When I took up the minimalist view in 2009, I simply used this principle as a means of keeping a limit on the number of things I owned, and avoid more stuff. Clothes seemed to be the worst culprit, ask the majority of the ladies I know. They go and buy swathes of garments, shoes and the like, whiteout a care for how they’ll fit in an already fully occupied wardrobe. Ok, this is perhaps a sexist view, I’m sorry, but there are a lot of men and ladies, who know exactly what I mean.

So I used this principle for every purchase, if I needed something, then at the least it had to be a replacement for something else, or if it was a new purchase of an item I didn’t own, then something unassociated had to go. You soon start to ask yourself if you really need the new one, perhaps the old one will do. I used this principle in my post ‘A year of no purchases‘, to avoid more stuff, you can read it in the blog post.

So in adopting what is a really easy principle, you might want to use the One in, One out, as a way of at least to avoid more stuff coming into your life.