Using the suggestions at the back of the book The Year of Less by Cait Flanders, I’ve been doing a little bit of prep work to help me succeed in my shopping ban in 2024. While I’ve technically already begun the ban, I’m also willing to make exceptions as needed for anything I learn while I am decluttering and taking inventory. With regards to the first step suggested by Flanders, decluttering, the author had the below words to share with those inspired to try out her experiment on their own:
1. Declutter your home
Before you begin a shopping ban for any length of time, I would suggest going through your home and getting rid of anything that doesn’t serve a purpose in your life. Don’t just organize your stuff—analyze it, ask yourself what you want to keep, and let go of all the rest. I’m sure that sounds counterintuitive to some degree. You’re not going to be allowed to shop for three months, six months, or a year, and you’re also going to get rid of the things you currently have? But decluttering first can open your eyes to how much stuff you’ve wasted money on in the past, which can serve as motivation to not waste more money during your shopping ban. It will also give you a visual reminder of how much stuff you’re keeping.
- Cait Flanders in The Year of Less (2018), p. 173
Flanders further suggests that those embarking on a shopping ban take stock of their belongings, her words are below:
2. Take Inventory
It’s easy to forget how much stuff you own when it lives inside closets, drawers, and boxes. While you’re decluttering, I suggest also taking inventory of the items you own the most of. You don’t have to be as exact as I was, where I literally wrote down things like how many pens I owned. Instead, try this: Go through each room of your home and write down the top five items you have the most of. For example, in your bathroom you might have a lot of shampoo, conditioner, lotion, toothpaste, and deodorant. Take inventory of those items and write down the number you currently have “in stock.” There are some of the things you will not be allowed to buy during your shopping ban—at least, not until you run out of them and need more.
- Cait Flanders in The Year of Less (2018), p. 173
As an organization fanatic, it was the inventory that really piqued my interest. I may have been decluttering in my pursuit of Minimalism for the past eight years, but I had never attempted to create an inventory of all the items I owned. The closest I’d come before was creating a spreadsheet which listed all of the books I owned. I tried using the app recommended in the back of the book, Sortly, to take inventory, but regrettably the free version only allowed me to catalog 50 items.
Luckily I am a sucker for a spreadsheet, and will take any opportunity to make and use one.
I decided to reverse the suggested order here, and to take complete inventory BEFORE I began to declutter. Chiefly, I wanted to know with precision how many things I owned so I could accurately calculate how much I would be downsizing during the “Declutter” stage. Flanders makes an offhanded joke about counting pens, and I regret to inform you I am far, far worse; it’s possible I counted individual coins, safety pins, and foam earplugs as I completed this inventory—I am not at liberty to definitively confirm.
Taking Inventory
The sanctum sanctorum of my story, my affectionately named “little green house,” is a modest, single-story, two-bedroom, one-bathroom home just under 700 square feet. One enters into a spacious living room, and the remaining rooms include two small bedrooms (one of which I use as an office), a kitchen, a bathroom, and a laundry room which has no laundry machines so I call it the mud room. There is also a very large shed in the back yard which is mostly empty, but does contain a few items and boxes I’m currently storing there.
I decided to begin by inventorying the largest room in my home, the living room. The living room tallied a whopping 760 individual items, nearly half of which were made of paper. In the living room alone I counted 265 books and 66 notebooks, sketchbooks, and journals (of which 46 are completely full). As I began to count and touch each individual item, I knew I was interacting with some things I was already ready to part with, but for the purposes of completion I wanted to wait to begin a donations pile until my inventory had been completed.
In my bedroom I counted candles and pillows, wall art (nearly all originals from my beloved friend Ashe Walker) and charging cords. I painstakingly logged each item in the shoebox I keep full of supplies for mending my clothes, and may have even counted the number of unused foam earplugs in my night stand. My minimal bedroom came out to 420 items, including 50 safety pins, 48 foam earplugs, and 35 pairs of socks, of which 26 are the exact same sock.
On some level I knew I was taking it too far.
Intuitively we can tell that owning 50 safety pins is not the same as owning 50 T-Shirts, or 50 books.
I made a mental note that I could simplify later on, and continued my near-manic, entirely-neurotic counting and logging. One of the more interesting parts of taking inventory in my bedroom was counting the first half of my wardrobe. I rifled through the laundry and counted the clothes on my body to be sure I didn’t miss a thing:
T-Shirts (for wearing): 11
T-Shirts (for sleeping in): 5
Pants: 6
Sweatpants: 3
Pajama Pants: 3
The second half of my wardrobe would have to wait, because it was hanging in the one closet in my house, located in the office, and I was already dreading the time when I’d need to inventory the office. Even more than the shed, I winced knowing I’d have to touch and count every single one-off thing I’d shoved in my office for lack of a better place to put it. I knew the office was the belly of the beast, and I knew I’d be saving it for last.
I got through the first half of the inventory on adrenaline alone, and by the time I reached the bathroom I was growing weary. After spending a couple hours counting razor heads and toothbrushes, I was visibly irritable. When discussing with my partner that evening I told her, “I’m annoyed I have to own any of those things, plainly! If it weren’t necessary I wouldn’t own a single thing in there!”
It was a bit of an insightful moment, and helped me realize that counting things I enjoy owning feels significantly less daunting than counting things which are practical, things I need and use but do not care about. I took some deep breaths and endured.
In the mud room I encountered the first plastic storage bin which needed to be opened, with many different sorts of things inside. This and the junk drawer were the largest hurdles I had to cross before making my way to the office, and I could feel a real resistance in my body in response to these areas where all variety of different objects intermingled. And yes, by the way, I do have a junk drawer.
A Minimalist with a junk drawer? That’s rich.
I’m sure you’re all thinking it. When someone presents me with a better place to store bread ties, twist ties and rubber bands, not to mention unused stick candles, command hooks, and user manuals—I will be all ears. In addition to being a Minimalist I am also a MacGyver of sorts, and having these items on hand when inspiration strikes feels helpful to my creative process.
In any case, the junk drawer wasn’t even that hard to inventory, and took me all of about 10 minutes. Like many postponed chores that ADHD kept me from tackling in a timely manner, I had hyped it up to a disproportionate size in my mind before beginning. Powering through the parts I thought would be tougher was a helpful reminder that we make things worse when we worry about them, and ultimately propelled me forward.
I started keeping track in my spreadsheet not only of what each item was, and where it was located, but also what became of it.
I didn’t just want to make decisions about what to get rid of, I also wanted to make specific and intentional decisions about what to keep.
LESS is MORE if you get my drift. My spreadsheet grew longer and wider as I kept track of new and important details until finally the only room left in the house was the office.
To be fair, I inventoried most of the office in about 15 minutes, including counting an additional 155 books stacked up into a cute color-coded tower by my girlfriend. All that remained inside my house was the filing cabinet (stomach lurching) and the closet (feeling vertigo). The closet, most of all, felt like too much.
When I finally tackled the closet, I did it in two go’s. I learned to take breaks whenever my counting became too tiresome or boring, and that helped me get through it. To my surprise (because I had no memory of anything I’d put in there), most of the closet was neatly organized. The several storage bins on the floor were already sorted by category, and not overfull.
Still, the closet contained the highest concentration of things I was already ready to part with. I found a mini scanner and a GameCapture for streaming that I no longer had use for, as well as the empty box my camera came in, and a few too many colored pencils.
When I’d finally finished my inventory, including an estimate that I had about 1,000 individual pieces of paper inside my filing cabinet, the number of items I owned came out to a massive 6,009 items. I spread it out over two weeks and painstakingly categorized and logged EVERYTHING; I felt a mix of relief and pride, and I was excited to move on to decluttering, but I had to do one more thing first.
All along I had been counting rolls of thread and rubber bands, safety pins and paperclips, and it had deeply scratched an itch I had to truly KNOW how many things I owned. Recently a Tumblr user commented on a post I made about statistics pertaining to the words I use in poetry with the following comment, which feels important to resurface here:
I was glad I had done it, I didn’t regret the knowledge of my 48 unused earplugs, but I did realize that for the data to be useful to me, I would have to simplify it quite a bit. 77 Band-Aids would become 3 boxes; 9 needles, a needle threader, 26 miniature rolls of thread and a thimble would become 1 mending kit; and 48 foam earplugs would become 1 container. I kept an individual count of pencils and pens, and simplified the paper in my filing cabinet to a number of folders.
The simplification of my inventory produced a far more useful number, where it’s clear that 50 safety pins and 50 t-shirts are being appropriately distinguished. The grand total of my belongings, the number I would be referring to henceforth, was 2,665.
Does owning 2,665 items make you a minimalist?
It’s a reasonable question. A friend recently asked me, “can someone who lives in a Mansion be a Minimalist?'“ My answer? It’s a slippery slope to try and say who “can” and “can’t” be a Minimalist. Divorcing minimalism the design aesthetic from Minimalism the anti-capitalist, life-reclaiming movement, anyone can be a Minimalist if they’re making a move toward LESS.
The rest of my answer? In my opinion, someone who takes up much more space than they need and experiences no dissonance probably hasn’t engaged with Minimalism in any kind of serious way.
I knew it was about more than owning 2,665 things; especially considering that so many of those things had been given to me, reused, repurposed, or purchased second hand. At the end of my count I felt mostly pride. I had run into some items I no longer wanted or needed, but I did not feel in any way that I was too far gone. I did not feel profoundly inundated, I felt only slightly oversized. I was pretty proud of the things I owned, and especially of how organized they all were.
Here were the most interesting findings (in my opinion) from the inventory:
Books: 424
Bobbypin(s): Exactly 1
Wardrobe: 209 items (including socks & shoes, gloves & hats, coats, jewelry & accessories)
There were pencils in all 5 rooms of my house and in my car (fitting for a writer)
It didn’t surprise me much that books made up more than 15% of my total belongings, or that books and notebooks taken together made up nearly 1/5th of all my belongings. My wardrobe did seem a little bloated, but I had included 77 items that might not normally be included in “wardrobe,” like necklaces, rings, belts, ties and socks. Without those, my wardrobe was only 123 items, and I knew come Summer I’d be able to get down another 10 or so.
Decluttering
I went through my items with a first sweep, grabbing those items I had earmarked while I was counting. With relative ease I took my number of belongings down to 2521, getting rid of three books, five board games, a t-shirt, a hoodie, and two pairs of shoes. I also stumbled upon one sports bra that hadn’t been ceremoniously discarded after my recent top surgery, and let that go too. This once-over represented a 5.4% change in the total number of things I owned and my first real victory in the year of LESS.
Decluttering will become an ongoing part of my year of LESS, and I will writing not only about the things I get rid of, but the things I choose to keep, and some of the obstacles I run into when trying to decide between the two. Plus, now I’ll be able to calculate with certainty how that pursuit progresses.
I don’t know what it says about me that I did this, or that I did it to this level of specificity. I’m also not sure what it says about me that I am going to make it publicly viewable, but I guess this is just who I am.
Inventory Stats:
Areas Inventoried: 10
Total Items Counted: 6,009 - simplified to 2,665 for the sake of clarity
% Items Decluttered: 5.4%
Using the button below you can view the Google Sheet of my Complete Home Inventory. I’ve sorted it for you in three different ways, each on a different tab.
I hope you look at it, I hope you scan and balk and question. I would absolutely love to hear what you find interesting or mundane about this. I am so curious how this lands with someone who is not me.
Please leave a comment (or 3) if you peruse this data. I’m also open to suggestions for new ways to sort it that would be interesting, and may even be willing to post photos of items or parts of my home that spark interest. At this point, for the sake of the shopping ban, I’m an open book.
Welcome once again to my year of LESS, I can’t wait to see what weirdness I’ll get up to next.
Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash