Minimalist Road Trip

A few weeks into my Minimalist Conversion, I took my three kids on a month-long road trip.

I had, at this point, begun to find other Minimalist Heroes to learn from. A few of my favorites were The Minimalists, Joshua Becker, and The Practical Minimalists. I knew that, in order to change my mindset so completely, I needed to surround myself with people that had already changed theirs. I didn't know any minimalists in real life, so I started listening to a lot of podcasts. I'm not normally a podcast person, and I have since abandoned all of the podcasts that got me through this mindset-changing phase, but it was exactly what I needed at this period in my mental transition.

Joshua Fields Millburn, one half of The Minimalists, often talks about doing "experiments" along his minimalist journey. Things like living without a phone for two months, or waking up at 3:30 every day. Experiments are a great way to see what the extreme is like without having to completely commit to the extreme forever and ever. I decided that this road trip could be an excellent experiment in extreme minimalist living.

The Experiment: Live for one month with three kids and only what I can fit into a Toyota Prius.

I made a lot of lists. What do I think I will need? Okay, can I pare that down? Can I pare it down again? It's amazing how many things you can live without for a month if you really put your mind to it. It's also pretty amazing what you can fit into a Prius if you're really good at Tetris.

It wasn't just "needs," either. We wanted to enjoy this road trip. This meant that things like books and games and toys and craft supplies made it onto the packing list. The first camp we were going to was a co-op style camp, where we would each come prepared to run a certain number of activities. Which meant that I would need to bring supplies for those activities, too. I pared the "fun" stuff down to the things that I knew would pack up small and offer the most entertainment for the most people. I was deliberate about every item I chose to bring, and I packed all the "fun" stuff in the sub-trunk. It all fit.

(The supplies for these bendy dolls took up very little space. We ran out of felt for clothes after the first camp, but guess what? We were able to buy more felt at the next location.)

(When you don't bring a ton of toys with you, you find other things to play with. Like rocks!)

I gave each kid a backpack and told them that all of their personal "fun" stuff needed to fit into that backpack. My kids are big readers, so I encouraged them to download lots of books onto their Kindles for the trip. (You can say whatever you want about the feel of real paper between your fingers, but nothing beats being able to fit a whole library into the space of one paperback.)

Other than the first aid kit, we didn't pack any "just in case" items. We weren't leaving civilization completely behind us, and I knew that we would be able to go to a store if we needed something. We didn't pack any fans, and then the weather ended up being hotter than we were expecting, so we bought ourselves a box fan. We left it behind at our last destination, because we didn't need another one at home. Was that a waste of $16? No, I don't think so. When I think about all of the other "just in case" things I could also have packed to save $16, they would never have all fit into the car. Once you start down the "just in case" path, it widens very quickly. And a $16 fan was several times cheaper than the car-top carrier I would have had to purchase to fit all those extras. (Should I have analyzed the weather patterns better and KNOWN that we would need a box fan? Maybe. But I didn't. And hindsight is always 20/20.)

I packed two towels for each person. A designated indoor towel, and a designated outdoor towel. That might seem like overkill when you're packing for a minimalist road trip, but I can tell you right now that it saved me a lot of extra laundry. We went to the beach or the river every day at camp, and to the spray park almost every day at my mom's house. Having a second towel that stayed clean while the outdoor towel got dragged around in the sand and dirt meant that you could actually take a shower and have something clean to dry off with afterwards.

Each person had a clear plastic tote to pack their clothes in. These totes kept their clothes visible and organized at our destinations, while also keeping them clean and together while traveling between locations.

(Full disclosure: This photo is actually from Girl Scout camp last summer, but the bin and the packing style were basically the same for this trip.)

We only packed enough clothes for about a week. And once a week, I found somewhere to do laundry, and repacked the bins fresh with clean clothes. Fun fact: Clean, folded clothes take up less space than dirty laundry. Doing the laundry and re-packing the bins before leaving each destination saved me a lot of space.

The verdict: We loved living minimally on our road trip! Doing a week's worth of laundry every week was so much less stressful than letting it pile up. Tidying up our rooms was so much easier when we hadn't dragged tons of extra stuff along with us. And we actually kept our rooms tidy because it wasn't too hard, and we had started to really enjoy having a clean space.

(Our room at the first camp - maintainably clean!)

I started to get stressed out at the last camp, and I started to let the room go. We started getting on each other's nerves more, and the peace began to break. Then it hit me - it's because the room is messy! I took some time that afternoon tidying up while the kids were at an activity. The difference afterwards was tangible. Clean spaces breed peace.

Coming home was the hardest part. Home, where bad habits are deeply entrenched, and the mess can't be fixed in an afternoon. Home, where there are enough spare clothes than I could put off the road trip laundry for another day or two or ten. If I hadn't been convinced before, I would have been convinced then, when the weight of clutter washed back over me, and I felt like I was drowning again. It's hard to see progress when you're picking away at decades of clutter a little at a time. The road trip experiment was like a glimpse at the end of the book: Yes, it's possible. You can do this, and it's so worth it. There are a lot of chapters between here and there, but at least I know that I will like the way this book turns out.

The "See You Later" Porch

This is the second post in a series of posts about my journey to minimalism. You can read the first post here: Stumbling Towards Minimalism

I was starting to figure what I wanted and why. Less stuff. Less to clean. But I had no idea where to even start. My house was like one of those square slide puzzles. I can't move this square until I move that square, and I can't move that square until I move that other square, and I know I want this square over there, but I'm not sure how to get through those other two squares. I was never any good at those puzzles as a kid, but I do know one thing for sure: You can't move any squares unless there is an open space for sliding through.

So, that's what I decided my first project should be: Creating an open space. I decided that my side porch was a good location to clear out. It had been full of stuff since the day we moved in, five years earlier. On many occasions, it had been so full of stuff that you couldn't even walk into it, let alone through it. It tended to house two kinds of things: Actual trash (I would literally just toss my recyclables out the kitchen door onto the side porch, and box them up for the recycle truck later) and stuff that belonged other places, but I had been too lazy to put away.

So, I got to work clearing out the side porch. It actually didn't take that long, in the end. 90% of the stuff there went to the curb. Lots of actual trash and recyclables. Baby stuff that my now-five-year-old no longer needed. (I put the baby things to the curb a few days before trash day with a "free" sign, and a decent number of them went to better homes than the landfill.) Broken things I knew I was never actually going to fix.

I put away the things that belonged other places in the house. When I was left with a small collection of things I thought I might want to keep, I moved them into the kitchen temporarily so I could do a good scrub-down of the porch. I always forget to take "before" photos, but here's an "after" photo. If you want to imagine a "before" photo, just fill the "after" photo all the way up to the bottom of the windows with junk.

Then I ran out of steam.

Have you ever heard the term "decision fatigue"? Basically, every decision you make, no matter how small, takes decision-making energy. Decision-making energy is a limited resource. It's renewable, but it takes time, rest, and a milkshake to refill your stores of decision-making energy.
Source: NY Times

Okay, so maybe it doesn't have to be a milkshake. A healthy dinner will do. But you do need to give your brain a break from decision-making. And minimalizing* requires a lot of decision-making.

*A lot of people say "minimizing" but I'm not making anything smaller; I am making it more minimalist. So I'm calling it "minimalizing".

Even dealing with the actual trash, which really just required putting known trash into bags and known recyclables into bins, took decision-making energy. And I had run out.

Minimalizing Lesson Two: You are not going to finish today.

In his book, Goodbye, Things, Fumio Sasaki suggests that, for things that you aren't quite ready to say "goodbye" to yet, you can say "see you later" instead. Especially at the end of a long day, when my decision-making energy stores are depleted, the "see you later" concept has been extremely helpful for me. If you can't decide whether you want to keep or discard something right now, you can delay making that decision by boxing it up and setting it aside for now. You can come back to the SYL items later, when you have had the chance to think a bit more about it, and to experience life with them out of the way. If you change your mind, they are still there, waiting for you to reclaim them. More often than not, though, taking a break from an item helps you realize that you don't really need it after all.

I dubbed my empty side porch the "See You Later" Porch. And I started putting stuff back on the porch. It wasn't easy. I finally had this nice, clear, empty space. I just wanted to move an armchair onto the porch and live there instead of in my cluttered house. But I knew this was only one, small step in what would be a very long process. And I needed that empty slot to start sliding the pieces of my house where I wanted them.

Some things that I moved to the SYL Porch:

1. Three pairs of ice skates that I had bought for myself and the girls the previous winter when we traveled to Ottawa, Canada for Winterlude. It had been cheaper to buy secondhand skates than to rent them every time we wanted to go skating on our trip. I thought we might use them again. There is an ice rink only a few towns over, and skating is fun, and good exercise. Plus, we might go to Canada again next year!
Their fate: After they had spent a few months on the SYL porch, I got rid of the skates. I thought we might use them again. But we didn't. And, if we ever do go to Winterlude again, the girls' skates aren't going to fit anymore anyhow. I guess I could have kept mine, but I decided that there were ultimately too many "ifs" involved. If we go again. If I can find them when it's time to go. If I have room in the car to pack them.

2. The sleds. We don't get a ton of snow in Southeastern Pennsylvania. But when it does snow, going sledding is practically a mandatory childhood activity. Plus, the local sledding hill was literally in our backyard. And when it does snow, the stores all sell out of their small stock of sleds so quickly that you miss out if you don't already own one.
Their fate: I kept the sleds. One of the questions I like to ask myself, when deciding whether to keep something or not, is "What would I do if I didn't have it?" If it's something that I don't use very often that is easily/cheaply replaceable, I can safely get rid of it. Sleds are relatively cheap, but since not having one on hand when it snows usually means missing out on one of the two good sledding days of the winter, I decided it was worth keeping them.

On the surface, the skates and the sleds had a lot in common. My ultimate decision to keep one and not the other was extremely subjective, and I wasn't ready to make those decisions yet when I put them on the SYL Porch. You may have decided differently, and that's okay. That's why I shared these two examples. I don't regret getting rid of the skates. If we go to Winterlude again, I might even buy secondhand skates for us all again, because it was cheaper, although I would probably donate or re-sell them at the end of our trip this time. I might still change my mind and get rid of the sleds. Deciding to keep something is never permanent. Deciding to get rid of something replaceable isn't actually permanent, either.

Minimalizing Lesson Three: You're allowed to change your mind.

Stumbling Towards Minimalism

I've always been a collector of things. Cool things, memorable things, useful things. I prided myself on being the person who could produce on demand whatever random craft item, costume element, or useful bauble the situation required.

But my house was always a mess. Always. I thought it was just me. A sign of a creative mind. Of someone who wasn't bothered by external appearances.

But it did bother me. I didn't want it to, but it did. And nothing I tried worked. No cleaning system could keep me focused for more than a few days. And I felt constantly disappointed in myself.

About nine months ago, I was complaining about my inability to keep my house clean, and someone said something to me that changed my life. He said, "Maybe you just need less stuff. You know how diabetics can't have too much sugar? Maybe you're like that with stuff."

The person who said this to me wasn't a minimalist, but he started me on the path to minimalism. Why had I never put those two things together before? The fact that I collect things isn't unrelated to the fact that I can't keep my house clean. In fact, it could be the VERY REASON I can't keep my house clean.

The only problem now was that I had absolutely no idea where to begin. Maybe Marie Kondo? She's a minimalist, right? I went into my Overdrive account and downloaded the audio book for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. While I was there, I searched for other books about minimalism, and I downloaded a second book for good measure, a book called Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki.

I started listening to Marie Kondo's book first. She had a lot of things to say that I really liked. But something about her method didn't feel right for my situation. It felt like it was, ultimately, just another cleaning/organizing system that I wouldn't be able to keep up with. Don't get me wrong - I love Marie Kondo, and I have adopted many of her strategies. But I couldn't get 100% on board with her method, and I couldn't figure out why. I didn't figure it out until the chapter about handbags. She has a system for storing handbags of similar size inside each other so they take up less space and hold their shape better. A system for storing handbags. That's when it clicked for me. It wasn't that the KonMari method was too extreme for me. It's that it wasn't extreme enough. The solution I wanted from minimalism wasn't "how to store your handbags." I was looking for something more like "how to get by with only one handbag."

So I started listening to Fumio Sasaki's book. HERE was the minimalism I was looking for. The simple "less stuff, more joy" minimalism I wanted for myself. I especially loved that he explored the underlying philosophy. Why stuff isn't making us happy. Why minimalism makes sense. Why keeping extra stuff lying around is costing you money in the long run. And the principle of "less stuff = less to clean" really came into focus. I called my kids into the kitchen to do a little experiment. I set up three trays: One with just one thing to clean around, one with a few, organized things to clean around, and one with our normal life's clutter to clean around. The moral of the story, which should be obvious, but is still important to realize: It's a lot easier to clean around less stuff. (I posted the video of our cleaning experiment on YouTube here: Our Minimalism Cleaning Experiment.)

Lesson one: Less stuff = Less stuff to clean.

This is the first post in a series of posts about my journey to minimalism. You can read the second post here: The "See You Later" Porch