How much stuff is too much stuff?
- vathsanclan
- Feb 25, 2018
- 3 min read
I am not a big fan of moving houses. The task of packing everything up, including all the furniture plus whiteware plus kitchen utensils plus crap you store in your garage ( the rental houses in NZ usually come with no furniture, sometimes even no fridge nor washing machine, simply nothing, nada) and then unpacking it all in a new house, feels to me like a big challenge. So at first moving to Dunedin sounded great, except for the big task of packing & unpacking everything. Initially, we wanted to sort it all, get rid of everything which was not needed anymore, donate some, sell some and pack only the necessary. And I am sure we would have done that if we had enough time and especially if we were under stronger financial pressure.
But back then we ended up hiring a moving company. They were great, they came to our place and in about 6 hours they wrapped, packed and placed everything we had in our house into a big ass container. Compare to the average customer, our removal was very small. We used only half of the container. *** ( Not sure how many boxes we used back then, but I remember writing down the number of boxes we packed when moving to our current house by the beach. Guess how many? 31!)
Then the truck drove to a storage unit where all of our belongings were dropped off. This way they could wait for some time while we were going to travel in India, Sri Lanka, drive from Auckland to Dunedin and look for a nice house to rent. Once rented , we could get back to the moving company to ask for things to be delivered because we finally knew the exact date and address.
For the travel, we packed only two backpacks, one duffel bag and a small box of the most important goodies we own. This box didn't go with us to Asia, it waited in friend's house in Auckland and we just picked it up and drove with it from Auckland. The backpacks were full of nice summer clothes that were useful in tropics. The duffel bag was filled with warmer clothes because we were returning to Auckland in September, ( beginning of the spring ) and driving farther South so we were expecting temperatures getting lower and lower.
To be honest, all we packed for all those weeks ended up to be really sufficient. We were not missing on clothing and washing 2 times per week was enough to keep us going. Our days felt also a bit more interesting because I was not preoccupied. If you have less stuff, it simply takes less time to take care of them : ) Obviously, the kitchen is the only thing that we could debate on. In Asia we were not cooking and back in NZ, we were staying in units with equipped kitchenettes.
We were not really missing all those other items that we locked in a storage. It almost felt like, if the moving company would ring us to say: hey, so sorry, there was an accident and your container burned down, all we can do is to pay you insurance for your loss. I probably wouldn't care this much anymore. These few weeks were enough to catch a healthy distance to our belongings and not feel like we need them so badly.
But there was no accident and the company came with ALL that we own and dropped it off in our new place in Dunedin. As they were bringing these boxes, one by one, filling rooms with cartons, I was looking at all of that and asking myself: What is this?
Do we really need that? How much of THIS is actually useful and how much is something that looks more appealing than it is for real?
So I began my mini battle with unnecessary clutter.
I am trying to prioritize and draw the line between how much stuff is too much stuff?
It is not easy especially since I believe they are certain contradictory rules I try to follow at the same time. But I will try to break them down for you in an upcoming couple of blog posts.
There will be one about travel gear and one about organizing the home.
I hope you will find it interesting.
And how about yourself? do you feel the same way, as if there is more stuff than needed surrounding you in your daily life?
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