Because I've gotten a lot of questions about it this week, today I want to tell you how I packed up all of my stuff... (And why!)
In a my last blog post, I shared with you the idea of a Packing Party, which was first introduced to me by The Minimalists.
Basically, you spend a day (or two, if necessary) packing up all of your stuff as though you had to move. Over the next week, you unpack your belongs only as you need them. At the end of your set time, you see exactly what you use over the course of a week, and you go through the unopened boxes using them as a starting point for getting rid of stuff you don't really need.
Before my sister and I packed, this is what our shared room looked like...
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| The view from the doorway. |
This is the view from the doorway pre-packing. In the bottom right corner, you can see our stack of empty boxes waiting to be filled. It took about ten minutes to find enough boxes for us to start. I was worried we wouldn't have enough, but we ended up finding quite a few more than I expected!
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| Every shelf in our room has something on it. |
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| The closet was especially full. |
The closet was one of the best (or worst) examples of the storage crisis, and the space that bugged me the most. In fact, it was while I was looking at our very sad closet that I decided everything must go! (Well, not everything, but you get my reference, don't you?)
Monday was our big packing day. We started around noon and worked until "lunch break" at 3:30. I worked by myself for the next three hours, then my sister took a shift after that. We decided to stop for the night just after 9, and had gotten nearly all of our stuff packed.
The next day- which also happened to be yesterday- we finished up what we hadn't been able to get done already. There were just a few shelves that still hadn't been packed up Today, I have declared that we are
Officially done packing!
Now, I realize that we aren't actually moving, and I know that none of this was mandatory... But I'm still excited and relieved to have everything done! It's been a really long and busy two days, and I'm so glad we're able to move on to the next stage of the proceedings.
Unpacking.
Thankfully, this isn't nearly as intense as the packing was. Actually, the point is to not be intense. The point is that we really aren't focusing on getting things out of the boxes- we just get them out when we need them.
Until then, this is how our room looks...
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| The new view from the doorway. |
Here is the view from our doorway! You can see that the floor is completely clear except for the area holding our boxes. The bed- which was a temporary landing place for the boxes- is also nice and clean, now.
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| Most of our boxes are piled in one corner of the room. |
For the moment- to get them out of the way- we have all of the boxes piled on one side of the room. In the original Packing Party by The Minimalists, a whole house was packed up and they were able to devote a full room to holding the boxes. Because we only have one room and so much space, we're making do with what we've got.
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| This is the rest of our boxes, as well as our dressers which are packed under sheets. |
We had more boxes than would fit in the one corner of the room, we put the rest of our boxes on top of the dressers. Since the dressers obviously wouldn't fit in any box we've got, we covered them both up with sheets and did the same thing for our beds.
There's something very humbling about looking at pretty much everything you own packed away in boxes and stacked in the corner of your room. Nothing's hidden away behind doors or in cabinets- it's all out in the open.
I'm definitely gaining a new sense of perspective about how privileged I really am, which was just one of the many reasons I decided to pack my stuff away.
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Did this answer any questions you may have had about The Project? Were there any misconceptions you had about minimalism that have been cleared up now? If you have anything you'd like to ask about The Packing Party or minimalism, just leave me a comment below or over at my Facebook page! I always love to hear from my readers.
There will be more pictures to come next week when we go through the boxes again, so be sure to subscribe over --> you'll never miss another post!
