Happy holidays, Minimalist friends! Like many of you, I have spent the post-Thanksgiving days getting the house ready for Christmas. In my never-ending effort not to conflate my December-birthday child's day with the red and green month (never do this - having a December birthday is hard enough without someone saying "oh, this will be for birthday AND Christmas!"), I often don't go full-Santa until after mid-December.
Despite my minimalist tendencies, I do enjoy decorating. I like the change of decor for a short while, and of course, reminiscing over the ornaments the kids made or things we brought back from vacations to recollect. And where does all that decor live?
In the garage attic - a place that requires at least two of us (preferably three) from which to retrieve the festive boxes. One to limbo in the cramped rafters, one to stand on the ladder, and one to receive the box and stack on the floor. My family is less and less interested in helping every year, and I am less and less capable of the yoga-inspired bending necessary to reach all the stuff. This year I vowed: no more. This stuff is NOT going back up there. It is going to find another home.
My immediate solution was to build a storage building, influenced by my Canadian families' basements with accessible storage. Does NOT sound very minimalist, does it? Acquire MORE storage space for crap? In my defense, I promise to cull the herd and organize it by season, etc. The primary goal is to NOT use the attic as a black hole for things I don't want to look at.
I have several friends who boast there is NOTHING in their attics but HVAC. Well, ok, but your closets and garages are overflowing. I prefer to hide my shame up near the disappearing stairs, thankuverymuch. After my parents died and I was cleaning out their home, I kept the things of theirs that I wasn't ready to make decisions about shoved BEHIND the Christmas stuff. It's been a few years now, so the distance will permit me to get rid of the things that don't add value to my life. Since I can actually SEE it now that Christmas stuff is on the garage floor, the parent boxes will be sorted, organized, and assessed for keeping as well.
I've been perusing Pinterest for ideas on storage and organizing a garage/storage space, and I have ascertained that I need to purge more for sure. Here on the ranch, we have a lot of stuff we don't use on the regular, but when you need it, you need it - e.g., bailing wire, surveyor's wheel, t-post clips, donkey treats. You don't want to run to the hardware/feed store every time a need pops up, so you keep a lot.
We don't have a barn/outdoor storage - YET. In my effort to clean the attic, I'll find storage elsewhere. Garage for now, store room for later. Any attic/garage tips? Hit me up. Pinterest just wants me to buy everything in red and green. And happy storing in a few weeks, friends!
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