Minimalist January - part 2

Week 2 of the minimalist challenge is going well, so well in fact that I am posting this a day early!!

I had already got up to 11 and had already done 15 so I only had 12, 13, 14 left to do but I wanted to try and do 29, 28 and maybe 27 so that I had less to do when I was away. The smaller numbers were ok but those bigger numbers - they were a challenge without really cheating and counting things like marbles or pens!!

So I really put my mind to it and I did better than I thought I would as you can see below.

It was great to get some inspiration from some great articles about minimising though like this one.

Even dd and dh got in on the action with Indie getting rid of some items which are part of day 26 below and she got rid of a whole lot of dolls which went on ebay here but aren't included below as I didn't want to include too much of her stuff.

Day	Picture	Reason why
12		I am a bit of a bag lady so there is really no surprise that I had spare bags that I really don't need and don't use. These are just some of them that I could bear to part with. They went to charity shop.
13		Here are some of the books I got rid of but these went to my local library because they are happy to take good quality books.
14		Household magazines like Prima, Good Housekeeping, etc. These went on freecycle.
16		Juno magazines which I had read. These went to a friend.
17		A whole load of various crochet magazines which I had read and noted the patterns I needed. These went on freecycle.
23		Bad picture (sorry) but here are our unneeded Xmas decorations. We have one box of decorations and it was beginning to overflow so it was time to freecycle some.
24		A set of books that went to charity and a set that went to Amazon for some money.
25		A bunch of seeds I had left over from the Grow Wild Kew campaign last year. Some will be sown and the rest have been freecycled.
26		Some games we don't use which have been taken to charity shop and a bag of dd's clothes which are too small for her. It was great getting dd involved. We totally tidied and zoned her room as we went too (see below.)
27		A bag full of painting stuff that we don't need any more.
28		A whole load of various craft and knitting magazines which I had read and noted the patterns I needed. These went on freecycle.
29		Another whole load of various craft and knitting magazines which I had read and noted the patterns I needed. These went on freecycle.

My items from last week are still on ebay and don't end until Sunday but have sold already which is great. I have also freed up at least 3 whole shelves by getting rid of these magazines and various other things.

	Here are the photos from dd's room transformation. I wish I had got some before photos as well because you can rarely see dd's floor. I am hoping that the re-zoning of everything to where it is most useful to her might help her keep the floor tidy but we will see.
Above is a photo showing that there is enough floor space to actually lie down!! Not something you can ever do in dd's room. Here are her newly arranged shelves with boxes and baskets all ordered and organised. This will not last but it looks good at the moment.
	I have tried to organise her shelves so that the books she uses more often are nearer the bottom and ornaments she doesn't play with are at the top. The same with the red shelves in the photo above. The more ornamental things are on the top shelf and the precious things she uses more often are on the bottom shelf.
With the 3 sets of wardrobe shelves (to the right and above) I again tried to find out from her how she uses her toys and boxed them up appropriately. This means that she can get a box down to play with something and there then might be a small chance that she then puts it back!! I think these will need re-visiting as her room becomes messy again. I will then try to find out what is not working and why but by this time she as getting tried of tidying and sorting.
	A happy dd using some floor space for writing her book whilst listening to music. So even when I sort out her desk so that she can write on it she wants to use the floor because she can!!
The 5 piles of stuff that we got from her room which she doesn't want any more. Result!!