Are you ready to simplify but are unsure of what items to pair down from your home? Maybe you’re fearful you will get rid of something only later to regret it. One thing that helped our family de-own much of our excess stuff was having a philosophy we can apply to each item in our home.
The philosophy is this: We want to love, use and know everything that we keep in our home. I call this the LUK method, although it has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with intentionality.
Three words to help you get started:
Love. Use. Know.
Love: We want to remove the things we like for the items we love. Quality over quantity.
According to the report, Value Your Clothing, conducted by WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), the UK’s leading body on resource efficiency, UK consumers have around £30 billion worth of clothes which they haven’t worn for a year hanging in their wardrobes. The number one reasons for so many unworn clothing items, people simply prefer a different item.
When we started sorting through our clothes, many clothing items that fell into the “I kinda like this” category. Thus, they were hardly ever worn. We wasted time and money on clothes that we didn’t even love to wear. When you look in your closet do you see clothes you don’t even like? When applying this to shared use items like tools, we purged 3 hammers down to one–keeping the one we loved to use first.
Use: We want to actually use the items we have in our home. Most of us only wear about 20% of our clothes while the remain 80% sits unused and essentially, wasted.
According to a survey conducted by Nielsen Customized Research, the average american household has over 50 unused items worth a value of $3100. Clothing is a top item that goes unused. If you’re like I was, you have many articles of clothing hanging in your closet that haven’t been worn for a year a more! I saved my clothes thinking I would wear them, someday. Eventually, I accepted reality, that day was not going to be anytime soon (or even this year). As I started purging un used clothing items, I felt the mental clutter dissipating every morning from choosing what to wear.
Know: We wanted to know every item kept in our home. I found myself wondering why we kept things we didn’t like, we never used and didn’t even remember were there.
Do you know where everything is at the moment you need it? If not, how long would it take you to find it? Have you even been surprised to find stuff you forgot you even owned? If we don’t even remember we own it, how much do we really need it?
The Daily Mail reported research finding that people spend about 1o minutes a day searching for misplaced stuff. that amounts to 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for stuff, over our lifetimes. The research found that we also loose up to 9 items each day accumulating to 198,743 in a lifetime.
Not finding things I needed and taking care of things I didn’t want was much of my initital motivation to shift towards minimalism. Having a family of six with excess clutter, Im sure I spent twice the amount of time looking for misplaced items than the average american.
The more excess we have, the less love what we have, the less we use it and the more likely we’ll forget we even own it–Tweet That
If you’re ready to apply the Luk way, your clothing can be a great place to start. Ask yourself if you love, use and know each item in your closet. If the answer is no, let it go.