Minimalism and Consumables

Minimalism can be defined many different ways… it’s about different principles for different people… and everyone uses minimalism in their own unique way in order to most effectively apply it to their life. For me, minimalism is about reducing stress in my life by reducing the number of things I own and therefore have to clean, maintain, move, store, etc. It’s also about paring my possessions down to those things I need and use. This means my household runs more efficiently, economically, and produces less waste. I think minimalism and economics go hand in hand. So I wanted to write a bit about how I apply the philosophy of minimalism when purchasing consumable goods for my family.

Minimalists may tend to own fewer items, but we are still consumers. For the most part, we all use toilet paper, paper towels, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, food, etc. every day. I believe we can view this consumption through a minimalist lens and save ourselves time, money, and maybe even help out the environment in the process.

I start by asking myself a few questions about the consumable items I buy regularly. Question one: Is there any way I could use this item less? Question two: What’s the lowest quality of this item I can live with? Question three: What is the least amount I can pay for this item?

Is there any way I could use this item less? Depending on the item, the answer may be yes, no, or maybe. Can I use deodorant less? If you’re like me and don’t sweat much to begin with, don’t exercise like I should, and have a desk job in an air-conditioned office, maybe you could use deodorant only once per day and be comfortable. In fact, I do! On the other hand, if you are a person who naturally sweats more, exercises a lot, and/or has a job outside or where you’re quite active, you may not be able to use deodorant less… at least not without offending others with your odor! So your answer would be no. Be brutally honest when answering this question!

Can I use paper towels less? When I really took stock of all the little things I was using paper towels for, I was astonished. Spills, wiping windows, cleaning the stove top, cleaning the microwave… the list went on and on. Like the typical household, I went through a roll of paper towels in less than a week. I decided to spend a couple bucks on some cheap microfiber rags to see if that would help me stretch my paper towel usage out longer. They were about $0.36 each on Amazon so I took the plunge! I loved the rags and found new uses for them every day. From dusting to cleaning windows to cleaning the kitchen, the rags have allowed me to use a roll of paper towels a month rather than a week! And I feel good about producing less waste as I just throw the dirty rags in the washing machine with my other towels and use them all over again.

Can I use toilet paper less? The answer is yes. There is a concept, similar to replacing paper towels with rags, called family cloth. It’s basically using pieces of cloth for toilet paper and then soaking, washing, and reusing it. But here’s where question two comes in… I’m just not there. I am not to the point where I want to be handling and washing and folding cloth that was just used to clean my bum. I should be dedicated enough to the environment, to the cash savings over the years, but I just am not yet willing to take this step. I would not be happy living with this choice… so I choose to stick with 2-ply, off-brand toilet paper because that’s the least costly level I’m willing to live with. And that’s okay!

What’s the lowest quality of this item I can live with? I occasionally use bleach when cleaning or in the laundry. Name-brand bleach costs upwards of $4.00 a bottle… I was paying over $2.50 for off-brand bleach. To me, bleach is bleach is bleach. With just a little searching of the ads that come in my mailbox every week, I found the same amount of bleach at K-Mart for $0.97 a bottle. That was the regular price! Sometimes it even went on sale! From then on, I always got my bleach there. All the K-Marts in my area went out of business recently so I stocked up. I have six bottles of bleach in my basement that will take me years to go through.

I have a similar feeling about laundry detergent. You’ll get no argument from me that Tide is the best detergent. It definitely is. But my family is just adults and we typically don’t have crazy stains that necessitate Tide’s superior cleaning power (or exorbitant price!) I decided to start back at square one and did research on any and all detergents I could find. I made a list of the cheapest ones so I would know what to buy when I ran out of what I had. In the meantime, Menards, of all places, ran a killer sale that made one of the brands I had researched cheaper than I had ever seen it. I bought a test bottle and ran a few loads to make sure no one in my family was allergic (which they weren’t) and then bought enough detergent to last us a year. I really like it so far… my clothes are clean and smell great… at a fraction of the cost! Seriously, a fraction… I was using Persil which cost $0.24 per load and the new detergent, Sun, costs $0.04 per load.

That brings us to question three: What’s the least amount I can pay for this item? Once I determine I need the item and make any changes I can to use less of it, decide what I can live with and what I can’t, then I look for ways I can pay the least amount possible for that item. This can include stocking up when great sales come along as I did with the laundry detergent and bleach. It can include going to a different store than I normally do to get an item or buying it online. It can mean using coupons or price matching or even just apps like Flipp to see which store has it cheapest when I need to buy it.

Once you start asking yourself these questions about the items you use every day, you’ll be amazed at the changes you’ll make and the money you’ll save!

Organizing Dresser Drawers

Once again, life has been so busy lately that I've had to put off organizing. I did have a chance to organize my yoga pants drawer, though. Most of you probably don't have an entire drawer devoted to yoga pants only, but I do! It actually includes any lounge-around-the-house-type pants, capris, and shorts. But it was so full and jumbled that I couldn't tell what I even had. I did get rid of two things, but everything else fit and "sparked joy" enough to keep. I was actually watching Marie Kondo on Netflix for the sixth or seventh time and that's what finally motivated me to take ten minutes to organize this drawer.

In true KonMari style, I took everything out of the drawer. I laid it all out on my bed and then took each piece, one at a time, into my hands. I tried it on to be certain it still fit, didn't have holes, etc. I put any damaged or ill-fitting pieces in the donate pile. Then I paid attention to how I felt while wearing each item.

I love yoga pants because they are soft and stretchy and conform to my body. When they fit, they make me feel good about myself. I almost always put on a pair after I get home from work to relax around the house in. But they work hard, too. I clean in them, garden in them, and usually sleep in them.

I also gathered up any additional pairs of these type of pants from around the house. I had some in my pajama drawer and some in the closet. Once I decided what I was keeping, I folded each piece so that it could stand on its own in the drawer. I then arranged them in rows with all the long pants together, then the capris together, then the shorts. As you can see in the pictures, I ended up having more than enough room for all of them!

I'm a minimalist at heart and usually get rid of much more than I did here. But yoga pants are something I wear every day and I've owned many of these pairs for decades. They have some sentimental attachment for me... much more so than jeans or shoes or shirts. Everyone is different and has attachment to different things for different reasons... I just wanted to drive home the point that you don't have to get rid of everything just because you have a lot of something. But each and every item should be accessible and usable.

Again, I am surprised at how much more I'm wearing each of these items now that I can actually see and get to all of them. I love these pants and now this is my favorite drawer in the house to open!

My medicine cabinet project

This week I was able to finally minimize and organize my medicine cabinet. My dear husband has had five surgeries in the last 18 months and that cabinet was stuffed with old prescriptions, discharge instructions, expired medicines, etc. It needed attention badly. So here is my method when I'm minimizing an area such as this medicine cabinet:

First, I pull everything out of the area. I take this opportunity to clean the shelves with antibacterial spray.

I then place each item into a like category. I changed these categories a few times based on the items I had. You don't want the categories to be too narrow or broad or you'll have too many or too few items in each category. The idea is to group like with like so you can see what you have excess of. I just used my kitchen counters as space for this part. If I saw things I knew didn't belong in my medicine cabinet, I took them to the area in the house where they did belong. If I saw things I knew I wanted to throw out or donate, I moved them to the trash, recycling, or donate box immediately as well.

Once I have all the items in categories, I go through each item in each category and get rid of anything not needed, unwanted, duplicated, or expired. Everyone is different. We have pets so I had a huge category of pet medication. It's the entire third shelf! You may not have pets so you won't have that category. The important part at this step is to let go of anything you don't need. I was really surprised at how much I got rid of. I'm sure you will be too.

Once the minimizing is done, I went on the hunt for any storage boxes or containers I might have around the house that could be repurposed for this medicine cabinet. The square miscellaneous medications box is an old Tupperware piece that I bought for a few cents at a garage sale. When I got home, I noticed the lid had a crack in it so it is no longer air tight. However, it's perfect for the medicine cabinet! I like to try whenever possible to use containers I already have and not buy anything new. I saw what categories fit in what containers and what containers fit on each shelf. I adjusted accordingly and then made labels for each container so I could clearly see what was where.

Once you have everything clean, minimized, categorized, and your containers are labeled, put what you have left back into the medicine cabinet using whatever organizational strategy makes the most sense to you. In my case, I separated my daily medicine from my husband's daily medicine and made those the easiest to access since we use them every day. I put the pets' medicines up on the top shelf since we don't usually get into that but once a month for their heartworm treatment. I made sure to put the heartworm medicine up front so I can get to it easily. Remember, the key to this organizational step is to make things easy to access. After all, you'll have less stress on a daily basis if you can always find and easily get to what you need the most.

When you choose to tackle an area in your home like this to minimize and organize, be sure you are in the right mood and have ample time to complete the entire task. Make it fun and relaxing by playing music and/or burning your favorite candle. Try not to get distracted and focus on only that one area right now. When you're done, take a second to look at the difference you made and how you feel about your accomplishment. Use the newly organized area for a few days and make adjustments as necessary to make it as user friendly as possible.