Chapter 1: What are the three categories for sorting belongings?
Hello and welcome to the Art of Decluttering podcast. I'm your host, Amy Revell. Welcome. It's so good to be with you. If you haven't yet listened to last week's podcast episode with Dana K. White, I want you to go back in your feed after you've listened to this episode and listen to it. We talked all about her new children's book, Winnie's Pile of Pillows.
And even though it's a children's book and we talk a lot about engaging children in decluttering in the episode, I've had multiple adults reach out to me with no children in their lives to say, Amy, that conversation with Dana was so incredible. It changed the way that I see things. It was really transformational.
And so I want to take the opportunity to say, if you haven't gone and listened to it, jump back in the feed and make sure you do that. It's a really great episode and I think it'll be helpful for you. It'd be helpful for the little people in your world if you have them as well. Today's episode is all about want. need and excess.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to categorize the stuff in our home. I had the idea, I was listening to, I was reading a blog from the minimalists the other day. And one of the things they did is they categorized and said, everything kind of falls into three categories, kind of your essential things, the things that you want and you use to live a good life.
And then you've got the excess and the clutter. And I played around with this idea a little bit in my mind over the last couple of days and thought, yeah, it's really actually helpful for some people to see things within this lens.
Do you see things like what do I actually need? And sometimes we conflate that and we think we need all the things, but actually when you drill it down, what do you actually need? that you're gonna keep what you need. You've got, what do I want? What is it that will help me to live a good life, a life with good wellbeing and a life I enjoy, things I like around me.
And you've got this like, this is what I want. This is kind of the desires that I have.
And that's good as well. And then you've got this excess, and that's the things that you actually don't need. You don't need them, that you don't use them. They're adding stress to your life. You don't have space for them. And so by being able to kind of categorize, I hope that this is just one other tool that you can add into your way of thinking about the stuff in your home.
So we're going to start off with talking about things that we need. And my challenge, because I can be a little bit of a black and white thinker, as some of you know, is that when I think like what do I need, I can get like really reductive. I need like a toothbrush, a pair of shoes, a sleeping bag, a tent and an outfit and maybe some food.
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Chapter 2: How can we differentiate between needs and wants?
Some of the other needs that I wrote down was toiletries. So I need soap. I need shampoo and conditioner. I need a hair comb. I don't have a brush because I don't need a brush with this wild hair, but I need medications. So there's some medications that you might need. And then what else did I put down? Oh, a bed. Like, come on, you need a bed.
And so there's these things that you need to live safe and to live well in your home. And then we move on to the wants. And what I don't want you to do is think, well, the needs are good. I need the needs. But the wants, oh, they're a bit dodgy, like it's a bit flush of me. No, no, no, no, no, no. It is important to have these wants in your life.
When you come to the needs, let me just jump back one thought that I just had is when you're looking at the needs and these essentials that you need in order to live well and safe and function well, sometimes they're the items that you want to invest a bit of money in. So in our home, there's a couple of things that we've invested money in on our needs. So we have good bed sheets.
We're in our beds a lot and it's really nice to sleep well. We've invested in good mattresses and we've also got good pillows for all of us. And so they're those need areas that for me, it is worth investing some money in.
And so whatever that is for you, maybe it's like a car and you're like, well, cars are expensive, but I want to invest my money in getting good insurance or getting a car that's safe and reliable. And so as you kind of think around these needs, what do I need? Often there is like, oh, I need a couch to sit on so I can be with my family and I can read my book and I just need a couch.
And you want to have a comfortable couch. So it might be an area that you do spend a little bit more money in on those needs.
Yeah.
Now when it comes to wants, these are good things too. So the wants are things that you enjoy and you use. So I wrote a list of some wants that we have in our house that I enjoy. We have a piano. I love our piano. Elijah plays our piano literally hours every day and I get so much joy from listening to him play the piano. I had a piano in my home growing up. We had an upright piano.
We've got an electric piano now and And I would play when I was younger, hours and hours every day. And my mum used to say to me, I love it when you play the piano. So the piano is absolutely not a need in our home, but it is something we love and we really enjoy. And it's a want. And if something happened to that piano, I'd probably go out and buy another one.
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Chapter 3: What are some examples of essential items we need?
We have a set of 12. We like to have friends and family over and I like to be able to just pull out that one set of crockery that, you know, suits everybody, works for everybody. If I'm hosting more than 12 people, I'll probably go for disposable or I will ask someone to bring some with them. But what does excess look like with your crockery?
Well, that's when you've got maybe 30 different mismatched plates that don't stack properly, that you don't actually need. And so you've gone from, it's not that you need them, it's not even that you want them or like them or use them, or even to be honest, that you have the space for them, but they've really moved into excess.
And so excess is things like books that you're not going to read again. How many books do you need? You might say there's one book that I need. Maybe it's a spiritual or religious book for you or a book that you wrote or a book that's got childhood. You're like, I need that book. That book is part of my identity and I rely on it and use it a lot. How many books do you want?
Okay, maybe there's 15 books that you really love that you want to keep a copy of. But when does it become need to excess? And the excess is all those books you're never going to read again that are just cluttering up your shelves and gathering dust. Nobody else can read them because they are stuck on your bookshelf doing nothing. Bedding for beds that you don't have.
So we talked about having that excess bed. What if you've got all this excess linen? And it might be for beds you don't even have anymore. That's when we get to excess. And I want you to be able to use this as a filter to look through when you look at something and say, is that item a need, a want, or excess? And it kind of has to fit into one of those three categories, a need, a want, or excess.
Another area of excess that I see in pretty much every home that I go into is hobbies that you used to like or you thought you would like. You guys know at the start of the year, I was like, this is the year of Amy learning to crochet. I tried. I didn't like it. It wasn't natural for me. It just, I had to concentrate too much and so I stopped.
It would have been really tempting for me to just keep all the crocheting. I mean, I only bought two kits, so it's not like I bought a lot of stuff, but it's really tempting to put that aside. I think maybe I will come back to it. Maybe that's something that I will learn to love and I don't want to waste the $15 maybe that I spent on the supplies.
now that's one category for me for you that might be 15 or 30 or 60 different categories of this hobby that i decided i wanted to buy some beautiful markers and now they're sitting in the back of a drawer and then i decided i wanted to learn how to mosaic and so there's tiles and tile cutters and and then you wanted to bake and so you bought all the baking stuff and then you wanted to make soap it goes on and on and in clients homes
this sway from the need, I want a hobby, which is a great thing. Hobbies are awesome. It's great to have a place to express your creativity and to make things and learn new skills. But when that goes from a want to an excess is when you are no longer paying any attention to all of that stuff that you bought for your hobby. And so it might be time just to get rid of it.
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