About three years ago, my husband and I decided to build a home. Sounds simple enough right? After agonizing over colors, finishes, materials, and umpteen trips to the big box home improvement stores we ended up with a beautiful 3,500 square foot home that was falling apart.
Yep, you read that correctly. Our brand new home needed over $100,000 in repairs. Our general contractor had cut corners throughout the entire process of building the house and in doing so had left us with a home that looked beautiful, but wouldn’t stay that way for long.
We legally battled with our contractor for two years and ended up being forced to say goodbye to our lovely home and downsize into something smaller. We were blessed to find a place that was in our budget and that was actually owned by my parents. The only problem with the house was that it was about a fourth of the size of the home we had built and filled up with our stuff!
I began the task of packing to move and it was right around this time that I found out I was pregnant with our 3rd child. I was then faced with the reality that we would have a family of five in a two-bedroom, 850-square foot home.
How was I going to make this work? Where would we put all of our things?
Mission: Simplify
As I started going through everything we had accumulated over the five years my husband and I had been married, I was amazed to find that we had boxes in our basement that had never been unpacked, full of items that we thought we couldn’t live without. This to me seemed wasteful and it was then, after opening that third box that had been sitting untouched for almost two years, that I started a mission to simplify our lives.
This was my rule: If we hadn’t used something in a year, it was donated or sold. The only exceptions to this rule were pictures and a few mementos that held a special meaning to us, like the guitar played by my husband’s late grandfather.
Did I have to let some things go that I loved? Yes. Was it the end of the world? No. After all, they are just things. And while I did love those three sets of curtains, there were not that many windows in our new home so they were lovingly donated to our local Goodwill.
Our Lives Are Not Wrapped Up in the Things We Own
When moving day arrived, we were able to fit our once 3,500-square foot lives into 850-square feet — with room to spare for our upcoming addition to the family. Throughout this whole process, my husband I learned a valuable lesson: our lives are not wrapped up in the things that we own, but instead in the people that we surround ourselves with. Our family has grown and enjoyed the simple pleasure of being together in a home filled with love, not clutter.
Amanda is a 26-year-old, stay-at-home-mom to three little boys (ages 4, 2, and 4 months). She and her husband are high school sweethearts and have been married for six years. He is a public school teacher, just as she was before staying home with her children.
A question I have heard over and over during the past few years is: “How do I start offering giveaways on my blog?” I get the impression that many new bloggers think you must have a big blog or super secret sources in order to host giveaways on your blog.
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