Always room for less

We have had this apartment a little over five months, and have lived here about four. Although we had previously decluttered (a lot), the short time we had to sort, pack, and move our belongings did not allow for much fine-tuning. We eased the transition by renting a storage unit, mostly for Mr. Fixit's business needs, but also for holiday decorations, a few boxes of books, and a couple of bulky things like car ramps (used for oil changes).

It's now time for Phase Two: we're planning to close out the storage unit and bring it all home. Or at least the parts of it that fit. Or that we want to fit.

Did I mention the three large plastic bins of Christmas decorations? Yeah. Well, we did sort through them, just before we moved, in a Clean Sweep Yes-Maybe-No style. We cut down quite a bit, but that was with the plan of keeping the storage unit until at least Christmas.  Now things have changed, so we'll have to rethink. Strangely enough, our artificial tree is not a huge priority. It does fold up in a box, but it's still a large box. And if we didn't have the tree, we wouldn't need the lights, and so on.

What's already here that could be rearranged or reduced? Where could car ramps go, at least temporarily? (The balcony is the only real option.) We have some large boxes of photos in the storage room (in our unit), and some of those could be digitized, making more room for other things. I've already emptied a bin of all-the-other-holidays-of-the-year decorations, and rerouted the important ones to a closet shelf.

The boxes of picture books and teaching books...well, somehow we will find spots for the important stuff. We've found that, often, two boxes can be reduced to one, if that's what it takes. But there is almost nothing (even a Christmas tree) that is so important it can't be replaced, or lived without.

There is always room for less.