I’m a fan of minimalism. But I am far from taking part in it. I try my hardest not to buy anything unless I really need it. But there is a lot of stuff in my house. A lot of stuff I use. A lot of stuff I feel like I might need one day. And finally, a lot of stuff I don’t want but I don’t know how to get rid of. This last category is the subject of this post.

As I said, I do like the idea of minimalism. I agree that all of this clutter is adding stress to my life. But one thing I don’t see covered by proponents like Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of The Minimalists is how to get rid of stuff, especially for an environmentalist like me. Most of what I read or hear is how to motivate yourself to choose things to toss. But I don’t have a problem with that, well not too much anyway. I know what I want to let go of as you’ll see later.

I could easily just put everything I don’t need anymore in the trash. But my problem is that I don’t want to fill up the landfills, especially with things that might still have some use. Of course I donate and sell whatever I can. But there are many things I can’t just donate because they are broken or for some reason they don’t fulfill their original intended use. They could either be repaired by someone who likes to fix things. Or the parts can be used to make something new, something useful or even artistic.

We all know that saying: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Here are the ideas I thought of so far to get this stuff out of my house:

1. Create a website where anyone can post things to give away and makers or fixers or artists could claim them. But I just don’t have the time and it might not work.
2. Donate to a maker space. I think maker spaces are a great idea even though I don’t make use of them. I contacted a local one but unfortunately they don’t have space to store anything right now.
3. Create a new Facebook group like the yard sale groups online already but this one would just be for these types of things. This is probably the easiest to set up but I don’t know if it would get enough of a following and how much time I would have to spend administering the group.

I’m open to other ideas. Let me know what you think.

In the meantime, I’m going to actually use these items to practice my photography. I never tried much studio photography. I mostly shoot outdoors. I’ll post the images in upcoming posts and describe the items. I’ve got a lot of this stuff so it could go on for a while as long as I have time to take the photos.

Keep watching.