Apartment Clear-Out

Since attending university from 2011-2013, I decided to reduce the amount of ‘stuff’ I owned. This resulted in me having to become pretty ruthless with things I had hoarded throughout my life and whilst studying in Cardiff. Something I will say for being a graphic design student is that we keep anything that has a nice design. Books, packaging, greetings cards, flyers… You name it, we collect it!

Something that kickstarted this process was moving from Cardiff back to Tenby. Not only having to move back into my parents’ house but into my fairly-small bedroom. Not only did I have my possessions that I had left behind when going to university but all of the belongings from my house in Cardiff as well. It was a struggle but I managed, just about!

One thing that limited the amount of possessions I could keep was the fact that I didn’t have my own property. I was intending on working at USA Summer Camp (May-August 2014) and this meant I had no immediate plans to commit to a rental property. So the de-cluttering and spring-cleaning began!

Since 2014 I have been ruthlessly sorting through everything I own in order to minimise what I had. My main motivation was ‘if you’ve not looked at it in six months why do you still have it?’ This definitely helped and out of everything I only kept the most sentimental of items and kept anything that I could use in the future when I got my own property.

After working at summer camp for two seasons (2014 & 2015) and living at home between, I eventually moved into my own apartment in July 2016. Before this, if you have followed me on social media for a while, I planned – and started work on – converting my parents’ garage into a self-contained living annex. I hadn’t quite finished going through all of my belongings by this point so the second bedroom became a dumping ground!

I have been living in this property now for over twelve months and I’m finally at a point where I am comfortable with it. I had to purchase all of my appliances and utilities throughout this year (mostly towards the start of my tenancy on credit cards which I’ve now paid off) and I now have everything I ever need or could want.

As my journey to a minimalist lifestyle is progressing, I have decided to continue filtering through everything I own to really focus on the items I need and use on a regular basis. One big step I made this summer was converting fully to cloud storage. That’s a whole new blog post and topic however I have also accumulated digital clutter over the years and by converting fully to cloud storage, those long-forgotten hard-drives are no longer needed!

This leads me onto the point of this blog post… The sale of belongings. A key part of living a minimalist lifestyle is keeping only what you need. I have been fortunate enough to be able to purchase really nice technology, clothing and accessories etc. over the years and I’ve kept them in fantastic condition. As I’m completing the final part of my four-year-long spring clean, I am getting everything that I’m going to sell organised. I am going to produce either a web-page or a new blog post with all of the items I’m selling included. This way people can contact me through the website or directly if they are interested in purchasing anything from me.

Keep an eye on my social media accounts (@glenconbeer everywhere) in the coming weeks to be notified of when this is up on the website and what I’m selling altogether. Have a great day and thanks for reading!