Living Smaller

For many years now, I've been looking at living smaller, both in the amount of stuff that I have to keep up with, as well as the size of the "box" that I put it all in.  Sadly, right now, this is very hard for me to actually do, as I have a family of six that I'm helping house.  But in the general stream of "eventual lefts" I'd like to take, downsizing my life is one of those big things that makes considerable sense to me.

In most of the areas of my life, this is not really a huge challenge.  But there are two specific areas that it will be a massive challenge for me, namely tools and books.

Tools are difficult because with them, you can do so many "other" things...like build small houses (see "Little House on a Small Planet", "The Small House Book" and others).  You can be crafty (see "Maker Spaces", "Instructables", etc.), you can help out friends when their stuff breaks, etc.  Also being the son of a former hardware/housewares store owner, I both know good tools when I see them AND had easy access to getting them.  Further, as a new slum-lord of sorts, I've increased the collection of "construction tools" quite a bit of late, trying to fix up the rental property I have.

Books are the other seriously hard thing for me to prune down.  When I recently moved, I had a moving company come in and give me a quote on boxing up everything and moving it.  They counted 17 full-height (72" high or better) book cases and quoted me almost $4000 just to box up 11,000 pounds of books.  And this was about five years ago.  To say the least, as I read and collect books rather voraciously, and time marches on, my collection has grown.

Both of these areas are things I'm neither ashamed of, nor that I can bring myself to see as evil.  However, when trying to make them jibe with the whole "live smaller" theme, it is quite the contradiction to have to resolve.  It will be hard to do, as both my collection of books and tools has grown since my last move.

When the time comes, I think the best I'll be able to do is to trim things down to a smallish kit of things that make sense to me as "maintenance" things...both books and tools...and then to give the rest of it away.  The books to a local library (hoping they'll keep them in their collection...not just dump them into the "Friends of the Library" used book sale) and the tools to either seed a local or extend a near by Maker Space.