A new activity - 30 days of less

I haven't done a 30 day activity since My Year of TED ended in November last year. This was an activity that I had planned to do during that year, but we weren't ready for it, since it focuses on the new house. So, since we now have a certificate of occupancy and will be moving in about two weeks I can finally do 30 days of less.

The TalksThere are two talks that form the basis of this activity Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff and Graham Hill: Less stuff, more happiness, which are both about using less stuff. For those of you who have read through the previous activities, you may notice that much of this activity follows the basic principles  used from Jessi Arrington: Wearing nothing new for Activity 1 - 30 days of fashion.

The ChallengeI guess you could say that we've been trying to follow many of Dan's points as we were building the house. We definitely tried to reuse offcuts and reduce the amount of new materials we had to purchase, mainly to reduce the costs but also to reduce the impact of building a house. This will be taken a step further as we move in. We are going to limit the amount of new furnishings that we purchase for the house, trying to find ways to use the furniture that we already have before we consider buying anything new.Graham's talk will be used during the packing and moving phase, where we will try to reduce some of ourstuff before going, so we don't bring clutter with us. We will follow the theory that everything must have a home in the new house. If we don't treasure enough, or need it enough to give it a home then why are we keeping it? Our new house has been built with quite a bit of storage, but the last thing we want is to make any of it feel cluttered. So we will be reducing as well.

The ActivityAs we pack and move into our lovely new house we will be trying to reduce the clutter in our lives and reuse the things we have, rather than purchasing new things. It's a pretty simple exercise in theory, but there is a desire to buy new things to go in our lovely new house. Having said that, I think that it will be lovely to bring all of our things into this amazing building that we have spent two and a half years creating for ourselves.I think that this will be an interesting one for us, partly because moving into the house is such a massive milestone for our treechange to Tasmania. It's also a really interesting time for us since Derek has gone back to office work and I have just changed jobs, so we're going through an upheaval. But by the end of this month we will be settled into our house (well the parts we've completed anyway), and hopefully settled into our new lives as well.

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