When you have an abundance of square footage and closets and garages to store stuff, you buy stuff to fill it up.  You spend weekends at box stores buying stuff.  I am not casting stones.  I did it.  When we moved, we had a garage sale, estate sale, we put stuff on the front lawn with a sign “Free stuff” and my good friend with a Tahoe who went back and forth multiple times to the Salvation Army.  We gave a couch, dining table, BBQ pit and on and on to the buyers of our house.   If I added up the retail value of all this stuff I really did not need, maybe I could send a kid to college.  Who knows?   This is one of those lessons learned that I feel compelled to communicate in the hopes of keeping others from doing the same thing.

One rule that I established early in the house was “nothing goes in the attic”.  This was initially not a popular rule, but when we moved out, it was deemed to be one of my better ideas. 

When you have 1300 square feet, you tend to not buy stuff because there is no place to put it.   Its really that simple. 

Imagine losing your attic, garage and over half your closet space overnight.   The big one for me was the garage.  Guys like their garage.  I no longer have one.  Imagine, all the stuff in your garage now, doesn’t exist for me.  I have two parking spaces in a parking garage.

Bottom line, when you have space, you tend to fill it up.   When you don’t have space, well…..

“We wanted less stuff and less to maintain.”

One parting note to think about, when you have less stuff, you have more time.

And a big back yard.