2010 - the Year of the Clearout!

William Morris once said: "If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful".

As we find ourselves on the brink of a sparkly brand new year, I look around our shop and our home. Two very different environments with one common theme: lots and lots and LOTS of stuff.

Many moons ago The Shopkeeper and I had real jobs. Starting Little Sunflowers took us from one financial extreme (pretty comfortable) to the other (skint and worried about money all the time). In some weird way having money worries was good for us because it made us think hard about where we wanted to be. Far from the ambitious ‘world domination’ ideas we had at the outset, our ambition level has evolved to something which sits much better with us: to build a sound business to fit around our young family and each other. We’d like an income eventually which would allow us to have a nice life (as opposed being ‘minted’ which is what we originally thought we wanted) – but then again, don’t we all.

During the difficult times we didn’t buy luxuries; the money we had went towards buying things for the children. If this reads as ‘poor us’ it isn’t intended to be – it was simply reality and probably in keeping with just about every other new business owner in the country. We were absolutely where we wanted to be with an unshakeable belief that things would work out, and it’s amazing how many things become unnecessary when you don’t have much spare cash. Luckily for us the financial pressure has started to ease, but I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the mad old days when someone else paid us and we spent it all instantly. Do you suppose that little voice whispering ‘what if’ in the back of your head when you have your own business ever goes away? :o)

In the shop’s early days we were very cautious about slashing prices in the sale, being so concerned with original cost and ‘worth’ to us. This was perhaps partly due to being having financial challenges at home which made it difficult to get our heads around selling stock in our business below what we had paid for it. We’re over that now, hence our online Sales have become somewhat legendary. We now heavily reduce prices from day one plus reduce extra stock as we go along to ensure we get a really huge clearout. Now if only we applied the same logic at home...

We already had loads of personal stuff and old stock which we should have cleared before we relocated to Sussex in 2007 from Wendover, but instead we moved it here. So now we’ve got very old stuff, pretty old stuff, recent stuff... too much stuff.

My New Year’s Resolutions are usually hopelessly unrealistic so this year’s is simple. 2010 will be the year of the clearout. We don’t need all this, it’s sapping our energy (is there anything more depressing than looking at a room piled high?) and someone else could probably make much better use of it. This decision hasn’t come out of some kind of zen-like revelation. I’m just fed up with all this stuff.

So I promise myself that in 2010:

• Each month I will lose the equivalent of at least one car-load of stuff from the house to the charity shop, freecycle.org, ilovefreegle.org, ebay.co.uk, gumtree.com or, if all else fails, the dump. Actually I’m hoping for higher volumes than this... just trying to keep ambition levels realistic... :o)
• Each month we will donate one box of old stock to charity. This stems from the early days of trading when we couldn’t bring ourselves to slash prices in the sale, hence the stock didn’t sell so we dutifully boxed it up and it hasn’t seen light of day since. Of course we were going to sell all this stock on Ebay ‘one day’ and, in truth, are never going to get around to it (other independent retailers out there may be able to relate to this!).
• For every non-food item I buy (ie clothes, furniture, toys) I will throw or give away something – yes this is a bit zen and it does work. I used to do it a lot but got out of the habit somewhere along the line.
• I’m also going to try swapping things we don't need for things we do – there are some fab sites out there like readitswapit.co.uk for swapping books (or bookcrossing.com for those who prefer to release their books into the wild). Then there’s swapshop.co.uk for swapping cds, dvds and video games, Swapitshop.com for swapping toys and board games.

And so I will rid our lives of as much of this non-useful, non-beautiful stuff as I can in 2010.

Is this something others can relate to, or are we the only ones who need a massive clearout?