Saving By Simplifying

Posted By Paul

(This is an old posting that I forgot to publish).

Hi Everyone,

Happy New Year! Those of you familiar with the Portland area are aware that the week of Christmas was highlighted by an unusually heavy snowfall that made getting around town treacherous.

So I found myself sitting at home, unable to go anywhere. I decided to tackle cleaning out the garage. Well I ended up with a lot of stuff that I no longer needed, which I took to the recycling center or Goodwill as soon as the snow melted.

How is this frugal? Well my wife and I had been talking a lot about how we could increase the storage in our house (more shelving, etc.). Tackling the garage came at the perfect time because we discovered that many of our storage problems disappeared once we got rid of a lot of stuff that we didn't need.

Here are two prime examples:

1) Old infant car seats - they take up a lot of space, so I finally hunted down a place where I could recycle them (see my earlier post Recycling Child Car Seats).

2) Paint - it was only when I went through my garage and gathered up all of the cans of paint that I realized just how much I had. Can after can of paint that we kept in case we needed a touch up, plus several cans that came with the house. I was amazed when I piled it all together and found over 30 paint cans of various sizes, most of which were less than half full. With a little research I found a place where you could take them for recycling and safe disposal (if you live in the Portland area, the info is here). Once I got rid of all of that excess paint a third of the storage space in the garage was suddenly empty.

By just doing these two things we were able to free up a bunch of storage space in our house, so now we feel like we won't have to spend a lot of money on buying stuff for extra storage or worst of all, renting a storage space (see my earlier post Paying For Storage).