50%
A couple of weeks ago, we moved to a house. A beautiful house, a lot of rooms, a huge garden, cellar - everything needed. This weekend, the kids were out of the house (on vacation or with grand-ma). Instead of just enjoying life doing nothing, my wife and I spent saturday and sunday going through the boxes, sorting the books, installing shelves in the cellar, opening boxes, rearranging furniture, hanging paintings and all the other things necessary to make an area, that was looking like the beginnings of a landfill area to something habitable for a family.
We have way to many things. We keep saying that a lot of times. Instead of just saying all theses things, this time we decided to do something about it.
We invented the 50% rule. 50% of stuff we have remains unpacked and gets to live in the cellar. Beginning with the books. I love books. I read a lot. But over the years a lot of books have accumulated, that have no business on my shelves. They have ceased being relevant (at least for the moment).
Therefore we spent the better part of saturday going trough all our books, deciding on which books should be kept on our shelves.
Goethe is in the cellar, Prattchet on the shelves. Dostojevskis “Brothers Caramsov” live down under, while his essays have shelf space. Frank McCourt & Douglas Adams stay, Asimov, Niven & Jack Vance are down. Gunther Grass & Heinrich Boll stay, Marx & Engels are downstairs. And so on.
While I despise flats without any books, I think our reduction by roughly 50% has helped a lot. By reducing, we hope to keep the essentials, freeing the rooms so that we can live in them, and not having to navigate the accumulated debris of our lives.