Decluttering, the hobby that turned into a side hustle

Recently, I have been following certain influencers on Instagram who talk about minimalist life style. I fell in love with the content & how they plan “no spend outings” , “no spend weekends” & how they use the thrift store for purchase of apparels. Thrift stores are so popular in western countries where they sell & purchase used clothes & other accessories. 

The word “thrift” itself was so new to me. While I was googling to understand what thrifting means, it led to one more new term “declutter”. It was all about removing unnecessary items from a place to make way for pleasant & necessary things. This is when I looked at my closet & my home to see the mess I had accumulated over the years. Hard earned money being turned to apparels & accessories hardly used. There wasn’t space for anything new, anything pleasant. I wanted to work on this & took this as my hobby. 

I started with small steps working on one shelf at a time in my closet. I found clothes stuffed to the backside where I did not even have a view of them, so I never wore them at all. Since these dresses were not maintained properly, they started losing their original shine. What I did now was, took out all those clothes which I wouldn’t be using and started gathering them in a suit case. Shelf by shelf, I was done with the entire closet. 

Then, I moved onto other accessories in the living room, kitchen & other spaces which were occupied with not so necessary things. 

After all this was accumulated, the big question was what do I do with all of this. I thought  of 2 ways. One was charity & other was selling to others to whom it might be useful. 

When it came to charity, I gave it to girls in my close vicinity & when I see them use those clothes & accessories , it felt so fulfilled! But for the selling part, I had to search a way out. 

With lot of surfing found out few apps where we could sell used clothes. Took pictures of all the clothes & accessories, posted them on apps and started getting orders for them. It felt so good to give your pre loved items a new home. The orders started coming from Pan India - Tamil Nadu to Arunachal Pradesh. At this point of time, decluttering from being a hobby became a side hustle. 

The earnings I got through selling the old items, I put in a separate jar. Whenever I saw this jar, it reminded me that I have spent 3 times more amount to purchase the items that I sold after decluttering. This made me realize the value of items I purchase. Then I thought,  it should be okay to repeat clothes & not to have certain accessories at home unless they are absolute necessity. Now I think twice before making any purchase for myself & our home. Earlier, I would purchase by my instinct , now I am trying to do it on need basis. 

My daughter is 10 months now and I have decluttered her clothes, toys & other items. Now we have just the things that are relevant to her size & age. This has made so much space available to new things. 

Now, the challenge was with my hubby. He believes in the concept of “abundance”. Like, it’s okay for him to wear different set of clothes for each day in a entire year. May be we were completely different in the ideas we share but I thought it was not right to enforce my ideas over him. If I like it the minimalist way, he equally has the right to live the way he likes. 

We had a small deal, where I don’t disturb his closet to declutter it and he himself will look for one or two items in a month from his shelf that are obsolete. He started helping me to pack my orders to sell it through apps.

At the end of day, it’s our home , our closet. We can have it whichever way we want it to be & whatever suits us and the family. But, we all would inevitably look for a pleasant living space that invites positive energy. It may be the minimalist way or the abundant way, we should be doing it with all our heart. Because, Home is where the Heart is ! 

This picture was taken while packing an order that came all the way from Arunachal Pradesh. I used the old amazon boxes at home to pack it.