That’s right. I love inventory.

There.

I’ve said it and I feel free.

In these days where the current trend is to get rid of your stuff and to live meagerly in order to fully thrive, I’ve discovered that I love my stuff. All of it.

I love options and choices and selection. I love rotating my linens for the season and my mood.

I love changing the pictures on the wall seasonally.

I love selecting my morning coffee mug

and my dish towel for the day.

This is one of my newest designs.

I love this design too.

Today is a gray day so I defiantly selected a bright yellow dish towel. Take that, sixth rainy cold gray day in a row.

I love when my neighbor makes us her Rum Cake.

You all know I’ve been packing boxes for an impending move since January, I’ve said it enough. (And by the way, I am sick of packing boxes. That’s the downside of loving inventory.) We have a lot of stuff. But I can make a case for keeping everything that we have, and if I can’t, I do purge it. And that, my friends, is the key to keeping the stuff that we have. Do we love it? If “yes”, it stays. Could we use it down the road? If, “yes”, it stays. There will always be another time to purge.

I’m a purger by nature but I’m also a practical country gal who doesn’t like to throw things out. I’m always thinking there might be another use for something. How do you balance those two sides of yourself? (A question I ask of me a lot because there are so many sides to me.) When we moved out to Wisconsin, we purged everything that didn’t fit into our apartment or our life style at that time. Then we eventually bought a house and it looked vacant even though we had moved in all of our stuff. The cute little bistro table we bought to replace the family-sized boring table we brought with us from our house in NY was now not big enough to seat our new growing family at our new house in WI. There are more stories like that and I learned from that experience to not be so hasty to purge. Money doesn’t grow on trees ya know, and now we needed to replace many of the things that we had purged. I scolded myself more than once for needing to purchase something that we had already had, but let go.

With my dream of opening a country shoppe, I have held on to every little table and furnishing that may help start me out on that adventure to cut the costs of trying to start a new business. We might not need it in our house anymore but we might need it in my shoppe. So, it stays. Or maybe I will re-purpose it to sell it in my shoppe, so, it stays.

The toys in our house get used and are loved. I purge the few things that no one has any real interest in, but more often than not, we play with it. Or maybe we will play with it as we get a bit older. So, it stays. I love to pull out a bin of toys when someone says they are bored and watch them excitedly rediscover the things in that bin and what they come up with. That’s how I look when I rediscover a stash of table cloths or tea cups that I had tucked away. Giddy!

I find it hard to purge something that we already own, just for the sake of paring down our belongings, because I know that there is a 50/50 chance we would be purchasing it again. Keeping it allows me to say, “No, we do not need that”, and that is a fun thing to say.

The key for me is to keep only what we love, or would be useful, and to store most of it, only displaying what we will use at that moment. I love my stuff but I can’t live with it all out at one time. My living space needs to look like I have purged and that we are living a meager life and thriving because of it. But there’s a giant stash hidden away. Now, it is in boxes, but it was on shelves in my basement so it looked like a stockroom. Heaven.

Whenever I get to open my boxes and rediscover my treasures, I’ll be like a kid in a candy store. And I think the only reason I want to open a country shoppe is so I can have more inventory…