I have a personal policy where I choose not to collect anything. I try to only keep things in my home that are useful or have personal meaning, and collections don’t typically meet this criteria. I can appreciate the time, dedication, and investment that it takes to create a nice collection and have it on display in your home, it just isn’t for me. I have friends that have some great sports memorabilia and view their collections as an investment (which I can appreciate), but my past experience with baseball cards has burned me on this forever.

Instead, I fall a bit on the opposite end of the spectrum.  Perhaps I am just spooked by seeing the way people live on TLC’s Hoarders, and the fact that I have some relatives whose relationship with things has their homes looking fairly similar to the ones seen on that show.  I truly love to get rid of things. We try to apply a rule in our home where if we don’t see ourselves using something in the next 12 months, there is no need to keep it around. The one-year rule means it is okay to keep around a box of Christmas decorations, but it might make sense to unload a jacket that we haven’t worn in 3 years.

It doesn’t hurt that I am not the most sentimental person when it comes to material things. I don’t feel a strong urge to save my kid’s “first backpack” or every piece of artwork that they have ever created. Instead, I tend to take picture of these items and save them digitally– which uses minimal space and still keeps my home clutter-free.

Of course, this rule is not universal and there are always exceptions. For me, the closest that I come to collecting anything surrounds the keeping of books. Physical hard-copy books seem to find their way into our house on the regular. Both the adults and kids in our family receive books as gifts (and give them away!) on a regular basis, and  I fully approve of this because books are always a great gift. We also tend to find books from time to time at thrift stores or library clearance sales.

Speaking of libraries, we still do get books from the library on the regular basis. We struggle a bit with getting books returned on time, but loading up on library books (especially for the kids) is still one of our favorite activities. I do often take advantage of the library’s digital rentals, which just stop working after two weeks and thus don’t have late fees. Unfortunately, their selection of digital books is often a bit lacking.

All five of us in our family share a love of reading, and as such– it makes sense to keep some books around. But with that said, we make an effort to try and keep book-hoarding under control. When I noticed a few years ago that we had boxes of books that were in our basement that nobody ever went through or even considered reading, I knew that we needed to take an inventory of these books and donate the ones we weren’t ever going to use.

We ended up using the following process to keep our book “collection” under control:

• If nobody in the family has read a book, and nobody is interested in reading it in the next 3-6 months– we should add it to the giveaway pile.
• If a book was enjoyed in the past, but we doubt we would ever read it again, we asked the family to see if anyone would ever have an interest in reading this book. If not– it went to the giveaway pile.
• If a book was once enjoyed, but was no longer age appropriate (think: Diary of a Wimpy Kid or the A to Z mysteries), we set it aside for younger siblings to enjoy when they got older.

All and all, we ended up with about 100 books to give away. We put those in a few boxes in our garage and every time friends or family came by– we asked them to go through the pile to see if they were interested in any of the books. They were welcome to take as many as they wanted (and many people took an armful, which was great!). After a few months, we ended up just donating the rest to a local charity.

Our plan is to repeat this process every couple of years as new books come into the family and old books fall out of favor. As of yet, there hasn’t been a book that was given away that I wished that I could read again, but if that ever happens– there is always the library!