Welcome back to the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast. Today we're going to be chatting on a topic that you all seem to really love and enjoy and that is decluttering and minimalism. I'm having on Stephanie from the Sustainable Minimalist podcast and we're going to be chatting decluttering when it comes to kids, spouses, all of it.

Alright, join us for the interview.

My name is Lisa, mother of seven, and creator of the blog and YouTube channel Farmhouse on Boone. Join me as I share with you my love for creating a handmade home from scratch cooking and a little mom and entrepreneur life along the way.

We're here with Stephanie from the podcast Sustainable Minimalist and actually we're going to do a podcast swap. So we're going to record an episode for hers as well that I'm going to be on so you can check that out.

But let's start with some introductions. Tell us about you, maybe why you decided to go this route of a more minimalist lifestyle and yeah a little bit just about you and your business.

Sure. Well, first thank you so much Lisa for having me. I am a huge fan of your show. Do you want the short version of my journey or the long version?

Whatever you prefer.

Right. Well, I guess I'll do the medium version. I am again, the host of the sustainable minimalist podcast. I have a book by the same name sustainable minimalism.

And I wasn't always doing this. I didn't always care about the planet and I didn't always think about, you know, what I was purchasing and what I was bringing into my home.

I would say that things drastically changed when I had my first daughter and I became a mom. Prior to being a mom, I kind of just bought whatever I wanted, whatever I could afford bought new outfits for work, you know, filled my little apartment with stuff.

But then once my husband and I, our first daughter came along, the influx of baby stuff also came with her. We were living in an 850 square foot apartment.

We had no room to store all the baby stuff. And so I thought, let's just declutter like minimalism was really hot circa 2016. And I was like, I need to be a minimalist.

But when I took all the stuff in our home that we weren't using and didn't need and shouldn't have spent our hard earned money on and I put it in a pile on the floor.

I had a real moment, a real moment of reckoning. I like to call it because as I looked at this stuff, I realized that number one, it was all taking a toll on the quality of my life.

But it went more further than that. It went to, you know, what is the impact of the creation and shipment of all this stuff all around the planet doing to the planet.

And so I love the idea of minimalism, less is more living. But I think that a lot of the minimalist conversations miss the mark because it's not just about decluttering so that we, you know, are happier and lighter and more carefree.

It's also about decluttering so that we look at the stuff we have and the stuff we buy through a critical lens so that we become more intentional moving forward.

And that maybe wasn't the medium length story. I'm very sorry about that. That was definitely the long version.

Oh, that was not bad at all. Actually, right before I came out to this podcast, my husband and I were just having a conversation similar to this because he was talking about just in the last couple years of like certain times when he thinks to buy something.

That we haven't had before, but you get enticed like this, this thing's going to make everything just so much easier so much better.

And then you get it. And then after a while, you maybe find out that it wasn't something you really needed or didn't really serve you well.

And then it's always this, okay, well, now what do I do with it? Because whenever you have so much stuff to manage to figure out where it should go that's going to be most appropriately used.

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