100 item challenge

I'm sure I've talked about this before. It's called the 100 Item Challenge. The idea behind it is too only own 100 items. Why 100? It was a good number to start with. It all started with Dave Bruno's website. Then I found where Zenhabits was thinking about doing it. Here's what Dave had to say:

You'll immediately wonder, what constitutes personal stuff? Pretty much whatever I say. But for now a "personal stuff" does not include:

• Books, including maps - likely the stuff-vice I'll carry with me to my grave
• Tools - will hopefully get this category down to 100 sometime down the road
• Collections - for example my Marklin train collection is 1 item for now. And my collection of underwear is one 1 item for now. (Like I'd go down to 1 pair. Give me a break.) But really I don't have a lot of collections. I've always kind of wanted to, cause it seems cool to collect something. I've just never been able to muster the passion necessary.
• And stuff I cannot claim as 100% or close to 100% mine, i.e. I'm not going to toss the Hobbit picture hanging in our hallway or chuck the one radio we own, though both happened to be gifts given to me. These things don't really belong to "me" so much as our home. Someday our family might choose to take up the 100 Thing Challenge for home decorations, furnishings, and accessories. But I'm starting this challenge realistic.

When I first had the idea of doing this I thought, "This'll be easy, I've only got about 150 items now". I always said that everything I owned would fit inside my car. Hoo-Boy was I wrong. I went though the apartment and found 385 items. Not counting the 125 books or the (gulp) 600 DVDs. At last count I'm down to 135 items, counting my clothes as 1 item. I'm down to 7 books and about 150 DVDs. I've been taking the DVD, converting it to a single file, so that I could fit 5 or 6 onto a single DVD.

I had a set of dishes for 8. Now I have 2 each of plates, bowls, silverware. I large measuring cup that I use for everything from soup to oatmeal. The other good thing about it is that forces me to keep the dishes clean. Being a single guy and The Laziest Man(TM) of thelaziestman.com fame I would keep using clean plates until all 8 were dirty!

The hardest part was getting rid of clothes. As you know from some of my other posts I'm following Ayurveda and losing weight. But getting rid of the "fat" clothes was so far because somewhere in the back of my brain there was always the thought "what if..." Finding clothes when you're thin is easy, you can walk into any Wal-Mart and get more pants. But when you wear a size 66 there's only 1 or 2 places in town. At anywhere from $30 to $100 for one pair of pants. I'm putting together a list of what I have left. This time of year is hard because the idea is if you get something you need to get rid of something.