Redux: Books

So time for some before and after and maybe some explanations. Just to recap I will be traveling soon so it inspired me to reduce the amount of stuff I own overall to just the stuff I need. There are many great examples of minimalism online but most I found related to ultra minimalism and seemed to leave creatives out in the cold. We own books and supplies to make things and there is no room for such junk in the world of the minimalist and you know what I like to cook my own food and that does require owning a fair amount of stuff. So Now I want to define an ideal I call Functional Minimalism I don't want to play the game of who can live with the least amount of stuff I want to have to most versatile stuff and a minimal amount of junk. To begin the project I figures my books and bookshelf would be a great place to start and when Im done it should free up functional space. Before

Yup this is worse than it looks to be honest because I have like stacks of books elsewhere that couldn't fit and as much as I like books I wasn't reading some of the often enough to justify keeping them. If anything I'm a member of 3 libraries so I shouldn't have trouble finding books to read on the cheap(free). I'm a designer and I wanted to keep my reference books and type books and ditch the crap. So I sat down and sorted the books into two piles and then resorted that again to get rid of as much as possible. This wasn't an exercise in throwing all of the books out it was sorting and condensing my collection into something useable and easy to move.

After 

So I've got a few groups going on here, one of course if text on graphic design, I have one of poetry, visuals and collectable. Does it see almost as full? when I didn't want it to look empty so I spread the books out more and put them more towards the front. I would say I got rid of half the book I owned and I owned more than I had on that shelf so I'm feeling pretty good about the first stage. And it really makes a difference in the feel of the room there is less of a chaos feel from the overstuffed bookshelf. I was also able to go though a bunch of junk at the base of the shelves and that was almost equal in volume to the books.

Results

So I got rid of a bunch of books, but I also have a giant box of stuff to donate so the image to the left is about 2 feet tall and weights in at about 100 lbs of stuff I no longer want or need. Now I just need to figure out what I should do next, and is the criteria I should use when deciding to keep or pitch. Will I ever be down to 15 items to live off of? No, and I don't want that but I'm getting closer to having what I need and less of the stuff I thought I needed.