Minimalist Life With a Hoarder – A Day in the Life 1

In my personal experience, the minimalist life with a hoarder is quite dysfunctional. I posted a better introduction into our current lifestyle here if you wanted extra context. I am also a big fan of the MindBeautySimplicity site – as I find her blog to be one of the best inspirational sites for minimalism out there. Definitely take a look and see if you agree. 🙂

This current post is just a description of a typical day for us…

Minimalist Life with a Hoarder – The TWO Printers

We have a household printer. That’s normal. Nothing weird there.

Last March however, my husband had to start working from home full-time. Due to his work, he *needs* the printer during his entire working hours and he goes through ink like crazy. I don’t believe he actually *needs* the printer that much. He prints everything because 20+ years ago when we started working that’s how we documented and saved everything. And he just never adapted to saving everything online instead, like I have.

So when he started working from home around this time last year, he took over the household printer, and moved it into his personal office space. And I never go into that space ever, because it is ridiculously cluttered and that makes me crazy.

Since then, whenever I need to print something (maybe once every 2-3 weeks or so, nothing obnoxious), then I email it to him and ask him to print it. It’s never anything urgent either so it doesn’t interrupt his work and he can do it after-hours.

But I just spent this past weekend working on our taxes. Well, there were some documents that I sent to him to print out, maybe 6 pages maximum.

And he went out and freakin’ BOUGHT me a brand-new printer so I could start printing everything I needed myself, and not have to ask him anymore. I was irked about this because I thought it was a legit waste of money. I don’t ask him very often to print anything for me. I was also irked because I had to completely set it up myself just to get those 6 pages I needed for taxes. And then I placed it in the exact same location where the original household printer used to be. I posted a photo of it.

But get this – he’s about to have to go back to his real office in May. So in just a few more weeks, he won’t need the original household printer anymore that he’s been using this whole time. And he just NOW told me that he wants to move it out of his personal office space because he wants to re-do that space to be more man-cavish and he doesn’t want a printer in there anymore. So now I legit have TWO household printers. And THAT irks me most of all – redundancy makes me lose my mind.

I told him I was going to get rid of the original printer then, and now he’s upset. He says we need to keep it because he might have to work from home again in the future, and he’ll want it back. But if that happens, there’s a perfectly good brand-new household computer I just set up that works very well for those needs. And I reminded him that I won’t need it that much – maybe only once every 2-3 weeks, and during taxes once a year.

And this is seriously what we’re fighting about today, which is pretty typical for us in this minimalist life with a hoarder.

Minimalist Life with a Hoarder – The TWO Keurigs

And I didn’t even know he had this bc I never go into this room, but apparently he had also bought his very own Keurig for this “office space”. Not a problem in itself. But now that he’s started moving things out of that room so he can start prepping it to be his man-cave, he has moved it into the kitchen, right next to the Keurig that’s BEEN in the kitchen this whole entire time.

Now there are TWO Keurig’s in the kitchen.

This might be the best time to also tell you – that’s he’s the only family member in this whole entire house that even uses a Keurig. He could’ve moved the original kitchen one into his “office space” instead of buying another one, and nobody else would have been affected. But no, that didn’t happen.

Also, his “office space” has no water supply, so he has to go into the kitchen (where the original Keurig is) to get water in order to use the new Keurig in this room every time anyway. Such a waste.

C’mon folks, tell me… Which one of us is the crazy one? I don’t think it’s me, but maybe it is?!