Boise Donation Resources

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Hi all, Cary here!

Today I wanted to share some of my top resources for where to drop your post-decluttering donations in Boise.

I’ve been working on growing this list for the past few years, but I also know that it took us the better part of a decade to secure our dozens of donation partners in the Bay, so please email me if you have additional suggestions.

The impetus for this post was the recent gathering of over 800 brilliant, accomplished, and civic minded folks at the 2019 Women and Leadership Conference here in Boise over the past week.

Two of the keynote speakers were none other than Obama’s Director of Communication, Jennifer Palmieri, and the former Secretary of the Interior and current CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Sally Jewell. It was basically a trifecta of three of my favorite things: Obama, communications, and the environment. To say I was fangirling hardcore would be an understatement:)

I also had the immense honor of speaking to over two hundred of the attendees at two different sessions on Thursday.

I was just blown away by how open, wise, and curious both audiences were, not to mention how thoughtful their questions were. One question that I received several times (as I shared just how crucial Kyle and I believe donating to be to the decluttering process) was, “This sounds amazing. Where can I bring ______ here in Boise?”

So, as promised to my beautiful attendees, I’m excited to share my current list below!

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BOISE DONATION RESOURCES

The ARC: Clothing, accessories, books + media, housewares, and toys.

BabySteps: Infant and young child clothing, diapers, wipes, kid cups/plates/bottles/bibs, baby toys, young child furniture.

Book It Forward!: New or gently used children’s books and text books.

Big Brothers, Big Sisters: Sports equipment, board games, and craft supplies.

Dress for Success: Women’s professional clothing such as blouses, dress slacks, skirts, suits, dress shoes and accessories in petite, regular, and plus sizes.

Habitat for Humanity: Appliances, building materials, cabinets and furniture, décor and flooring, decorative hardware, electrical, lawn and garden, millwork and doors, paint sundries, plumbing fixtures & hardware, tools & accessories, and windows.

Idaho Youth Ranch: Sports equipment, clothing, appliances, electronics, toys, yard equipment, decorations, houseware, furniture. In short, almost everything.

Interfaith Sanctuary: dental hygiene, razors, diapers, toilet paper and more.

The Library!: books, records, DVDs, CDs, audiobooks, software, and magazines in good, sellable condition.

The Reuse Market: Paper, fabric and notions, artist’s mediums, mat board, framing, sign making, architecture/design materials, office/school supplies, media/tech, metal, and wood.

The Reuseum: Computers, consumer electronics, industrial machinery, spare parts, robots, spacecraft, and flux capacitors.

Women’s and Children’s Alliance: generally, WCA is in need of bedding, towels, toiletries, and toys, but please check here for their current wishlist, which is updated weekly.

Can You Be a Minimalist in a Large Space?

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Image // Dwell. Design // Jessica Helgerson.

Hi friends, Cary here!

The question — can you live simply in a large home? — is something I've been mulling over since we moved into our first home two years ago.

Cam and I had lived, quite happily, in a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco for 6.5 years before our move to Boise. Our intention for purchasing a larger home was to have space to grow our own family –– babies both fur and human (see below) –– and for family and close friends to visit often and for as long as they’d like.

Truly, I love our home. I love our neighborhood: our kind and active neighbors, the dozens of miles of hiking trails right across the street and our fabulous public school down the block. I love our land: the fruit trees, the garden, the hillside and the bike path running past our backyard. But it was a really strange feeling going from an apartment with three closets (which felt down right luxurious at the time) to a home who seemed to invite us to have too much with a basement, a garage, a guest room, and nearly a dozen closets.

I'm not going to lie, I had a lot of anxiety about moving into a larger space.

I was worried that the clarity a smaller space enabled me to have would be lost and that I'd become the type of person who just fills up space in order to fill it. Backsliding into consumerism and mindlessly holding onto unwanted and unloved things seemed unavoidable.

And yet here we are, two years later, in a large and simple home.

How did this happen? By deciding before we moved, before we shopped, before we filled our space exactly how we wanted to feel in our home. It’s been our internal boundaries and clarity, rather than external forces, that have allowed us to create a home we love. Here are a few tips to keep in mind to help you stay the course of your version of minimalism.

5 Tips for Simple Living, No Matter the Size of Your House

My side of the closet in our S.F. apartment.

1. Don't add storage.

When you have plenty of closets and other built-in storage space, don't bring in additional dressers or cabinets, drawers or shelves. Allow the built in storage to be enough. We, for example, have the same coffee table that we used in SF (a glorious Japanese tansu that was handed down to me). In San Francisco we used the spacious drawers to hold board games and candles and things we used when entertaining friends. Here in Boise, we ignore the drawers all together. The drawers are not the easiest to open, nor is opening them conducive to the layout of the space. So we treat the tansu like a solid cube and enjoy it’s surfaces without utilizing it’s storage.

2) Remove storage where you don't need it.

For us, this looked like removing an entire wall of upper and lower cabinets from our garage. While the millions of drawers and shelves might have been “organized” and labeled to each hold one item – camping sporks in this drawer, headlamps and lanterns on this shelf - we didn’t want a complicated system and didn’t need nearly the amount of storage provided. Instead we have two large open shelving units that hold a bin with all our small camping gear on a shelf alongside our tents, camping chairs and sleeping bags. This makes packing and unpacking for car camping a breeze (Step 1: place bin in car; Step 2: camp; Step 3: remove bin from car and place back on shelf). This smaller, open storage also prevents us from hoarding unwanted and unneeded items out of sight.

Our old pantry in our S.F. apartment.

3) Redefine “full”.

We have a laundry room. Yes, a whole entire room dedicated to the act of laundry. It's a small space but it nonetheless has a couple of cabinets and drawers. One cabinet houses our large bag of dog food. Another holds the laundry detergent and white vinegar we use for cleaning. Thats it. Each cabinet could easily hold 10x what it has, but there isn't anything else that belongs in there, so we just let them be.

Adapting to a different version of "full."  When we work with clients we are constantly helping them adjust their mindset to what “full” looks and feels like. For many of us, after years of overflowing drawers and cabinets that jussssst baaaarely close, it can feel strange to acknowledge that full is actually much less than capacity — it’s an amount that allows for ease and optimal functionality. In a large house we’ve taken this a step further even. “Full” in a linen closet might just be a spare pillow and seasonal throw or two. The idea is not to be austere, but to let my internal compass rather than my external storage tell me what is the right amount.

4) Go slowly.

When we moved we had neither the finances nor the desire to rush to fill-up our home with stuff. For example, in a bright extra bedroom that we hoped one day would become a nursery, we placed just one comfortable chair. A single chair was really all we needed to take work calls or sip coffee in this room’s morning sunlight. Now that it is a nursery I’m so glad we didn’t rush to furnish the room unnecessarily

The same goes for walls. We'd spent six years slowly decorating the three small rooms of our old San Francisco apartment. Here in Boise, I wanted to be just as thoughtful about adding decor rather than trying to rush around and appear “done” without getting to know the space and how we hope to feel in it. Two years in, we’re continuing to slowly add layers and textures and colors to our home as it feels right. I know some people won't be able to stand the feeling of being "incomplete" but I suggest moving forward with decorating as intentionally and mindfully as you can.

5) When in doubt, add plants and lighting.

For architectural or feng shui reasons, there are a couple of spaces in our home that feel awkward or unpleasant when empty. I cannot tell you how many times I thought about how if I'd built this house I would have removed a bizarre nook here or an extra few feet there. But instead of turning my back on these off-putting areas, we embraced them by slowly filling each with lovely greenery and lighting (luckily for me, Cam has quite the green thumb). Plants and light sources give purpose and interest to these spaces without adding the weight or expense of furnishings.

Decor doesn't have to be all furniture and artwork. If you don't need another place to sit, don't just stick a loveseat somewhere. Instead, use greenery and task lighting to make a space feel alive without filling it up for the sake of filling it. 

Image // @urbanjungleblog

Life in the Slow Lane

On a hike to fly fish in one of Idaho's many rivers... 

Cam and I moved…  Again!  

This time we left our little chunk of paradise in the Bay for a slower, more mountainous way of life in Boise, Idaho. 

Cam and I have for years sought to really put down roots in the Bay Area.  We’d imagined settling there for good, buying a house, starting a family, raising our kids and dogs among the redwoods.  We love California for a couple of reasons: the insane and diverse natural beauty, the environmental / social activist culture, and, most of all, our dear group of friends who’ve become our family over time.

And yet, something was always missing.  

Life is complicated, until it’s simple.

The truth about a new minimalist lifestyle is that when you deal with and consider and think through your stuff, you can’t help but gain clarity in other areas of your life.  In the past year it became completely clear that Cam and I were ready for the next phase in our life. 

We wanted to be somewhere slower, somewhere affordable, somewhere with great and expansive natural beauty and — in a dream world — be close to family.

Our Idaho roots

I’ve been visiting Idaho for as long as Cam and I have been together.  His father was raised in Boise and almost his entire extended family remained there.  We went hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains, skiing at Bogus Basin, snowshoeing in McCall.  When Cam’s parents decided to return to Boise after raising him in New Jersey, we were intrigued.  

Boise, while we loved the place, hadn't been on our short list of possible, more affordable locations we would trade in the Bay for.   Our Idaho trips over the past year showed us a new way of life that was open to us: a slower, more affordable pace of life balanced with a vibrant downtown, a line-free regional airport within biking distance and the eternally enthusiastic presence of college students at nearby Boise State.

Once we opened our hearts to the possibility of life in Idaho, the stars aligned in ways we couldn't have imagined. 

We found a home that we love with a sweeping backyard, tumbling down to a creek with our very own water wheel.  We adopted the sweetest, most precious and adventurous dog in the world. 

We walk along the river, have dinners with family, never worry about traffic, bike anywhere in the city we need to go, and spend about 40% less on our mortgage than we did on our SF rent.  We have a whole new sector of this beautiful country to explore and come to know.  We have a small but amazing group of friends who have taken us rafting and hiking and taught me to fly fish (which, by the way, is every bit as romantic and beautiful and meditative experience as the movies make it out to be).  

Ohana is everything.

My older sister recently surprised me by flying to Boise for my birthday.  If that wasn't a gift enough, she gave me a shirt with the perfect saying on it: "Ohana is Everything."  Ohana, Hawaiian for family.

While Cam’s family is without a doubt my family now as well, it was hard to settle away from my folks and siblings.  

Which is why Cam and I agreed that as often I needed/wanted/desired to visit family, I would.  I’m on the plane to Chicago right now to help my folks move. I’ll be back in November and for Christmas (with sweet Bodhi in tow).  Part of living in Idaho meant that we would have real space for all of my family to visit whenever and for as long as they desire.  I knew anywhere we ended up long-term (if it wasn’t in my parent’s basement, as I think my dad would have loved) I needed my family to feel totally comfortable and at home in my home. I wanted a real guest room and a real bathroom and an experience of ease the would lure them to the Treasure Valley and keep them here for a long while.

Our little mutt is part terrier and part something that will jump in the river after ducks!

I look forward to sharing with you guys a new way of looking at and living the NM lifestyle, from a much less urban city in a stand alone home, which we own, in the mountain west.  While I’ve always been so proud of my Chicago roots (go Cubs go!), it feels brand new to be an adult not living on the Pacific Coast and all that stands for.  My hope is that these new learnings and adjustments will connect us with and serve a broader range of people seeking out a simple, easy, inspired life!