The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life by Joshua Becker overall is a great book for anyone that is looking to declutter their house and has possibly never done it before or just needs some more encouragement. However, if you have read other philosophies on decluttering or are 80% there, this book might not be for you then.

The Book

Each part of the book is comprised of topics broken down into specific rooms to tackle and ideas that go along with it. Specifically, some of the chapters were around decluttering the following rooms:

  • Living Room and Family Room
  • Bedrooms and Guest Rooms
  • CLosets and Mudroom
  • Bathrooms and Laundry Room
  • Kitchen and Dining Room
  • Home Office
  • Storage, Hobby, and Toy Rooms
  • Garage and Yard

The book did a good job of having a mix of tactical informing to get started, personal stories from Joshua, and then personal stories of others. I think each complimented the other and really enforced to the reader that you are not in this alone. There are people out there right now reading this ready to take the same steps as you as well as people like you who walked these same steps and here is their story, and mine.

In addition to the great steps and antidotes throughout the book, I really enjoyed the quick quotes sprinkled throughout. They are perfect to write down as a reminder of why you might be taking this journey.

Minimalism isn’t about removing things you love. It’s about removing the things that distract you from the things you love.

Joshua Becker – The Minimalist Home

There is one thing I don’t remember from his other books and he called it a minimalism dividend. In short form, it is really just the savings or benefits you would get due to the fact you now have less stuff to take care of (e.g., maintenance cost of items). There honestly is so many benefits to living a more decluttered life and if you haven’t started your journey it could be hard to grasp. That is where this book does a good job of pointing out many of the benefits you could gain by reducing clutter instead of just organizing it nicely in a closet or storage facility.

My own decluttering thoughts

Never organize what you can discard.

Joshua Becker – The Minimalist Home

From a personal perspective, that was one of the biggest things I learned through my decluttering process. I think back at all the time my wife and I were just trying to move things around in our house in order to be organized. Fast forward 10 years, with the knowledge we know now and we really just needed to get rid of stuff. I can’t even count the number of times we commented to each other that all we felt like we did was organize and move stuff around during our free weekends.

ONLY Downside

The only downside to this book for me is that I have read a lot of what Joshua Becker has written in book form (e.g., The More of Less), stories from his blog Becoming Minimalist, in addition to taking his Unclutteredcourse. So from that token, nothing in the book was new to me and most of his personal stories were the same ones that I had heard before. That is why I said at the beginning if you are far along on a path to decluttering this book might not be right for you as it probably won’t be anything groundbreaking to get you to 100%.

Parting thoughts

Even though I have followed Joshua Becker for some time, one of the best parts of this book is to hear other people's stories. Since the other stuff was not new, I enjoyed all of the other stories and hearing how other people have approached it and then after they completed what it means to them today. As I said before if you are looking to declutter your house and need somewhere to start I would definitely pick up this book as it really does a good job giving you a room-by-room guide to getting you started. If anything, I feel Joshua Becker does a great job in this area anyway so I would suggest you check out his blog (Becoming Minimalist).