For my husband’s 30th birthday a few years ago I booked us into a small cottage in Jedburgh for a night. It was a small single-storey property with one bedroom, a hallway, living room, kitchen and bathroom. It didn’t even have space for a dining room table for two – just a breakfast bar with stools along one wall of the small kitchen. Going to a property with only the essentials and a few creature comforts, be it a caravan, hotel or holiday home always seems to make life look so much simpler, and while we were there I was wondering why people didn’t live in such a small properties anymore – or even (without any real urge to do so), could we? Houses seem to be getting bigger even as households get smaller but they don’t seem to feel any more spacious.
What had struck me was the absolute lack of clutter. The property was set up for short-term stays; there were no bottles in the bathroom because the owner brought them in when they cleaned it and took them away again. There was no storage space for hobbies, winter coats, formal wear – it had room for the everyday essentials and that was it. Did it make me want to sell my detatched house and move to a one bedroom flat in the country? No. Did I come home wondering how I could get that low-stress holiday feel in my own home? Definitely. Even before knowing what minimalism was, that seed and craving for less clutter in my home was planted and things started to move slowly out the door.
Last year we had our conservatory demolished and replaced with a larger footprint building, taking our small kitchen and dining room out into a bigger open plan space. Part of this transition involved spending a month with our entire downstairs in the living room, which also forms the corridor between the front door and the rest of the house. We were doing the washing up in the upstairs bathroom, and cooking on a camping stove on the dining room table in between the armchairs in the middle of the room, with the fridge plugged in beside the sofa and saucepans, crockery and cutlery heaped wherever they would fit around the dry food goods.
It was very busy but there were useful lessons to take from it.
- When everything you DON’T need has been put in boxes in the attic, you probably don’t need to get most of it out again
- Cooking in bulk on the weekend makes meal preparation during the week after work a doddle
- When we’re on the same page and pull together, we can make anything work
I’d realised when we had our bathroom refurbished two years previously that I really appreciated having a place for everything (cupboards!) and the worth of clear sides is not to be underestimated. I’d purged bags of clothes from my wardrobe on multiple occasions and realised I found removing unused items from my house cathartic. Our new kitchen was going to have nothing on the sides except the knife block and the kitchen towel holder. No toaster, no cake mixer, no stereo – they’d all have their homes in the many cupboards we were installing. The sides would be CLEAR.
This ethos carried through our whole downstairs space – clear sides, no trinkets, a home in a cupboard for everything, and only things we used in the cupboards. A car-full of bags and boxes went to the charity shop. I realised as part of this process why I felt it almost necessary to do this: I was mentally stressed and taking care of visual clutter and getting it OUT my house reduced the sense of claustrophobia in my head. Removing things I didn’t need made me feel in control, as if I could throw my mental clutter out with the abandoned craft materials, unworn clothing, mountain of spare bedding and towels, picture frames, ornaments and books.
The reason for this struck me later when watching a video from Dawn at The Minimal Mom (see below!) regarding The Silent To-Do List. Everything we own requires care, and the more we own the more input we need to put into maintaining our belongings. When there are already so many demands on our internal batteries such as spending time with family, eating, sleeping, cleaning, working, walking the dog, why would you make that list longer by giving yourself more things than you need for living to take care of?
I’ve been using minimalist maxims since to manage our home space and even my desk at work, and our home has become a space we both really love to spend time. It’s like taking a fresh breath every time we come in the front door. My Mum doesn’t get it, I think she sees it as a blank canvas to be filled and can’t quite understand that for us it’s ‘finished’, but for us it’s perfect.
Having become very comfortable with the practical aspects of minimalism as concerning property and physical things, I now need to move through the mental aspects: What’s causing the stress that means I need a visually uncluttered and open space to feel I can breathe and rest? An unboxing for another day…
A Life of Well 