It’s a Small House
I don’t often blog about my lifestyle but felt like sharing some things today. My family and I live in a 1000 square foot, 90 year old home in East Boise. Our neighborhood is a delight with a wide variety of homes, huge trees, and a park just two blocks away. We have no garage but we built a small storage shed for ourselves 3 years ago. Our house has little storage built into it and so a natural outworking of our life here is that we often find ourselves shedding possessions. We don’t have much income anyway, so not buying things is pretty easy but not only do we not buy much stuff, we constantly get rid of things we no longer want or need.
For example: we sold our television back when the digital switch was announced. We weren’t watching it much, didn’t want to partake of the government’s largesse by getting a voucher and didn’t want to pay for the converter box. So we sold it for fifty bucks and haven’t missed it once. We use our laptop for DVD watching and HULU for “The Colbert Report” and “The Office”.
Our microwave was broken by a power surge some months ago and we simply decided not to replace it. We use our little toaster-oven or a double-boiler for reheating foods. Our food tastes better and we have $100 more in the bank.
I just went through my cedar chest and sorted out a lot of things I had been storing for years. I had kept them because they were supposed to have sentimental meaning for me, though in reality, they meant nothing. Some things I simply threw away and others I’m selling or giving away on Craigslist.
I like nice clothes but I hate having a bunch of things I only sort-of like or that don’t go well together. So this spring I went through my closet and got rid of everything brown. Now I only need black shoes and all my clothes match each other and my footwear. I have two pairs of flip-flops, one pair of heels, and a pair of running shoes. When winter comes I will have to buy new high-heeled boots.
More than a year ago we decided to stop having “good” dishes and silverware and “everyday” dishes and silverware and just use our pretty dishes all the time. We gave our old Corell Ware to my brother-in-law who was just buying his own house.
Step by step we have given up things that meant nothing to us in order to enjoy the beautiful and the useful already in our lives. We are neither monkish nor self-denying. We have thousands of books. We have beautiful furniture. We make sure to maintain a 12-place setting and an expandable dining table so that we can have lots of people over. But getting rid of stuff that was just “stuff” and that cluttered rather than complemented our lives has been so freeing.
Oh, and be sure to enter to win the book in the post below…I need more room on my shelf!