My Path to Minimalism

I live in a beautiful newly constructed home on three acres of land, right across from a golf course.  Sounds great, right?  While I appreciate and am thankful for the ability to live comfortably, I just don’t feel like this is right for me.  I’ve owned three homes in the last three years, and each one has gotten progressively smaller in square footage.  And I like that.

In my first year out of college, having finally achieved my goals of financial stability, I married my high school sweetheart and we bought our first home.  The house was a great one, and it featured all of the suburban buzz words. Before moving in, we lived in a tiny 1 bedroom apartment barely large enough for the two of us and the cat.  We went from laminate to granite, peel-and-stick to tumbled ceramic, aluminum to vinyl, ramen noodles to risotto, and from about 500 sqft to about 2100 sqft plus a yard.  It was quite a change.

At first it was all very exciting, and in my monthly budget I included a hefty portion to be set aside for furnishings.  Having all those extra rooms setting empty started to eat away at me, and I felt a strange sense of urgency to fill them up with stuff.  That’s when the trouble started.  Beds, mattresses, dining tables (yes, multiples), area rugs, coffee tables, couches… so many couches.  Thankfully I had not developed an appreciation for quality yet, and was content with getting most of the furniture from Ikea.  But still… it was a lot of stuff.

Minimalist Art at the Rothko Chapel which we visited recently.

Towards the end of the first year, I started feeling strange about our house and all the stuff in it. My contemporary tastes didn’t sit well in our traditional suburban home, and neither did my happy hour, yoga class, farmer’s market lifestyle.  I would sit in meditation practice and feel weighed down by my new world of stuff.  This was the first time in my life that my burdens were not financial… they were material.  I felt pressure to buy more stuff, and yet I resented having it.  The line between “need” and “want” became grey for the first time, and I started to lose sight of the frugal, practical girl I was in college.

So I decided to move, and my poor husband went along with me. (This was after all a completely insane idea, and he hadn’t lost his frugal, practical self.)  I moved to the other side of town, where there were less small children and less retirees.  More yoga, more cocktails, more me.  Our new-old (new to us, but built in the 1960’s) house would have much less space, forcing me to really take inventory of all the stuff I had acquired.  It felt wonderful.  I realized that when I move, I purge.  Suddenly those bottles of nearly empty bath products don’t seem so valuable. That old chair from college wasn’t worthy of my new space.  By choosing what to take with us, it was like re-defining who I was going to be in my new home.

Sadly, two short months later we were asked to relocate and leave our fabulous new-old house.  And while I was again able to downsize in square footage, I gained three acres and went back to traditional new construction.  Even after two months, I managed to do some purging to squeeze into a slightly smaller space, but we had failed to apply the lesson we had only just learned the year before. We shopped for resale, not for us.  As I look around my home, I realize how little of the space I actually use.  I have an entryway, but I enter through the garage.  I have a guest bedroom, but we rarely have visitors.  I have five different sinks for two people. I have ample storage space, much of which is empty, and some of which is full of stuff I don’t want or need.  I have stainless steel appliances that attract slobbery puppy nose marks and sticky husband handprints. I have a garage that houses two vehicles which we have to drive 30 minutes to get to town.

So now it’s almost moving time again, and I am trying my best to consider the lessons learned.  I am a happier person when I live in a smaller space, with less stuff.  I don’t want to live in a large new house in the suburbs, however beautiful, clean, and tempting it might seem.  I don’t want to live on land, where I spend ridiculous amounts of money watering, plowing, mowing, spraying, and maintaining space I don’t use.

I want a home where my hubby and I can walk the dog to a local market, buy some local food, and eat it in the shade of a tree in our own yard.  I don’t think there is any material thing in this house that I would want more than to spend a morning that way.  Minimalism, to me, is about shifting my focus from materials to experiences.  And when I have an opportunity to make that happen, I'll have to remember to keep that in mind.