Our Journey to a Simplified Home + Lifestyle
I’ve moved several times in the last eight years. I moved to college and back three years, back home, moved in with my fiance, moved back home… you get the idea. You’d think this many moves would give me reason to reduce my physical belongings… and yet, the amount of STUFF I’ve amassed continues to grow. Over the last year, my husband and I have realized that we {mostly I} have WAYYYYY too many belongings. We have so many physical THINGS that our home never seems to truly be organized or put together.
Growing up, my family was not what you might call minimalists… we were more like maximalists. {Is that a thing? We were totally that thing.} I perfected the buying-it-because-it’s-on-sale and the I-should-buy-this-because-I-might-need-it-someday-but-probably-not. In our home now, I have a supply of newborn sized cloth diapers as well as one or two boxes of disposable diapers {no, we aren’t pregnant}. I have a healthy {or rather, unhealthy} collection of Parents magazines. I have two sets of mixing bowls {not matching} and two sets of flour/sugar bowls {also not matching}. Until this weekend, our garage had most of a set of kitchen cabinets {I got them off Craigslist like two years ago so I could renovate our kitchen…. which obviously hasn’t happened}. Our guest bedroom has never seen a guest and you’d have to climb over boxes of craft supplies to get to the desk in our office. I think you get the idea. Our physical belongings are detracting from our lives.
A few months ago {when we first found out we’d be moving}, I told Hubby I didn’t want to move anything that we didn’t truly love or didn’t truly need. We have a vision for our home. We want our home to be inviting. We want our home to have open couches and chairs, where you can sit without first moving the mail. We want a dining room table where people eat and a laundry space that is organized with easy access to supplies. We want our home to be a safe place where we can pour God’s love into others. We want our home to be a place where people can drop in and we don’t need to apologize or make an excuse for its condition. We have a vision for our home: a vision of life, of love, of simple{r} things. We want to get back to the basics.
We truly want to minimize our “stuff”, but how? Since coming up with the vision for our home, I have been introduced to Marie Kondo. If you’re living under a rock and haven’t heard of Marie, she is a professional organizing consultant in Japan. The waiting list for her services is over three months long. Marie’s organizing program is called KonMari and it’s gaining international popularity. Kondo wrote the book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” {affiliate link}. I just got the book this weekend. Hubby and I have motivation to transform our home and our stuff, but we don’t have the knowledge of how to change our lifestyle and our home. Marie Kondo’s program will {hopefully} give us the tools to turn our vision into a reality. We’ll go through every belonging we own and purge what we don’t need/use/love, then we’ll replace items where necessary.
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What is the vision from your home? What does your home say about you right now? I hope you’ll follow along {and join us} in our journey to a simplified home and lifestyle! Show us some love below and follow us {links at the top of the page}.