More Tiny Houses

Love watching videos about tiny houses, so inspirational!

Here is a fun trailer, I want one like that! So awesome.
Bohemian, gypsy chic.

Also love this little house and it’s always great if they are mobile, so yeah, would definitely go for a house on a trailer.

This one is cool too. Dude doesn’t live in the trailer anymore, but Airstreams are just sooo stylish!

What’s your favourite kind of tiny house?

Minimalizing vs. De-cluttering

I wrote a couple of posts about de-cluttering and minimalizing now, so I thought I’d explain what the difference is to me between those two.

To me minimalizing is quite a bit different to de-cluttering and organizing. Of curz, in the beginning they may look kind of similar, you’re getting rid of stuff and tidying your shit. I think the attitude is very different though.

To me de-cluttering is about a temporary state, it’s about getting rid off shit, but if you don’t change your attitudes towards stuff and consumption, soon enough you will have to do the same process again. And often it involves buying all sorts of storage containers and systems and all this shit just adds to the stuff you already got.

Minimalzing on the other hand , even if it means different things to different people, questions consumption fundamentally. Some people do it for political reasons, like for the environment, sustainability and avoiding mass produced items made by slave labour. Some people just want to live a life away from the mall and be more in the now.

I think minimizing is a huge process. That depends of curz on how extreme you want to go. For example, people who live in tiny or tree houses, house boats or sustainable communities are to societies standards quite extreme, but not to everyone’s standards of curz.

I’m trying to minimalize all sorts of things, spending is the obvious one. But when I buy stuff, even more then ever I’ll ask myself, “Where am I going to put this?! It’s just gonna clutter up my space!” I like having a clear space. It doesn’t need to be huge, but I like it simple and organized.

But minimalizing is even much more then that. It’s about simplifying your life. Stop doing all these time-sucking activities that are not really rewarding or relevant, like wasting hours on facebook, ..that would be a big one for me. Hanging out with negative people, that drain all your energy out of you, as I’m quite anti-social in general that isn’t really a problem for me and stop wasting time with whatever bad habit it is you do. You may even find the time to study and learn something new or make something you’ve never made before! Now how exciting would that be!!

To me minimalizing is about quality over quantity. To get something of great quality that lasts many, many years, instead of several items of it that are cheap crap. To spend time with quality people. By the way I hate the phrase ‘spending quality time’, people use it for all sorts of shit, like when they spend time with just one of their kids, it’s automatically quality time. No, it’s not, you’re just spending time, if you call any time quality time, you might as well just call it time, coz it’s nothing special. Even every day activities can be “quality time”..it’s not so much what you do, it’s how you do it!

To eat quality foods, instead of a lot of junk food crap is another point some people integrate into their minimalist lifestyle, to eat more consciously. To spend time doing the things you love instead of just doing the things you are used to. Yeah, think about the things you normally do for a minute and decide which ones are the activities you like doing and which are the ones you might have neglected and would like to do more of.

In our society it’s all about more, faster, quicker and keeping up with the Joneses.

It’s no wonder the Slow Food, Slow Living, Slow Parenting Movements catching up in popularity. Most people can’t and don’t want to keep up with it anymore. And are sick of just being patronisingly told very narrow definitions of how to do things, to worship consumerism and have products sold to them to fill the voids that are left in their lives.

So yeah, I love minimizing, it’s a long process, but so far it’s fun!!
Are you thinking of minimizing parts of your life or your whole life? Which parts? What makes you excited about it?

Problem Areas – Kitchen

One problem area for a lot of people seems to be the kitchen. Especially that dreaded cupboard with the random collection of plastic storage boxes. Yeah, you know the one I’m talking about!

We used to have a cupboard like that too. But not anymore. As I quickly mentioned in this post I hate using the top shelves in our kitchen ‘Coz I Can’t Fucking Reach Them!’. And it just makes me angry using them! The storage boxes used to be on one of the top shelves, so it made me extra angry. Coz plastic boxes are so ugly and random anyways.. it makes me angry just writing about it. Well, you get the picture..

I literally used to throw the shit in there coz, well, what’s the point, I’d have to get a chair and there was just too much shit in there. And then when i tried to pull them out I had to jump up, yeah, how fucking pathetic that must have looked like and pulled out half of the shelf at the same time, which ended in a lot of yelling and frustration.

This is how the top shelf looks now

One day i decided I am not going to take this anymore.

So I got a chair, pulled it up to the shelf and threw all the plastic boxes onto the kitchen counter. All of them.

I made a plan of how to structure the kitchen cupboards more accessibly. I cleared out one of the lower cupboards to use that as well, so the top shelf only had a few items right on the edge that I could reach.

Then I sorted them. Decided what we need for each person and to clean used ones every day so we don’t need an excess amount.

Threw the scratched and old ones out. I don’t have any random ones, but PLEASE, if you have plastic containers without lids or broken ones, THROW THEM OUT! Thanks!

Then I cleaned the shelf and all the containers and put the nice ones back in.

I also reuse glass jars for dried fruit or food storage as you can see in my post about my pantry and this one where you can see how I store spices.

So now that you know how I’ve done it you can do it too.
AND REMEMBER, DON’T BUY ANY MORE CONTAINERS, rather invest money in like two or three glass dishes for each member of the household.

I like glass containers better, but I still kept the plastic ones, I will be phasing them out though. I also don’t usually put damp containers in the cupboard, but if you have to just turn the lids inside out, so you can still stack them, but the air gets in.

And this is the lower shelf. My camera takes the shittest pictures in low light!

Ok, now that you sorted that dreaded storage container nightmare(that is, if you had one of them in the first place) we move on to that cupboard or drawer where you keep all your random shit in. Yeah, that one!

Same procedure. Pull everything onto the kitchen counter or table. CLEAN the dreaded thing. And sort through everything that is in there. Do you really need ten wooden spoons or three different sets of measuring cups or whatever you got in there?! Try to go for just one item each, depending on how large your family is and do the dishes more often.

Then give the extra items away to the charity shop or throw them AND DON’T BUY ANY MORE. Give the items away that you only use once a year or those awkward ones that you don’t use at all. Then clean and put the good ones back in.

And if you have to buy something new for the kitchen make it as practical and multifunctional as possible.

We had one of these clutter drawers and it wasn’t even that bad. Now that we sorted it it actually has a system. Yeah, amazing right?! I think, once you have a system in place, with less stuff, you are less likely to just throw stuff in there.

Minimizing is like taming a beast. You gotta be on your guard constantly.

Tell me about your problem areas! What sort of clutter always seems to collect?

Possum Living

Today i’m too tired to write a long post, so i thought you might wanna watch this short documentary.

It’s called Possum Living and is about an 18 year old girl and her dad living frugally on their own half-acre lot outside of Philadelphia in the late 70’s.

part 2

part 3

Enjoy!