Have you ever been inspired by a children’s book? Often the message taught through the story is simple ~ yet profound. Well, there’s this children’s book with a great life principle that resonated with Matt & me over the years. The title of the book is “The Biggest House in the World.” The story is about two snails, a father and a son. The son wants his “house” or shell to be the biggest. They watch as this desire comes to pass for another snail in the cabbage patch. His house was amazing! It had bright colors and bulging towers, and it was huge!
But then. The snails moved on once the cabbages were gone and alas… the snail with the giant house couldn’t move. “Some things are better small, keep your house light and easy to carry.” said the father.
This principle has always rung true for us and at different times over the years, we have set out to keep our house from getting too big. In our culture of abundance, things can accumulate even if you’re not a shopper. Moving house is a time when we’re all forced to reevaluate the stuff that has crept into our homes. While Matt & I aren’t planning to move anytime soon we are working towards reconfiguring a poorly done garage conversion that came with the house.
This means that everything we’ve stored in this space needs to go somewhere… This has led us through a reevaluation process:
- Purge: Do we need this? Who would need/use this?
- Re-evaluate: is this… serving us well/now?
- Streamline: would a smaller/simpler thing do just as well?
- Reorganize: can this setup work better? Is this the best location for these things?
In running through these questions we have sold, given away, donated, and gotten rid of so much over the last ten months! The French provincial chest of drawers and long Federal dresser were no longer serving us as well as they could someone else, so they were sold on FB Marketplace.
Progress came in spurts. Sometimes we were able to get rid of big things, other times we gathered groups of little things. In this picture, you see lots of household goods that we donated. Somewhere along the way, I decided to see if we could purge/donate 500 items. Oddly enough, the following week Dawn, from The Minimal Mom on YouTube came out with a video on how she purged 500 things from her home! She gave me several more ideas and great motivation.
Here are more furniture pieces that weren’t serving us well, weren’t our style, or a good size for our home. The large pieces found new homes via Marketplace and the side table & lamp were donated. During this time we also assessed the profitability/time invested in my Etsy shop and decided to close out the shop. I placed most of the Etsy shop goods in an antique booth that was closing out. This venture brought about $200 in sales, plus some great trades with the booth owner! So far (since January of this year), we have gotten rid of 916 items! We are easily going to reach 1,000! The funny thing is… we haven’t missed any of it and without the photographs, I took to share with you we wouldn’t even be able to tell you what we’d purged!
Like the little snail in the story, we have felt a greater sense of freedom, greater joy in our home, and less stress. The ripple effect is that places like the dining room, the kitchen, and the guest bedroom have become even better versions of themselves and served us even better than before!
Currently our “office” is in the buffet. Whenever it’s time for either of us to knock out some work on our home businesses we have everything we need right at our fingertips – even the laptop!
Here, in the guest bedroom, the bulky French chest of drawers, and the French settee have been replaced with a small bookcase and a simpler gallery wall arrangement. This room feels lighter and cozier at the same time.
I would highly recommend applying this reevaluation process to your home. It will feel light, and free, and you’ll love your home even more. I promise. Until next time,
Keep your house small!
Rachel
