My husband and I have spent the last five years living in a one-bedroom, 500-square-foot house. We’ve made this cozy space workable... and it has taken work. In the process of rearranging out kitchen and closets and making room for new items, we’ve learned a few tricks about using a limited space efficiently, which I’ll highlight in this and three future posts.
The first tip should be obvious: Don’t be a packrat.
Ideally, we’d sell, give away, or trash whatever we don’t use without letting sentimentality or the feeble “but I may use it later” get in the way. Imagine how spartain our homes would become!
In reality, I know very few who can live up to this ideal. For one thing, a poor or middle-class person should hang onto those extra 3M Command hooks and ball of twine and decorative stationery etc. because its economically unsound to use part, get rid of the rest, and buy more when needed.
Furthermore, while we may manage to be minimalist in one area (our clothing, our library, our notes, our knickknacks, our technology, our kitchen appliances, our furniture, our games, our shiny bits of paper...), we often cling to belongings in other areas (same list) though some serve no purpose other than to jog memories, to show off, or to allay our guilt for buying or receiving the items in the first place.
Unfortunately, many packrats don’t believe they are packrats—or don’t believe it’s possible to downsize their possessions. Fortunately, most people without an OCD can be cured.
Solving this begins in the mind with a brutally honest appraisal of one’s belongings and hoarding tendencies. Once we’ve acknowledged the area of immoderation, we have to change the way we think about those items—to reevaluate their worth to us (from God’s perspective, ideally)—and only then can we successfully work to improve our habits.
Then, as a compromise, be minimalist where you can and, at least yearly, reevaluate your favored belongings and clear them out as ruthlessly as you can.
- If you have acquired a plethora of items—rubber bands, twist ties, store coat hangers, etc—save only a few just in case you need them, but get rid of the excess.
- Gift sentimental mementos to family and friends who will appreciate their meaning and who have the space and interest to make use of them.
- Gift quality items to a charity to avoid guilt over the waste, and reuse worn items, turning them into art projects or rags... or simply throw them away.
- If you can’t bear to part with things you don’t use, you could put them in storage after labeling the box something like “Goodwill,” “family,” or “trash.” Then if you haven’t longed for the contents or can’t remember them after a year, deliver the box to the labeled recipient without opening it.
- I encourage book, newspaper, and magazine hoarders to go paperless (more on that in the next post).
- Get rid of movies you rarely watch, and only buy new movies you plan to watch every year; if you only want to see a film once in a blue moon, rent it or get Netflix.
- A note to clothes and shoe hoarders--if you consider seventy tops and ten pairs of shoes “necessary,” consider that once upon a time (and in a few places today), most people had two changes of clothes and maybe a third for Sundays. I point that out to show it can be done, not to urge you to reduce your wardrobe by that much; it makes sense to keep at least a week’s worth of clothes for both summer and winter, for slim and fat periods if your weight fluctuates frequently, and for varied levels of formality. Still, no one would/should look down on you for wearing the same outfit more than once a month! If you keep your wardrobe versatile, you can dress well without needing as many items, so downsize! Keep pieces you can mix and match to make different outfits, and keep only a few shoe styles in colors that work with any outfit.
Examples
I had collected over fifty teddy bears by my senior year of high school, but their value changed in my eyes as I grew older. Still, they stimulated nostalgia and looked so cute, I had a hard time with the idea of parting from them. I brought two to college and, later, to my home. The rest I went through perhaps once a year to choose ones that will go to kids at the Topeka Rescue Mission. The rest I kept bagged in my parents’ basement until the next year I could evaluate them and part with a few more. I made the final cut this last year, giving yet more to the Rescue Mission and those with meaning—several my late grandpa gave me—to some of my young second cousins who could love them and appreciate the connection to Grandpa. Only a few remain with sentimental value, which I’ve asked my parents to keep for visiting grandchildren, should God grant them.
As another self-deprecating example, during junior high or high school, my mom finally made me realize (through an ultimatum) that I was hoarding shiny candy wrappers only for the pitiful reason that they looked too pretty to throw out. She forced me to reconsider whether I really needed them. Though I couldn’t completely change the way I valued them, I did finally use the “trash” to make a collage, which is displayed in my childhood church’s abandoned youth room to this day where somebody, someday, will surely throw it away. But at least it won’t be me, and I still have photographs of it. Since then, I’ve improved that habit of mine, so I now throw out candy wrappers instead of hoarding them—with a slight pang for the pretty ones, but I can still do it.
You can do this kind of thing, too!
I’ll address other methods of managing tight spaces in later posts, but the first step is to decrease the amount of stuff one owns.
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