The Stuff Gifts are Made of

Tis the sea­son, not just when the amount of cat­a­logs com­ing to Our Little House increases, but the amount of boxes and cards that show up do as well.

In addi­tion to friends and fam­ily wish­ing us well and send­ing us gifts for Christmas, I cel­e­brate a birth­day in this month also, so we typ­i­cally get more cards and boxes in December than we see through­out the rest of the entire year.

The issue of deal­ing with gifts becomes even more of a tricky thing when one lives in such a small home.

The first year or so we lived here, I don’t think our friends and fam­ily under­stood just how lim­ited 480-square foot can be when it comes to stuff.

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Mail and the Role it Plays in Clutter

Since we’re on the topic of clut­ter, I have to share with you that after years of work­ing to remove our names and my parent’s names from cat­a­log mail­ing lists, I’m still spend­ing time doing it.

As I’ve shared before, my mother’s mail was for­warded to us after her death and yes, after nearly 30 years after his death, we even received a solic­i­ta­tion for life insur­ance – of all things – for my dad.

As Gail com­mented on the Living Large Facebook page, in a small home, there just is no room for yesterday’s mail to be lying around, so we’ve done what we can to elim­i­nate all unnec­es­sary junk mail from our lives.

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More on Stuff and Simplicity

Based on a cou­ple of com­ments regard­ing “stuff” last week, I wanted to fol­low up my list of the Top Ten Reasons to Live in a Small Home.

Jessica was pretty pas­sion­ate, feel­ing I had lied about the ease of clean­ing a small home. She com­mented she lives in 600 square foot house and finds that she is clean­ing all of the time. “It is so much harder to stay orga­nized in a small house. The big­ger the house, the more room to orga­nize and store your stuff,” she wrote.

Kathleen also wrote, “What I've dis­cov­ered in mov­ing from a smaller house to a larger one is this: it is eas­ier to keep things tidy in the larger house. There is a place for every­thing and I don't mean the wan­ton accu­mu­la­tion of junk, but just the reg­u­lar amount of cloth­ing and linens and tow­els, keep­sakes and etc., within rea­son­able limits.”

My mother also said the same thing after up siz­ing from about 1,000 square feet to 2,500 or so square feet.

I agreed with her until we com­pleted our own down­siz­ing. I agreed with her because, well, I was much like her, I had too much stuff for the size of home we had.

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Top Ten Reasons to Live in a Small House

Posted December 1st, 2011 by kerri and filed in small house living
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37 Comments

When I’m being inter­viewed by the media about liv­ing in Our Little House, the reporter will always ask me what are the advan­tages of liv­ing in a small home.

I thought I would put together a Top 10 Reasons for Living in a Small Home for our com­mu­nity and you all are so great, I bet you will add to it!

1. Smaller Footprint on the envi­ron­ment: There are two peo­ple and an always-changing num­ber of dogs, but we still don’t need mul­ti­ple bed­rooms, baths and space.

2. Less Room for Clutter: Our house in the city was packed with stuff. We didn’t even know what we were doing with all of that crap! At Our Little House, we have room for the neces­si­ties and only the things we love. This, of course, helps us save money on buy­ing more stuff!

3. Lower Utility Bills: Who likes dump­ing their money into the util­ity com­pa­nies. We would like to be com­pletely off the grid, maybe some­day. In the mean­time, we pay a 12-month aver­age of approx­i­mately $50 a month for utilities.

4. Less Time Cleaning, More Time for us: I can clean my house and stu­dio top to bot­tom in about 2 hours. What more is there to say about that?

5. Less Maintenance: Doing yard work, land­scap­ing, paint­ing and clean­ing gut­ters in our 20s was fun for maybe the first 5 min­utes as home­own­ers. We spend a lot less time doing all of those things here, giv­ing us more leisure time.

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