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Living a Life of Less | Space

ByChantel

Simple Living Less Space

I can’t believe we’ve been living in the basement suite we are renting for three weeks already! Time is really flying, and it won’t be much longer until we are in our house! Even though I am looking forward to being back in our own place I have not actually disliked this in-between stage. To be honest, I’ve actually enjoyed the smaller space we are living in. Sure it’s annoying that I can’t get rid of the wet dog smell and inconvenient that we couldn’t bring our own furniture in and therefore have some of it stored at my parent’s place as well as my in-law’s but there are actually quite a few benefits to living in a smaller space.

Before I share what I’ve been liking about this place I have a pretty exciting announcement to make!

I think it’s been pretty apparent to most of you who are regular readers that simple living and the whole idea of living with less have been a huge part of my life these last few months. Awhile ago I was planning out my monthly blogging schedule and I realized I just had too many simple living ideas to share and not enough days to share them all. So, I decided to launch a blog dedicated to simple living! Today is launch day for The Simple Kind of Life, I’d love for you to head over and check it out. I have dreams for that to be a place where a number of people will contribute ideas for living with less as well as sharing their real life stories. I’m still looking for some people who would like to write for The Simple Kind of Life on a monthly basis, if that’s up your alley let me know.

Okay, back to the idea of living with less space, I know it’s only been a few weeks but here are my favorite things about the smaller space so far:

LESS TO CLEAN
It’s a lot easier to convince myself to vacuum when there is only about 900sq and it’s all on one level. Plus, one bathroom as opposed to the three we were used to before, yeah, cleaning one toilet is a lot better.

LESS STAIRS
This is one thing all three of us were looking forward to! Our previous place was a two-storey that had all the bedrooms upstairs, plus the ceilings in the main level were high which means anytime we wanted to go upstairs from the main floor we had to climb all 16 stairs, and if you are a forgetful person like me that means you had to do that multiple times because half the time by the time you reached the top you forgot why you even came up!

YOU ARE LESS LIKELY TO LOSE SOMEONE
Okay, so you won’t lose people in most houses but when I was an au pair in England back when I was 18 the family I worked for had a huge house and the man would often stand in the middle of the house and call for his wife because it was so big and he didn’t want to wander from room to room to find out where she was. Right now if I’m standing in the kitchen/dinning room/living room area and I’m looking for Raeca I know she’s got to be in the bathroom or one of the bedrooms, no yelling needed.

I THINK MORE ABOUT MY PURCHASES
Since we don’t have a lot of space to store stuff right now I really think hard before buying something that will take up more space, or I use the one-for-one rule. If I’m going to buy an item, like the set of 6 dinner plates I picked up at the thrift store for a total of $1.50 the other day, I get rid of that many items, well, in reality, I got rid of 8 plates, so even better!.

THE REALIZATION THAT WE DON’T NEED SO MUCH STUFF
We packed up and are storing a lot of our stuff while we are here and I’m realizing we don’t really miss any of it. We’ve actually continued to purge some of the items we do have with us here, items we are finding we don’t need to keep, and bonus: it will make the move even easier in a few weeks!

WE TAKE MORE TIME TO DO STUFF
After creating my life vision statement I realized I really value doing things over buying/having things. While we’ve been here we take almost every advantage to get out of the house and enjoy the last bit of summer because it’s easier to feel cooped up in a small space, especially when you don’t get any outdoor living space.

Have you lived in smaller spaces before?
What would you say the advantages are?

Remember, most of my simple living posts from now on will be posted over at The Simple Kind of Life so be sure to stop by!

Linking up with Oak+Oats

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26 Comments

  1. The smallest place I’ve ever lived was a 23 foot motorhome with my parents, and at the time, 4 younger siblings for 9 weeks. You can bet we did not spend much time indoors! In more recent history, about 4 or 5 years ago my parents made the tough decision to give up the 1800 sq. foot home we lived in (by this time, 7 kids and mom and dad) because the rent was too high, and move into a 1000 sq. foot apartment. I’ll never be one to say that 1000 sq. feet is a spacious place for 9 people to live, but it’s definitely doable, and since household chores were our (the teens) domain, we absolutely loved the fact that we spent so much less time cleaning our new smaller home. Angel’s and my apartment now is about 600-700 sq. feet and yep, it’s easy to clean and we don’t buy anything new to add to the storage lightly, because there just isn’t a ton of space. But we still buy things when it’s worth it. We bought kitchen tongs today because they’re ever so useful when I’m cooking fried chicken.

    And congrats on the new blog!!! Looks really cool!

    1. That’s awesome Rachel, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during your childhood! I know I could live in a much smaller space IF we had good access to the outdoors and lived in a warmer climate. We are pretty much inside for a good 6 months of the year and I’m sure we’d drive each other up the wall if we lived in a teeny tiny space and had to stay inside for that long.

  2. When we had our Daughter almost 3 years we lived in a studio apartment, basically. It was all one room, a kitchen that only had 2 burners on the stove, a bath room, and the laundry room that was actually just a closet big enough for a washer and dryer side by side. Our large room had our bed, the baby crib, and a recliner, then our dresser with our tv on it. We’ve since moved into a 1,200ish SQF house. One bathroom, I have mixed feelings on having another bathroom. Two bed rooms, ours actually used to be the living room and could be split in two and have another. Our daughters room is small, but functional for her. We have a open area between our two bed rooms that we use as an office/craft room. Kitchen is okay size, I wish we had a island area, but the cabinets are amazing and tall. The house was built in the early 1900s and then added on in the 70s. We’ve finally gotten enough furniture to fill it all up. The one thing we do need is a bigger tv for the living room and the bathroom to be remodeled.

    1. That sounds like quite the transition! I love how you said you’ve “finally gotten enough furniture to fill it all up”, isn’t that how it goes? I’m sure that’s how we (as a society) are accumulating more and more stuff because we keep building bigger houses, and then we have to build even bigger houses because we have more stuff! It’s a vicious cycle.

  3. I LOVE the new space, Chantel! It’s gorgeous. Congrats, times a million 🙂 You did great work on there. And I truly love your Simple Living posts, so I can tell it will be one of my new favs. Sometimes I wish we lived in a smaller space so I could really get rid of any MORE stuff. I feel like it’s already so barren in my home. I think it’s just the color palette and everything. I need to do a whole remodel of furniture and flooring and stuff, and I think the simplicity of it will really shine.

  4. So good! I can’t wait to get out of our transition phase either. Currently reading Happier at Home, and it’s super inspiring! Blessings to your family.

  5. This post is really making me think about all of the stuff I keep around. Perhaps it’s time for me to get rid of some things so that we can start living more simply ourselves! I’m excited to have found your blog here and your simple living blog too!

    1. Thanks so much Emily! It really has been a journey for us, some how despite getting rid of a LOT we still feel like we have a ton of stuff left, how does that work?! But every time I get rid of one thing I feel a little lighter. It’s a lot of work but so worth it.

  6. Chantel, I always want to give you a hearty high-five after I read your posts. Sheesh…this is just awesome! I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. Moving definitely makes us realize how much junk we have/don’t need!

    Also, what’s an “au pair”???

  7. Yes!
    I moved back into a dorm this year and I absolutely LOVE it! Since I’ve been downsizing, most things fit very nicely and it helped me to see that I could definitely live in a studio – something I never thought I could do when I had all my extra stuff.
    My favorite is definitely having less to clean – I HATE cleaning!

    1. Yes, I love your cleaning comment, so true! Plus I find the more STUFF I have the more time I spend just shuffling it around and making different piles, so annoying! I’m definitely not at the point where I could just live in a dorm but I’m slowly getting better.

  8. This is right up my alley. 🙂 We downsized from a 3 bedroom home to a one bedroom apartment while we moved out west.. so we’ve had to do a lot of simplifying to make things work.. but I know it always feels so good to live with less. 🙂

    Congrats on your new blog! Though I’m not sure I can guest post anytime soon… I’d love to after I simplify my schedule a bit more to open up space. haha

  10. woohoo i can’t wait to see the other blog!
    🙂
    and smaller spaces most definitely have fantastic positives (less to clean! and less to lose!)

  11. Congratulations on your new blog! It looks like a fantastic resource!

    When we were first married, we lived in a tiny 35m sq (375 sq ft) apartment. That place was so organised! We simply didn’t have space to keep anything we didn’t need. It only took an hour to clean every Saturday morning! When Alexander came along, we slid our bed into the corner to make room for his crib and hung a fold down change table in the bathroom, above the toilet. We were so creative with using our space well, and people were always surprised by how much we had, without it feeling cluttered. Even though it was small, it was really cozy, and we had people over all the time. When we moved into our 110m sq (1185sq ft) home, it felt huge and we didn’t have enough furniture to fit it. It has never been as well organised as that first place! Our current place is about 100m sq (1075sq ft), and is plenty big enough. We’ve learnt that a well organised, smaller space is better than a big place!

    1. Kay, that sounds amazing Fiona! I can’t believe you lived in 375 sq ft! That would definitely have to be one organized space, a part of me longs for something like that. It feels like the bigger the place the more we just fill it with stuff, and not necessarily stuff that we need or really even want.

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