Minimalism is possible even with a family
Making sure everything coming in to your house has a purpose helps with clutter
Being a single-person household or even a minimalist couple seems relatively manageable: you can get rid of your car to manage on your bike. Your cupboards can boast the bare look with minimal dishware and basic pots and pans. You can even significantly reduce the use of paper in your abode.
But how about families — do families and minimalism even mix? Between multiple piles of birthday party loot and artwork your 4-year-old refuses to recycle, being a minimalist family looks far out of reach.
But some families are able to make it work, practising their own version of minimalism.
For Reagan Brown, the basement was the biggest problem. “It’d become the dumping ground where we’d just throw stuff” says Brown, a Toronto mom of 4-year-old Evie and 18-month-old Brynn.
The amount of stuff tossed into the basement of their family’s semi-detached house was significant. “Our house was built in the 1920s, when families would have had four or five kids here,” she says. “We were having a hard time with two. So I was feeling a bit gross about the consumerism of it all.”
Some internet research on families and minimalism turned up Minimalist Mom blogger Allie Casazza, who had tips on how to think through household items and not be so emotionally attached. Then Brown got down to work: first, she took a week off work to clear out the basement, including some 50 per cent of her children’s toys and other family items she no longer needed.
But along with purging, Brown worked on minimizing what came into the house. “We had to train the grandparents to stop giving us stuff,” she says.
Now, she says, the minimalist lifestyle is finally permeating. “I think more carefully about buying now. If I do bring something in, it has to fill a purpose,” she says.
Jennifer Chua and her husband, Joseph, were no newbies to minimalism.
“My husband I had both separately lived in Asia — my apartment was 32 square metres (345 square feet),” Chua says. That time had helped teach them how to live with less.
But add in daughter Edie and that brought the twosome, then living in a 580-square-foot loft, into a whole new territory.
“When I got pregnant, friends told me that babies come with so much stuff. I was smug and said ‘no, no we got this,’ ” says Chua, who, along with Joseph, runs Hip Mommies, a babyproducts distribution company. “But it was challenging.” Some things she thought were silly baby items, such as a breastfeeding pillow and nursing bras, but she actually ended up needing them.
And even though they now live in a 1,100-square-foot home, Chua still strives to live with less. They live without a car — Chua uses a bigbasket stroller to lug groceries around, for example.
“Minimalism was a lot easier before kids,” she says. “Not only do kids grow through clothes each season, people also leave us garbage bags of clothes and I’m trying to go through it and pack it into her tiny closet space.”
It was the documentary, Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, that caught Coralie Metcalfe’s eye on Netflix. After all, the Metcalfe family was living in a bungalow after moving from a twostorey home and had two babies in two years. “We acquired a lot of stuff that you do with kids and I felt like I was drowning in things,” she says.
That viewing set off what turned out to be an eight-month room-byroom purge of items from the family home. “I got about three-quarters of my house done and felt like I could breathe for the first time in years,” she says. Items were donated or resold on local online mom groups, photos were put into albums and collections of collectibles downsized considerably. “When you have fewer things around you, it’s easier to breathe and easier to get things done and easier to prioritize,” she says.
That said, there were still two kids in the house. “It’s funny with children because you acquire things and you don’t even know how you came to acquire them,” she says. “So you blink and your house is full of stuff again. It’s been a bit of a constant battle.”