Simplifying your life through tiny living (Part 3)...

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Ben Brown, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Where do you put all your stuff?! Growing up in a standard sized structure, I always wondered “why do we have all this space and all this stuff we don’t use?” It just baffled my mind and still does to this day! If living tiny will teach you anything, it will force you to examine and understand what of your possessions are important to you. You must be organized! But it goes further than that. Being “organized” is one thing. Having every single item in your home have an exact place with very little wiggle room for flexibility is quite another. One thing you immediately learn in about living in a tiny structure is that every single item has to “belong somewhere.” Eventually, you quite literally run out of places to put “things” without having to get rid of somet of those “things”. And with that, comes an unintended outcome of living tiny that I would have NEVER thought of. This is that you get REALLY good at thing of creative ways to use your space and therefore, really creative place to put things. For example, instead of storing scotch bottles on a shelf somewhere or in a cabinet, they sit neatly on a wine rack that’s mounted to the ceiling above the refrigerator. The cutting board slides neatly underneath the toaster oven. And the silverware sits not in a drawer but on the wall via use of a magnetic strip that is drilled into the side of the kitchen wall. Another really cool concept that has been such a pleasure to work with and get good at, is the skill of making multiple uses out of different things. The easiest example here is the shelf that sits flush above the toaster oven. It not only serves as a place for groceries, but it also functions as a hot plate heater. I simply place the plate above the toaster oven and by the time my meal is done cooking, the plate is now hot and my meal stays hotter longer! There are other examples of this, but I will spare you. So as you might imagine, along with every item having its place, comes the unintended consequence of almost never losing anything. And with that, there’s a lower sense of anxiety from living tiny. Not that I was ever a super “anxious person” living in a standard sized space but you can certainly feel a lowered sense of anxiety around knowing where you stuff is when you need to find it. Now to be fair, one of the great pieces of advice I would give to anyone about to live tiny is to make an inventory list of every item and its place. There are times where you are looking for something and if you didn’t put it back where it belongs, forget it! You might as well block off your weekend because tiny homes are like dryers and women’s purses. They contain within them mysterious black holes that take with them whatever they please only to never be found again…or in some cases, to be found weeks if not months later (IN THE HOUSE or PURSE) even though you literally emptied the thing three times in a few days. So on the rare occasion that you do lose something, consult your inventory list and you will most probably find it. If you don’t find it where it’s supposed to be, then God help you in your senility. We will all (from time to time) as humans forever be the victims of our own occasional inability to follow the basic first grade concept of “putting things back where you found them.” Despite not having a lot places to put things, we as humans somehow, are not immune to “acquiring of random stuff” over time. Whether it’s the dreaded “junk drawer” from your own home or the home you grew up in, that space where all the random items (paperclips, pens, scotch tape, letter openers, jars of change, old bills, random photos, the tape measure, beer coozy’s, chip clips, tablets of sticky notes, and lighter or two…just to name a few) get magically attracted to and settle in over months or years of just “living there” or whether its the perhaps even more dreaded “bills basket” where piles and piles of unopened utility bills, publishers clearing house lottery nonsense and God only knows what else, we all have that one “junk space” where random items go to live and die. Hell, my partner even has a “junk desk” where all the random christmas and birthday gifts from those strange relatives that don’t really know you but still buy you the most random items from the dollar store because they don’t want you to “feel left out.” From this junk desk has come some of the most incredibly ridiculous items anyone could possibly imagine. A telescoping window de-icer brush with a LED flashlight on the handle that also magically turns into an umbrella? Yeah, that kind of shit. While I don’t have room for a “junk drawer” let alone a “junk desk”, I will confess that despite my 2 major qualifiers, I’ve still managed to get rid of 2 trash bags of random items over the course of 3 years of living. So it does happen. But the two gate keeping qualifiers do a pretty good job of minimizing that occurrence and answers the question I get asked most often about living in a tiny house, which is…”how do you decide what is in your house?” The answer is pretty simple really and on the back end of the answer lies yet another unintended albeit welcomed outcome of living tiny. There are two questions that get asked about every single item that enters this house. Question 1-”Is this of emotional value?” If the answer is “yes”, then a series of questions follow. “Why is this emotionally important to me or why do I have a relationship with this “thing”? If it is determined that the item is of great sentimental or emotional value, then the next question is, where does it belong in the house? If the only place I can find to put the “thing” with emotional value not somewhere that I will see it daily, then it either goes in the “sentimental/emotionally important box” or it doesn’t get in. A great example of each would be the following. There is wooden carving of a blue jay that was carved by my Grandfather’s hands and placed in a thick glass pyramid shaped prism. This used to sit on the shelf of my Grandparent’s home when I was a boy and I would stare at it for hours on end marveling at the detail with which his precision work could produce such a simple but beautiful piece of art all out of one piece of wood. It currently sits overtop a small disc LED light which illuminates the bird and I see it every single day when I make my tea in the morning. On the other end of the list is a series of letters written in my Grandfather’s handwriting. These have been laminated for preservation but I don’t see them everyday. So they sit up in my loft in a small container with other mementos for my reference from time to time. Question 2-”Does this item have functional value in my life?” If the item in question does in fact have functional value, to what degree is that function existent? With a few exceptions, I have found that if I use something at least once every 3 months, it stays. Otherwise, I just borrow things from friends, or get creative with the resources and tools I do have. Or I’ll go buy the thing. But its pretty rare and has in fact led to a decrease in the purchasing of “random stuff.” Every once in a while, I will find myself bringing something in here that I thought I would use more often than I do. Usually, when that happens, I’ll either sell it or donate it to a friend with more space than I have to put things. One thing is for sure, you ask yourself the same qualifying questions when you go to purchase things. Is this an emotional purchase or a functional purchase? I’ve always been a bit of minimalist anyway, aside from having a set of drums that barely fits in a standard sized bedroom. But otherwise, I’ve never seen the point in having a lot of “stuff” particularly, “useless stuff.” That brings me to the next topic of conversation, our culture of consumerism, the psychological side of capitalism, and the unintended immediate and future consequences of living in such a culture that seem to be rarely discussed in polite society.