Upsizing Your Home When You’re a Minimalist

Moving to the country and into a house has had us buying a lot of stuff lately. We own a lawnmower now and some basic furniture for a one bedroom suite. My brother has earmarked an inflatable slip ‘n’ slide for us that his kids have outgrown. We’ve all had to get outfitted in winter wear as the snow is soon to come. It’s been a stressful and strange couple of months of acquiring stuff for us minimalist-wannabes.

What do you do if you love simplicity and minimalism and yet, you move from a two bedroom condo to a house with a yard? At first I planned to not buy any new furniture. I thought we would get up there and then just see what we needed. But I looked at the second hand market for furniture in that area and it was frankly abysmal compared to what we could get secondhand in the city. And we thought about how we were going to use the space, that we’d have family over frequently, that the suite in our basement already had weeks booked with family staying in it, and decided to take the plunge and buy furniture for the house before moving up there. We actually rented a storage locker for a month to stash our Craigslist finds and some IKEA buys to get hauled up to our new house. It felt pretty uncomfortable to a) stockpile stuff and b) buy so much in such a short time. And I’m sharing all of this information here because I need to be brutally honest about this big life move. Both the good – more time, nature, less financial stress – and the not so good –  the increase of stuff and increased work of owning a single family home.

Upsizing as a minimalist wanna-be feels wrong. Moving into a house has been both enjoyable and panic inducing. When we looked at houses to buy in this area all of them had basements and garages packed with stuff. Seeing those packed houses made it seem inevitable: you buy a house and then you fill with as much stuff as you can.

Note: it wasn’t on our radar to move into an apartment in this small town. My husband wanted to have a yard (and mow a lawn!) and I admit, I was curious about living in a house too. We have given up a lot of city amenities with this move so we plan to use our new home space more for activities with the kids. 

I keep reminding myself: just because you have space doesn’t mean you need to fill it. There is so much storage in this house. So so so so much storage. Previous owners have put in shelving in the garage and basement and basically anywhere that would hold a shelf. There is far more storage than we have stuff for. And we won’t and don’t have to fill it.

Also: we don’t have that much stuff. The last few weeks in Vancouver people kept asking me about the packing and if I was stressed out. Not really. Sure, there was work to be done but it was really just a couple of evenings of packing after the kids went to bed and then we did the bulk of it the day before the movers arrived.  Even with the extra furniture we brought up our movers were very happy with how much stuff we had (they were getting paid a flat rate). They unloaded everything into our new house in under two hours.

There are so many wonderful stories out there about downsizing for simplicity. Could we be a wonderful story about upsizing for simplicity? I know it sounds incongruous but we moved to this small town, and this house, to give ourselves more time and more financial freedom. We’re a few weeks in and already feeling the relaxed and unhurried vibe of this town and enjoying some wonderful surprises to us like how cyclist friendly it is here, and that, WOAH, kids are allowed to have peanut butter in their lunches at school and daycare.

Okay all house dwelling minimalist wannabes: how do you keep yourself from filling every last room and every last shelf? One thing I enjoyed about living a smaller home was that it was pretty easy to see if you need to pare down clothes or toys – there just wasn’t enough room to hold a lot of stuff. Now… this home has endless storage.

  • I’m looking forward to hearing more about how your minimalist upsizing adventure goes, as our family will be doing something similar in the coming months. Having to furnish a home that is almost 4x the size of our Vancouver condo is a bit daunting, but we’re hoping to keep to our minimalist principles and to enjoy giving ourselves and our carefully selected possessions space to breathe!

  • Kootenay Time, Its the best. Balanced work life, people arent in as much of a rush!

    This is one area where I struggle with minimalism, we live in this beautiful country, with winters that are hard. Our way of dealing with winter, is to be active. But we downhill and cross country ski, and skate, and then all the summer acitivities. And with a afamily of 5, 5 sets of all of those things takes up a lot of space. Its definitely not cost effective to rent this equipment either.

    However we live in a really nice cohousing community and we share a lot with our neighbours (I know not everyone has that opportunity though). We actually own one 2 lawnmowers for 24 houses!!

    • There are usually community ski equipment sales where you can get equipment etc at bargain prices…then you can resale or swap them as your kids grow.

  • After 42 years of marriage, 4 kids and 30 years in our last home we “downsized “…. which in reality means we moved to almost the same size, but fewer rooms. I started 2 years before the actual move, listening to all CDs, and deciding which one to keep, watched the DVDs, going thru all our hundreds of books. By the time we had moved I got rid of 1365 items….yes, I actually kept track. We lost a formal dining room, family room, a bedroom and two closets. I don’t miss a thing. There is nothing stored in the attic, where the last attic was packed. There are empty shelves in the kitchen and nothing is stored under the bed…..it is almost as good as losing 30 pounds….almost.

  • Love reading about your move and thoughts on the change in lifestyle. I can imagine what an adjustment that is.

    Speaking of changes, did you change the font on your blog? This font seems particularly hard to read (I’ve had my prescription checked and am wearing my readers, so I don’t think it’s just me…)

    • I’ve had a few people comment on the font as being hard to read. Hoping to update the theme and get a more reader friendly font soon – my eyes are getting older and it’s hard for me too 🙁

  • I find it easier to clean if nothing is on the counters or furniture, so that helps me not fill the house. If I’m really torn about getting rid of something, I’ll put it in a box and then in the attic. If its there in the next few months or year – done with it. Kind of like purgatory for my junk!

  • Ah, as a Mum of a child with anaphylaxis to some nuts (you know, the medical condition where the airway closes and they stop breathing) I am really disappointed to see you throw the peanut butter at daycare comment in there as if life threatening food allergies are just a symptom of bing a fussy inner city dweller – just a fad or something. I so wish my child didn’t have to live with the potential to become gravely ill at the bite of the wrong food, but that’s his reality. A little compassion and understanding goes a long way. You may be able to celebrate not having to evaluate the ‘safety’ of the food in the daycare lunch box, but please think about those who can never take the risk of not knowing every ingredient in everything they eat, for the REST of their lives. We’re not doing it to annoy you, we’re asking for some help in keeping our loved ones safe.

    • Kyla, I’m so sorry my comment came across as insensitive. I didn’t mean that it was a fad or some kind of inner city fussiness. I know how dangerous nuts are for some people. And we were very strict with our children at daycare and school, washed our hands very well before leaving the house if they had any nuts that morning in Vancouver. We still do. We had friends with children with nut allergies in Vancouver and I know how terrifying it is for there parents.
      I simply meant to say we were enjoying the ability to send nut butters to school and daycare. It’s new for us as all of our past schools and daycares have had a no nut policy. A policy I have supported and complied with to protect those children.

  • I am in the same boat! Moving in the next couple of weeks from a 2 bedroom apartment to a semi detached. I’m hoping not to have to buy much, but I guess I’ll see how the space works when we get there. I’m looking forward to having some more storage and basically not having to live in the same room as every object I own and getting to space things out a bit more.

  • A friend of mine also had to buy furniture in advance when she moved to somewhere more remote. So don’t feel bad. If you have more rooms than furniture, one option is to keep one room basically empty – just put down some of those foam toddler mats and a mirror on the wall and call it the workout room/dance studio. 🙂

    • Yes, we’ve got a somewhat empty basement and the third bedroom is still influx but will likely be an open playroom. Love the dance studio idea. My kids love to dance 🙂

  • I don’t live in a huge house by any means — 1565 sq ft, plus a 16×22 outdoor screened-in porch with a one car garage and a large, accessible attic. BUT, we used to live in an 1100 sq ft house with no garage, no porch, and a very poorly accessible attic, and I can tell you, moving up to our current house has been a massive blessing that has simplified our life tremendously, not to mention lowered my stress levels significantly. We had pared our possessions down as far as I could without impacting our lifestyle negatively, and there still wasn’t enough room to fit the lifestyle of my family of 4 (we have a lot of large gatherings for family, etc). I am so happy we made the plunge and moved into our current home. It was about 60k more expensive than our other house, but it is worth more than we paid for it, so we have instant equity, whereas we are still underwater on the old house because of when we bought it (right before the housing crisis in 07/08), it is in a significantly safer neighborhood with significantly better schools, 15 minutes closer to my husband’s work, and walking distance to a lot of fun things, including a library. Everything is a trade-off.

    In our new house, our third bedroom is nearly empty because my boys decided to share a room and there is just nothing much to put in there. So I stuck their old crib mattress on the floor as well as a rug and a few pillows and left a dresser in there, and they use it as a sort of playroom to play ninjas and race cars and all kinds of other fun stuff that requires wide open space. Our den, which is essentially a second, large living room, only has a loveseat and a glider with a side table in it because we just don’t have anything to put in there and we like it being open. One day, I would love to buy some nice furniture for the room as it has a great fireplace and such, but for now the boys love having the open space to play redlight-greenlight and jump off the loveseat and such. There’s almost no furniture in the room but it’s where we spend a large portion of our time! Our screened-in porch, which is the same size as our den, acts as an additional living space for us except for the very coldest months (really just Jan-Mar here). We have a nice little patio set out there along with a scooter, tricycle, and a few other outdoor toys, and it’s where the kids play when they want to be outside but I can’t supervise closely enough to let them out into the yard (they’re 3 and 5), and my husband and I drink tea on the outdoor couch in the evenings after the kids go to bed. SO much more breathing room in this house!

    You have created habits that will serve you in the new house, and it’ll feel nice to have breathing room and the space to get a few fun “extras” furniture or space-wise that you’ve always wanted but not had room for, but because you’ve disciplined yourself, I don’t think you’ll just magically collect a bunch of junk to the point the house is spilling over with clutter. 😉

    I absolutely love reading your blog! Glad you have found a wonderful space in your new town!

    • So true: everything is a trade off. We lost a lot of our go-to amenities by leaving the city: huge library, condo pool, many great parks a few blocks away and so much more. But now we have a fenced yard for our crazy toddler and his brother and the kids can roll bikes and scooters out of the garage whenever they like. Plus it’s so easy to get out on our bikes now (no longer underground behind two heavy doors) so we are riding everywhere while the weather is still good. Also, joy, the library is pretty good here.
      Your screened porch sounds great! I think the kids will use our unfinished basement in a similar style over the winter.

  • This is me right now. We couldn’t find a small home that wasn’t super old with problems. So we bought a new home that is bigger. And I have had melt down moments just thinking about cleaning a bigger home.

    And then having to buy more furniture and I feel like it’s lifestyle creep already. Ahhhh!!

    • Lifestyle creep is what I fear. We are taking things slow. Might try skiing this year but will rent equipment and see if kids are into it. Same for camping. We want to rent a pop up camper for a trip this summer and see if it is something we would get a lot of use out of. It’s been a total lifestyle overhaul – no more trips to Europe! – and we’re hoping to get into the more frugal and nature focused fun of this beautiful area.
      And yes, the cleaning! We’ve only gone up 300 sq ft but I still feel it. Luckily the floors here hide way more dirt than our old place 🙂

  • We went from 795 square foot house to an 1177 square foot house in May and I’ve felt so weirdly guilty about it! Like, can I still call myself a minimalist if I don’t have to do acrobatics to get my salad spinner down? So far, so good — we have yet to buy anything just to fill space. Sure we have bought new things for the new house (edge trimmer for the lawn, a hammock for the backyard and my husband got a new bike for the velodrome out here), but nothing just to fill space. In fact, we have a completely empty room on our main floor at the moment.

    • I know! I have square footage guilt going from 1100 sq ft to 1375 sq ft + unfinished basement. It is strange have a place for everything in our kitchen now (our microwave and pantry goods lived in our laundry closet at the back of the kitchen in the condo).
      This home is still sparsely furnished by most standards and there is loads of floor space for the kids to run around. I love it.
      Love your bungalow progress updates on IG 🙂 IG.

  • In the past 3 years, my family and I have gone from an 800 sq ft apartment to a 1300 garden apartment to, finally, our 1800 sq ft house. There is often this urge to fill or decorate each new space, but we’ve stayed intentional and inched along with new purchases for every home. I’m a minimalist and my husband is a “just-in-case” person so there’s compromise there, but we’re still constantly editing out the things we don’t need or admiting when we rushed into a purchase that is actually unncessary. I also set boundaries for what storage we can use. The guest room closet is only for things our guests might use – 2 bath towels, a small fan, some hangers. Half the kitchen cabinets are empty. I took down all the shelves in the master walk-in, leaving just a single clothing rod. We’ve even started taking down kitchen cabinet uppers (this is our forever home so it’s all part of a kitchen update). As a practicing minimalist, I think you’ll get the sense of when things are starting to burden you rather than assist you.

  • We recently upsized as well. We were looking for a little bigger house on more land and ended up with a huge house on the same amount of land because it felt like the right thing for us. We also had to buy some things for the new house and bought about half used and half new. The good thing was that we threw out, donated or gave away to friends everything extra. I like the bogs boot idea. We live in a four season place as well with skiing and basketball in the winter and mountain biking and boating in the summer so tons of stuff. I should add that my husband and I are both medium minimalists which works well for us and our four children.

    • The activities in our new area are very gear intensive too: camping, skiing, etc.
      Thanks for another vote for Bogs. My oldest has a pair and I’ve been debating getting them for the other two. They were great in Vancouver’s wet winter but I wasn’t sure if they actually worked for winter as well. Now I know 🙂

      • Make sure you get the Bogs snow boots, not the cheaper rain boots. We live in snow country and Bogs keep my elementary age girls warm and dry ;). As long as the snow isn’t taller than the boots…

  • I am not a minimalist yet, but I’m trying to get there! In the house we lived in prior to this, we had a huge kitchen with tons of cupboard space. I intentionally left one or two cupboards completely empty except for items my then-1 year old could play with and made those the kid cupboards. Did the same in the bathroom. We had a large double-door closet in the bathroom that held all our towels and toiletries, so I didn’t store anything under the bathroom sink.

    • I’m enjoying our linen closet in the main bathroom – we’ve never had that before! – but it’s not very full.
      This kitchen is actually not that big which was a bit of a disappointment to me. It’s galley style and has some awkwardly sized cupboards and again, not a lot of counter space. But it’s a bit bigger and open to the dining area which is great.

      • Are you planning on doing my remodeling? Having a kitchen you enjoy seems like a worthwhile investment.

        • There really isn’t much that can be changed with the layout 🙁 But down the road we could change out the awkward cabinets and that would give us better counter space (they have corner cabinets at the end of the galley kitchen that really reduce the counter space).

  • Ditto Mountain Mom’s comment. We ended up buying an energy-efficient chest freezer on clearance so we could freeze garden excess that doesn’t can well (blue- and strawberries) and buy in bulk during great sales. It paid for itself in less than a year!

  • Rachel, I hear you. I’m an aspiring Minimalist too. 7 years ago when we found out we were expecting a third baby, DH panicked and bought us a house that doubled our square footage and gives us over a quarter of an acre in the city. While I LOVE being able to put towels away without a broom falling out on my head, it’s just too much! I confess, I went a little overboard at first, taking on every offered free thing and project that presented itself. After a couple years of that I came back to my senses and I’ve been purging and rethinking things ever since.
    My kids enjoy playing much more now that we have just Lego, s piano, a wii, craft stuff and a small basket for each kid of random, meaningful toys. And less stressed to have just a bed, a shelf by the bed, a desk and chair in the bedroom.
    The funny thing is that my 6 yo and 11 yo both sleep in our master bedroom with us because they “feel safer”. My girl sleeps on a twin mattress we’ve pushed under our king size bed. My little one in between us. My 13 yo boy won’t ask, but when invited he brings his pillow and blanket upstairs to join the rest of us. A friend from Guatemala laughs about how we’d fit right in there!
    My parents are definitely on the keeper end of the spectrum and it actually upsets my dad that I we have walls of empty cupboards in the garage and basement.
    I tell them that I’m trying to live by the Japanese aesthetic about beauty being in the spaces! And it’s good practice for when I finally get my way and we get to downsize!
    Anyway, that’s my experience. While I’d prefer to live smaller, I’m trying to make the most of the present breathing space, and keep it breathable!

    • I hear you on the rooms/beds. My kids all share a room but often I wake up and there are five of us in the king bed 🙂
      Funny, everyone sees the empty shelves/rooms and has ideas for you on how you can fill them. As if they can’t simply sit empty.

  • For me, moving to the country meant some fundamental changes regarding “stuff”. Mostly it meant more furniture so that family and friends could sit, sleep and eat easily. But I also realized that I disliked having to drive and drive or having a last-minute need that couldn’t be met by Amazon (impossible with children in school) when we needed a supply of some sort. So I designated a closet for supplies of all sorts. Yes, some things I donated when we moved again, but it saved so much time and money overall that it more than made up for the “lost” donations. I could stock The Closet when things were on sale, then shop The Closet as needs arose.

    Other than needing yard-care/gardening tools and The Closet, I still have the One In, One Out rule.

    • Yes on the furniture. We used to just have one couch that all five of us could squeeze onto. We got some extra seating because we knew my brother and his family would be over a lot. We also invested in a bigger dining table. And hahaha yes, we are stocked up on laundry detergent, etc. We did a huge Costco shop before coming up here.

  • I wouldn’t take out the storage. Just fill it with books 😉. Minimalist or not you can NEVER have too many good books 😂😂😂. Start considering bulk food buying too. If it’s non-perishable/freezable items that you eat on a regular basis there are many benefits. Especially since your winters can be brutal.

    • I totally agree with this comment. Books! Also food storage and some emergency preparedness items like water and flashlights, freeze dried food etc.

    • I bought a 40lb box of apples the other week 🙂 That is one thing I am loving about having a bit bigger kitchen and pantry. We can buy bulk items that we use regularly at a reduced cost.

    • After 2 overseas moves plus a cross country one with stuff that had been stored, I’ve learned books are much less sacred posessions than i thought. We still kept hundreds (we are book lovers) but we probably kept only 1/3 of our original total at most. Many books I’d rather just store at the library than in my house because I know they will always have the classic novels that I was keeping even though I only re-read once every few years and many books I realised we were unlikely to actually refer to (cookbooks whose food I want to eat but not actually prepare myself). I save our shelves for the esoteric and most special now.

      • I like hearing this, Allison. We really pared down our books in our first big declutter. We have a few more now but mostly try to use the library. When I see bursting book shelves in people’s homes I always wonder, how many times have those books been read? Sure, they are beautiful to see neatly lined up on the shelf, and can be fun to browse through to get an idea of the owner’s interests, but I prefer to read books rather than collect them. Nowadays if I am gifted or buy a hard copy of a book I read it and then pass it on to a friend to read (and ask them to pass it on when they are done). I like that the book gets more use AND, big one, then I have someone to talk to about it.
        This is very much in the eye/heart of the beholder as I know so many people that are emotionally attached to physical books and displaying them give them great joy.

  • Pull out the shelving!!!! It’s really hard for us humans to leave shelves bare, despite your best intentions, those shelves will end up full and fast. Leave in a reasonable amount in easily accessible places- like one shelving unit in the garage and two or three in the basement.
    I do professional organizing, downsizing, moves, etc and I’ve seen clients unintentionally backslide when presented with tons of lovely shelving, extra closets and cupboards, etc. after moving to a new home or apartment.

    • Interesting advice. Nature abhors a vacuum, right? That was one of the perks of condo living – you literally had no extra space and that gave you an easy guideline for stuff coming into your house. Some of this shelving is really ugly and poorly made so it’s on my list to give away.

  • Very interesting. I watch the uk programme ‘Escape to the Country’ and when I fantasize about doing it myself I always think I’d like a small cottage but in a beautiful setting with a good size garden. They don’t seem to have that combination on the programme often. I have noticed though that storage was a big issue 20 – 30 years ago but now less so. In general people are aware of having too much stuff as a negative thing.

  • This is exactly how I felt when we moved into our nearly 1000 sq ft larger home 3 years ago. We are one of the only houses in our neighborhood who can park both cars in the garage! We do have a shed with tools, but it’s not even close to full, like most people’s are. We do own WAY more than I feel comfortable with, but I also know a large part of it is the phase of life we are in. We live on a quarter acre and need some basic yard supplies, so we don’t have to pay someone else to clean up our yard. My husband is really into DIY home projects, so we have some necessary tools for those jobs…plus his garage homebrew supplies (basically a fridge and a small kitchen cabinet filled with supplies). Our boys have a playroom full of Lego and have some stuff in their rooms besides beds. To me it feels overfilled. To others, they see our house as barren. We have empty space in cabinets. I have an entire spare walk-in closet that is used for fostering kittens. Well, we have a lot of spare space that I use for fostering animals…because heck, I have it–might as well use it! Although there are aspects I loathe about our large house, I do love the neighborhood and that we always have a house full of kids, the boys can walk/ride to every level of school, and we can always accommodate family who visit (since none are nearby). I already plan to downsize the minute it’s apparent the boys can handle it on their own and am just learning to deal with all the literal stuff that comes with this stage of added ownership. Good luck in your transition!

  • I bought my home for the garden, because I am a passionate backyard farmer. Hubby tends to collect stuff. So our first project was to remove as much storage as we could. Out with the shelves! Less to dust even when they are empty. It gives the rooms a more open look, too.

  • OH I am so with you. We just moved to western Montana from Philadelphia and it has just been a never-ending acquisition of STUFF, mostly gear. All of it is necessary to enjoy the outdoors out here (which is why we moved here in the first place) but is definitely anxiety-inducing, as former small space city dwellers for whom minimalism was easy in our 475 sqft.

    • Maybe we can start a support group? 🙂
      Yes, you have to get gear for this kind of weather but it is so foreign to outfit all five of us head to toe in boots, snow pants and jackets all at once! We knew all of this was coming with the move of course.

      • re the gear–there are one or two things that can do double duty, like bogs–boots are waterproof, can even be worn in the summer (at least my kids will) and are good to about -32 celcius. they are worth every penny 🙂 and they’re easy to get on and off, and don’t have a liner that could be lost or squished.

        good luck. four canadian seasons is no joke when it comes to stuff.

    • Welcome to Western Montana. We made the move from Philadelphia suburbs about 15 years ago. You will love it!!

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