• I’m selling my 1400 sq. ft., 3 bedroom, 2 bath house, with a garage and basement because I don’t think a family of 2 needs that much space. A minimalist can live in a house, but it depends on their circumstances and the size their family and the home. I also question whether a minimalist should “buy” a house. My experience has been that ownership leads to more stuff, more expense. You suddenly need yard tools and other household tools, and you have to fix plumbing and electrical. It all adds up to something that feels conspicuously not minimalist to me. As a blogger @ hipdiggs.com, I’ve always felt like a little bit of a fake when I post about living smaller. I’ve struggled for five years with these feelings, and so I’m getting ready to sell this spring.

• this is a question i ask myself all the time. i definitely have an urge to purge, but at the same time feel like it’s not really necessary. we’ve been in the same condo for almost ten years. three years ago when my youngest emerged from baby to preschooler, we started purging higher volumes. everyone has pared down (even my husband started earlier this year), yet there really is no reason to do so. although i don’t have an outside space, if i did, i’d want outside furniture to enjoy it. and then i’d also feel guilty buying it. i have a terrible problem of seeing all things as clutter and i’d like to relax from that viewpoint. i am going to check out your book do less to see if and where i go from here.

• We started minimalism (or at least I did) when in a 500 sq. foot apartment with one car and one kid. We now live in 1400 sq. ft. house with two cars and three kids. We have more stuff than I want, but part of that is a slow-process of getting stuff out to people who need it. (Part of it is that I live with clutter-bugs.) I am really bad about getting the things we don’t need out of the house to donation centers, on Craigslist, etc. I feel so good when I do, but it’s hard. But we don’t buy a lot for ourselves. Our kids have just the right amount of clothes they need for a week. (And “shopping” the hand-me-downs to find I had everything I needed for daughters 2 and 3 was a real treat!) Minimalism looks a bit different now, more living simply than living sparsely. But compared to what other families and friends have, we are there! No TV, kids sleep all in one room, fewer toys, fewer clothes and shoes. Two cars we will wear into the ground. Keeping our schedules as open as we can while still nurturing our interests.

  • I feel similar to you in that our lifestyle now is more living simply than minimalism. When the kids were really little and we just 1, then 2 (third was a doozy!) I really could keep things pretty sparse. It helped that we lived overseas in furnished rental apartments. I really only feel like we don’t have a lot of stuff when we go to other people’s homes. Or currently when the kids don’t have enough summer clothing to last a week (they tend to not be able to rewear things in the summer).

• PS it was a great post, and I guess prompted by the ‘minimalist police’ who equate minimalism with your square footage and the number of possessions you own, rather than a sane philosophy for a happy life 🙂

  Madeleine

• Hello,

  I was really surprised by the title for this piece! I have always lived in a house as I have two dogs and like to grow a lot of our food. For me minimalism means having enough, and no more. I would agree that you need to be more mindful the more space you have, because it’s easy for things to just ‘sneak in the back door’ when you weren’t paying attention!

  That said, I probably have many more books than your average minimalist and make no apologies for them. They add enormous value to my life (many are on philosophy, gardening etc..) and I do not wish to spend my precious life interacting with a screen for everything, including reading and finding needed information. As well, we all know there is a dark side to screens – E waste being disposed of in developing countries, the huge amount of environmental harm caused by their manufacture and distribution, and let’s not forgot screen addiction which is about to be pronounced a medical condition in some countries. So it’s real books for me.

  Madeleine

• I always work to have less stuff. I am certainly no minimalist, but strive to make changes that will make my life easier. The hard ones are: the kid’s art work, old bills, and books. My goal is to have surfaces clear – no clutter, no random appliances, or stacks of paper (I fail at this one).

  • Kid’s art work: I’m going to a series on that in September. It’s one of my number one questions.
    I’d like to remove some of our small kitchen appliances from our counters but we use them everyday, some a few times a day. #coffeeaddicts. If we ever renovate this kitchen I’ll get those clever roll away cupboards that you can slide your appliances into.

• That’s an interesting question. Since I’ve been living this lifestyle for nearly 30 years now, long before minimalism was a thing, I’m not sure how to answer it. I guess I think that the labels are really immaterial – voluntary simplicity, minimalism, living light, extreme frugality, FIRE, whatever. IMHO it’s not about counting your belongings, the sort of dwelling you choose, the amount of money you’ve saved up, or following some set of rules that some “guru” made up, it’s just about living beneath your means and trying to participate in consumerism as little as possible.

  • “it’s just about living beneath your means and trying to participate in consumerism as little as possible.”

    You nailed it. There are all sorts of factors that influence where we live geographically as well as house vs. apt, etc. We don’t all have the same options laid out before us, or the means to undo experimental decisions (e.g. “My family lived on a boat for a year and I home schooled my kids and grew our food hydroponically! Now we returned to my childhood hometown, found great jobs and great schools and sweet little house!) I want to have less stuff but I definitely want to move our family from an apartment to a house – I long for a garden, and privacy that apartment living makes impossible. I would buy an extra freezer to store food (not huge quantities, but I’ll have that garden bounty) and probably get a dog, too. AND MY OWN WASHING MACHINE which will be my most prized possession. So my overall expenses will increase, and I’ll use more power (heating, electricity) and pay more insurance and have the exterior upkeep be singly ours. But right now none of this is beneath our means, so we’re doing the best we can with where we are.

• Hi Rachel,

  We’re a family of 3 (soon to be 4!) in 1177 sq. ft single detached with an unfinished basement. The house is the perfect size for us — 2 beds + 1 bath, but every room is spacious so the kids will easily be able to share. The property (5500 sq ft) is honestly too big for us as we don’t enjoy the maintenance in a climate where things grow, grow, GROW. I still identify as minimalist even though we’ve moved into a larger home. Agree with you that minimalism & small are often conflated (they were in my mind for a long time!), but honestly have NOTHING to do with each other. On days I wish we had a smaller house again, I think about the fact that I most definitely would not have had a second baby in our old 795 sq ft place! So lots to be grateful for, even if there’s some extra square footage to clean 🙂

  • Low maintenance garden? Put it on your list. And I understand. We have a large-ish single family home lot and I would love to get some natural landscaping in the front that would be low maintenance.
    That’s so exciting that it will soon be two kids in the bungalow! Congratulations.

• Great read! Yes, I don’t think the size of your house necessarily determines whether you are a minimalist or not. It’s about the choices you make every day!

  “Do what you can from where you are right now.” Well said!

• Yes, you can be a minimalist in a house! We are. We recently bought a house – 1966 sq ft, 3 bed, 2 bath. We have 7 kids who live at home full time, 2 more in college who are here on school breaks and we homeschool.
  I like the term from another comment – intentionalist. It describes it so much better than minimalist. Our house is perfect for that. Bedrooms are enough removed from the main space that they are quiet for naps and littles going to bed earlier than bigs. A great room that includes the kitchen, dining and living rooms where everyone usually congregates. Just enough storage for what we need and want but not too much so we aren’t tempted to keep things that have outlived their purpose.

  • Wow! So a family of 11 in 1966 sq ft? Amazing. I like what you said about your house being perfect for your intentions with the bedrooms being removed from the communal spaces. If you ever want to share your story and home here on the blog please email me: theminimalistmom@gmail.com.

  • I love this! I’d really love to see your home and hear the whole story! I hope you’ll share it here.

• I think it’s great we have voices like yours in the minimalist movement. As a minimalist who likes smaller living, we took what we could get in a very tough market and had to upsize! It sounds weird, but we were beat out on 6 houses before the one we ended up buying, which was 400-800 sq. ft. more than the other ones we put offers on. It feels weird to have this much space, and we have definitely accumulated more than I would like. However, the additional space is giving us more opportunity to do things. I have space to foster neonatal kittens and currently have 9 fosters set up in 2 spaces. We have a spare room for guests, so family can visit more and not worry about the cost of a hotel. We have a large yard that is usually full with neighborhood kids after school. We have lots of space to entertain and often throw large parties. I’m trying to find the good in this unintended situation. Minimalism isn’t about the size of the physical space you inhabit, it’s about intentionally living in it.

  • I hear you on buying what is available – not exactly what you want -in a hot market. Cool to see you are now fostering kittens – so sweet!

    • I search our neighborhood regularly for smaller houses, and even losing 600 sq. ft. means paying $50-100+k MORE than what we paid for our 2200 sq. ft. four years ago. So we are stuck in our giant house for the foreseeable future as getting anything smaller in the price range of the house we bought means going an extra 15-30 miles out of the metropolitan area 🙁

• We are only two people living in a approx 950 sq ft (88 sq m). We have three bedrooms so one of them is a spudy and our other bedrooms are big. I would have an en suite bathroom if it weren’t so expensive to build as one small bathroom is inconvenient when we have guests. So even though we don’t live in a house – we have ample space imo. I have been playing The Minimalist Game and I did a 1000 clutters challenge. (910 items gone so far, including some bulky furniture that became surplus to requirements.) And I’m not done yet. For me the best things are the feelings of space – the luxury of feeling like you live in a palace when it’s actually not that big; the time saved in cleaning around too much stuff; the willingness to clean as it’s no longer an all day, enormous, mountain of a task, meaning we have a cleaner home; and the feeling of peace that stops me being paralyzed by clutter and really does mean that I get more done. All these things apply equally in a house and an apartment.

  • Yes! And well done on the Mins Game 🙂

• It depends.
  We own a house, too.
  Since my husband is very handy we have a lot of tools to maintain our house. If we hadn’t, we would have to hire people to do the repairs which would cost a lot of money.
  If we would rent something the landlord would have to take care of it.

  • Yes we are the same, we have tools and equipment, not to mention baby stuff. But it’s a season, you can still be a minimalist with some stuff!

• We live in about 1600 sq ft or 150 sqm. It’s a lot for the three of us (soon to be four) but it was also an affordable house in the area and definitely not the biggest at 3 beds, 2 bath, most were 4 beds, 2 bath. I’m a minimalist and I’m proud to say that. I have what I need. I think defining minimalism is hard, it’s not about what you have or don’t have, it’s about knowing your values, what’s important to you and then actively working towards defining your life by those values.

  • Lovely words there. So true, it is about defining your life and how you live by your values.

• We live in a house, and we are not so much minimalists these days, but intentionalists. We have just enough stuff for our circumstances. The CDs and DVDs that we own are only the ones we would be devastated about if they got taken off Spotify or Netflix. We only own as many clothes as we need (my 13 year old daughter has such a small wardrobe! She has her favourites and that is ALL she wears! ) and our kitchen is small, so we only have items that we genuinely use. We also only have a small garden that is manageable for us to maintain (350sqm for the whole property) I think the important thing isn’t WHERE you live, but how INTENTIONAL you are about HOW you live.

  • Clare: love your take on being intentionalists. Sounds just right for where we are right now.

• I don’t consider us minimalists but we are trying hard to reduce what we consume and what we live with. We have SO MUCH work to do. My husband could easily be a minimalist though. We moved to a bigger house a couple years ago and it is slowly filling up even though we try to follow the in-and-out rule.

  • Melanie: Thank you for sharing The Buyerarchy of Needs a little while back on Instagram. Great reminders there.

• How silly! I don’t think simple living has much to do with the size of your house. We have four kids in a 1300 sq ft single family home. Minimizing is the only way we fit!

  • Agreed on the size of your home not being the test of simple living. And, of course, there is not test or one right way to do things. If you ever want to share your home please email me – I’d love to feature your family.

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