CHOOSING MINIMALISM: ROOM BY ROOM

 What images come to mind when you try to picture a minimalist house or apartment? Do you envision scarcity at its finest? Do you see white walls and faux stainless steel furniture? Do you picture matte-black furniture, muted colors, and desert flowers or succulents on the mantle? Whatever you see in your mind, you should know that you are right. Decorating according to a minimalist lifestyle is what you want it to be. There is no fixed template for how you should decorate a minimalist home or apartment.

In fact, for beginning minimalist families, each room is typically less empty and more filled with the sort of things families tend to accumulate. There may be more toys, more family pictures on the walls instead of generic artwork, more storage space, and certainly a little more clutter. That’s okay. Clutter happens. No one is going to take away your minimalist card.

However, the road to this minimalist lifestyle has to begin somewhere. For most people, the launch pad for their minimalist journey begins in their living room or family room. But what does it take to transition a typical living room for a bachelor or bachelorette into a room suitable for a minimalist man or woman?

And for that matter, how should you go about changing your bathroom, kitchen, bedroom,  or office space?

In this article we will guide you through your minimalist journey room by room. We will look at some of the most strategic elements of decor to change along with some possible problematic points. It all depends on how committed you are to a strong start.

Beginner Techniques for Minimalism

It’s important to keep in mind that the fundamentals of minimalism have little to do with decorating and more to do with removing the clutter, redundancies and duplicates we tend to embrace. The goal of the lifestyle is to reduce everything down to essentials so that you spend less time and energy handling those things. The less brain power you use on the stuff you have, the more you can focus on the things that truly matter in life.

When you go room to room there are three things you need to keep in mind for each room as you prepare to transition your consumerist space into a minimalist home.

1) De-clutter Techniques

Less is more! Get rid of the things you know you have not used and will not use first. Then consider trashing the items you’ve been holding on to but haven’t used in one year, two years, and three years. I’m not an accountant but I hear you only need to keep IRS records for three years. If it’s good enough for the IRS it’s good enough for me.

A good way to handle decorations is with a seasonal rotation. Keep certain items out for each of the four seasons and then put them away when the season is over .

2) Room Percentage Technique

What percentage of each room are you using? Are you using 90% of all available space in a bedroom? Now try scaling that number back to 75% or 50%. Consider what you can get rid of, sale or giveaway to reach that number.

3) Keep what Matches Technique

The things you keep should be essential, serve dual purposes, and match the remaining items you’ve decided to keep.  This final strategy helps you make the hard decisions when trying to decide if you’ll keep that bedroom dresser, living room night table or bookshelf. There’s no need to keep a printer stand in your home office if all it does is hold a certain type of printer. You should be able to store paper in it, mount a power strip, and nicely tie all your wiring together. If you cannot, toss it and get a new one.

This also means that if you’re going for a certain look, for example, Shabby Chic, you probably already know that keeping a super-contemporary chrome night table won’t fit the picture you imagined. However, in the end, all that matters is what you find useful.

Living Room

Just imagining the effort it will take to declutter your living room may be enough for some people to call it quits right out the gate. This is especially true for larger families. True to its namesake, the living room is where we live, both night and day. It has all the remnants of daily life scattered about, hither and yon. Quite often there is so much stuff that it’s difficult to clean it tidy, much less clean.

So how do we start the living room decluttering process without overwhelming ourselves?

First we should keep in mind that everything has a place. Unfortunately, the living room often becomes the junk drawer of the home. That is, we toss, store and house almost everything in the living room because we don’t have the time to put things away in their rightful place. So start by removing anything that simply doesn’t belong in the living room.

Next, make three piles. The first pile is the Definitely Keep pile. The second is the Definitely Donate pile. Anything that doesn’t fit into these piles is put into a third pile called the Maybe Pile. Maybe you will keep it, maybe you will donate it. Putting things into these piles should be super easy. If something doesn’t fit into one pile immediately put it into another. Don’t spend too much time debating.

At this point you should see progress. Also, you should be inspired by the fact that you haven’t spent too much time struggling over your decisions. Hopefully this will motivate you to continue.

When you arrive at a point where it’s now difficult to make decisions, stop. Step out of the living room and return at a later date to continue the job.

This is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. Decluttering your living room is a multi-step process.  Put a pin in your efforts for the day and come back at another time. The idea is to achieve progress, not perfection.

Bedroom

Achieving minimalism in your bedroom is a very intimate thing. Making the decision to permanently part with some items can be painful and emotional. During the process, try to think of minimalism as downsizing. You are not discarding all your earthly possessions, you are only reducing them.

Start with your bed.

Ask yourself how many times you change your sheets and pillowcases in a week. Whatever the truthful answer is, keep only that amount of items for a change of bedding. The same goes for blankets, comforters and duvets. If you keep the same blanket for the season (Spring, Autumn, Summer, Winter), keep only one.

Discard any old, unused, or forgotten toiletries, makeup, or perfume.

For your closet and dresser, start with any clothing items you’ve been holding onto until you lose weight. That is a rational we use to hoard clothing that once made us feel good about ourselves. Any T-shirts, underwear, socks, pajamas, or loungewear that serve only as a back-up item, should be set aside in the Definitely Donate pile.

Shoes can be a difficult task, especially for women who own numerous pairs. But do yourself a favor and discard shoes that are worn or need new soles. If you’ have not taken your shoes in for repairs, and haven’t in the last six months, discard them.

The same should apply to overcoats, hats, scarves and jackets, especially if you live in a place where the temperature dips below freezing during the winter. If you have a favorite jacket and you only wear that jacket for all of the season, why keep anything else?

When you’ve reached the point where making decisions on what to keep and what to donate is getting more difficult, stop. Put a pin in the task and come back to it at a later time. Do not stress yourself out. Again, the transition into minimalism is not an all-or-nothing thing. It’s best to achieve progress, rather than seek perfection.

Kitchen

Kitchen can be tricky to de-clutter because often the kitchen is the heart of clutter. The junk drawer is most often located in the kitchen. Why is that?  I believe this is because the kitchen is the heart of the house, and as such, it has a little bit of everything in it. It has some of the garage, living room, bathroom and bedroom in it. So, let’s start by moving things out of the kitchen and back to where they belong in other areas of the house.

First-aid kits and hand towels should go back to the bathroom. Tools should be returned to the garage. There’s no reason for family photos, batteries, documents, or postal mail to be kept in the kitchen.

Next, move to your complete sets of kitchen items. Most likely, you purchased a complete set of flatware/silverware but have accumulated other forks, knives and spoons along the way. Keep the set, discard the extras. The same methods should be applied to other kitchen items like pots and pans, serving utensils and cookware.

Any non-kitchen cleaning product should be removed to the garage or other storage area.

Next up is the pantry. The whole idea behind a pantry is about stuffing all available storage with stuff, just in case. It’s hard not to imagine all the big food brands being involved in the architectural design of houses to include large pantries.

Many years ago a new home in Beaumont, CA included a pantry the size of a small bedroom. Do we really need that much storage for dry goods?

In the spirit of preparedness, and in this post-Coronavirus era, it’s perfectly understandable for families to want an emergency supply of food and water. There are services out there that provide ready-made meal kits. Consider investing in these kits that contain food items with longer shelf lives than what you’ll find in the grocery store.

Bathroom

Like the bedroom, the bathroom is an intimate place and often quite difficult to downsize. It houses our first-air equipment, or cleaning products, our beauty products, hair products and personal hygiene products.

So how do you begin downsizing your bathroom? We begin by consolidating. Can you mix five different bottles of shampoo into one? Can you cut down to one bottle of perfume at a time? Do you need his and hers shaving cream? Can you swap your typical antiperspirant to a natural deodorant that both husband and wife can share? Also, can your marriage survive having only one tube of toothpaste regardless if one of you squeezes from the middle and the other from the end?

Then, discard any old, unused, or forgotten toiletries, makeup, or perfume.

If you have a bunch of sample sized items like shampoo, conditioner and toothpaste, check the expiration dates and move these items to your personal travel kits.

What do you do now that you have downsized and begun your journey into a minimalist lifestyle?

Okay, so now you have decluttered your home. You have reduced the amount of stuff you have. And you’ve streamlined every aspect of each room in your home. What you do now is up to you.

To continue your minimalist journey, you may need to repeat the steps above several times to sufficiently and dramatically reduce your stuff.  However, there is no set time-table to compare your efforts. Do what’s best for you at the moment. When things feel stressful for you, take a moment to step back and return another day.

I cannot emphasize this enough: the adventure of minimalism is about achieving progress not seeking perfection. As you become more comfortable breaking free of the stranglehold of consumerism, you’ll look at the things around you more as “Tools for life, not centerpieces of your life.”