Tag: environment

My husband Ryan and I have been trying to minimize in our home for about a year. While we’ve made progress, it often reminds me of the sloth scene from the movie Zootopia.

In the animated film, one of the characters needs to get information about a license plate from the local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Inevitably, the process takes a long time, because, as we learn, the excessively slow DMV employees are, in fact, sloths.

I think of this scene because sometimes we feel like those sloths in our efforts to minimize.

Luckily for me, there are a few areas where I’m already nailing this minimalism thing:

• The number of pants I have that currently fit and that I can wear in public
  
  
• The number of books I have actually finished reading since having children
  
  
• The number of minutes I spend daily on basic personal hygiene (perhaps I should google the effects of prolonged exposure to not brushing your teeth until nighttime)

Why are you doing this?

In January 2019, Ryan and I started a 12 week online course on minimalism hosted by author Joshua Becker from becomingminimalist.com.

At the beginning of the course, we were asked to write down reasons why we wanted to minimize. My husband came up with heartfelt ideas about being able to host people in our home. I wrote “to not walk into things.”

Living in our 1,400 square foot house at that time were:

1. an almost 3 year old child
2. a 7 month old child
3. two cats
4. one 45lb dog
5. two adults
6. countless animal fur clumps we affectionately call fur tumbleweeds

When we bought our 1930s home six years prior, it had seemed huge. It was palatial compared to the 400 square foot apartment we and our two cats had lived in.

Then we added a dog. Then we added a baby. Then another baby. And before we knew it, it wasn’t palatial at all.

There was an infant car seat dominating the front hallway, a baby bouncer in the corner of the dining room, a toddler trampoline in the living room and five loads of clean—and-waiting-to-be-folded (probably next week)—laundry on the buffet.

Adding all this gear to an already full house was too much.

Couldn’t you Just Move?

Technically yes, we could move. But, as I once said to a neighbor, “I want to die in our house.” Ryan, ever the interpreter, chimed in, “what she means to say is that she wants to live here a long time.”

I love our house. We know almost everyone on our street by name. Our neighbors babysit for us, bring us food when babies are born and invite us to backyard BBQs. Some of the neighbors have even chased our dog for us on one of his many escapades around the neighborhood .

Additionally, we don’t want a bigger house. Wait, what?

Minimalism and the Environment

Why I am writing about our sloth-like attempt to get rid of things on a blog about the environment?

1) Consumption is connected to climate change:

In her study Environmental Impact Assessment of Household Consumption, Diana Ivanova writes that more than 60% of global Green House Gases are created by household consumption. NASA Kids (honestly, this is about my speed of science) has a great explanation about how Green House Gases lead to climate change.

2) More stuff requires a bigger home and more resources:

Alex Wilson and Jessica Boehland write in their article Small is Beautiful: U.S. House Size, Resource Use, and the Environment “As house size increases, so too do the environmental impacts associated with buildings and development: resource consumption increases, the land area affected by development grows, stormwater runoff increases as impermeable surface area increases, and energy use rises.”

Additional sites I found helpful:
Minimalism Trend: Will it Save the Planet?
What’s the Connection Between Minimalism and Sustainability
Yes, Consumption Really Does Drive Climate Impacts and Resource Use

Our family will never be part of the tiny house movement by any means (for starters, where would you put the piano?) but we’re also committed to not having a huge house.

If you have a larger house, I have nothing against you. In fact, I probably fantasize about your open floor plan and spacious entryway at times.

Good News and Bad News

I’ll save the details of what we did with the items we got rid of for another post and leave you with a few highlights and low lights of our minimizing project. I’ll start with the highs:

• Finding the cup holders a.k.a. snack holders for the kids’ car seats. They were, of course, being stored in the master bedroom closet.
  

• Giving a collection of framed Bay Area prints to a dear friend who grew up near San Francisco. They look better hanging in her dining room than they did sitting in our guest room closet for 6+years.

And now for the lows:

• Discovering mouse droppings in a dining room cupboard. Granted they were there, minimizing or not. But if we hadn’t been de-cluttering we wouldn’t have noticed them and therefore could have innocently and blissfully watched another episode of The Crown instead of disinfecting craft supplies.
  
  
• Almost burning my hands on Thanksgiving Dinner as our one pair of oven mitts, having been used by the kids as slippers (naturally), were in the laundry.

In the past year, we’ve made it through about 3 of the 12 sessions in the minimizing course. During this time, we have gifted, donated or sold approximately 1500 items.

I can’t really think of anything in particular I wish we had kept. There have been times when a random thing or two would have been helpful but really not lifesaving. If we keep at this pace, about 6,000 items will have been removed from our home by the time we reach our estimated graduation of 2030. That’s a lot less stuff to walk into.

I want to do this! AKA not a to-do list

• College is going to cost about $19,825/class by the time our kids attend. Set up a college fund for your kids that family members can contribute to instead of buying them (as many) presents for Christmas and birthdays.
• Talk to your significant other about minimizing. This is good advice for anything you want to do, but as an added bonus there may be things she/he wants to part with that you thought they wanted to be buried with.
• When you hear of a potential giving opportunity (ex: gently used children’s clothing for foster kids, winter coats for the homeless) see if you have anything you can contribute.
• If I came up with more ideas I’d be reinventing the wheel, so check out these popular posts.

I just walked over Legos, again, please give me the bullet points!
* Minimizing your belongings can take longer than anticipated with small children but it’s a rewarding experience.
* There are many reasons to minimize. The author and her husband are minimizing so they can stay in their current home and decrease their impact on the environment.
* The author and her husband have found becomingminimalist.com a helpful resource in their epic, slow-motion minimalism journey.