My Minimalist Home: One Month Countdown

My House Hunting Checklist:

Find a new home – check

Prepare my current home to sell – check

Get inspections on new home – check

Pass inspection on my current home – check

Negotiate repair requests on new home – check

Negotiate repair requests on my current home (none) – check

It’s been a couple of busy and somewhat anxiety-inducing weeks of house hunting, buying, and selling, but I think everything should go smoothly from now on. I hope so. In fact, despite a long to-do list to prepare for the move, I can barely wait until I close on both houses. I know that I need to finish some mundane tasks like organizing utilities, updating addresses, and arranging repair work, but all I want to do is look through decorating magazines and the enormous wheel of paint colors that my realtor lent me. One month to go. It feels like a long time, but I know it will fly by.

Going from a 1600 to 1000 square foot house will be an adjustment. I’ll still have three bedrooms but they’re small, so I’ve got some decisions to make. Going down to one bathroom is also a change (I have nightmares of a clogged toilet and desperate searches of a nearby store or restaurant in search of a restroom). My library may be half the size it was a few years ago, but I still have four tall bookcases to fit in somewhere, and the living room isn’t going to be big enough for them. I’m going to use one of the small bedrooms as my study, but that means I’ll have to give up the futon sofa bed I have for guests. This is not a major sacrifice, but what shall I do when both of my adult children come to visit? I have an as-yet-unused air mattress and sleeping bag, but I don’t want to depend on those for week-long visits if I don’t have to. In the end, I decide that I’d really like to get a new sofa for the living room, so I’ll be looking for sofa beds this month. One problem solved.

I’ve done a lot of decluttering the last two years, but my future home is small and has little storage space. How will I fit X in the new place? Do I really need Y? Where will I put the food station for Zac the cat? Thank goodness the new place has a one-car garage, small but large enough to set up Zac’s kitty bathroom. Slowly but surely, as I box up my belongings, I re-evaluate everything. Somehow I believed that I was done with this phase of minimalism, but I was wrong. Each time I hesitate, I think of all those people moving into tiny houses or RVs. How do they do it? Much as I enjoy watching those shows on TV, I don’t want to live quite that minimally in real life. I guess I’m more of a middle-of-the-road minimalist, or as my son, recently drawn to Zen Buddhism, would say, I seek “the middle way.”

I think I could live in a tiny house for a short time if I had to downsize further. However, I’m secretly hoping that this next house will be my forever home, and I won’t need to go smaller. It’s the right size to accommodate my current life, and when I’m older, it’s not so large that I’d have trouble maintaining it. Some of the businesses I need are in walking or biking distance, and there’s a bus stop just a couple of blocks away. I’ve had many homes over the years, in several states and even abroad, so I realize that I have a wandering spirit. Who knows? I may be repeating this process in the future. With that in mind, I continue my decluttering and packing, curating my collection of worldly possessions as I go. My goal is to keep what I need and love but not get too weighed down with stuff. My middle way.