Do you want a limited special edition?

Two years ago, I posted a quote from Charlotte Mason on the benefits of owning a cherished, worthwhile collection of something, vs. the continual acquisition of mindless "collectibles." For some of us, a desire to "collect them all!" began with our first commercials for breakfast cereal (with toys), and moved on from there.

Buster Baxter (unwrapping a Christmas gift): Cool, it's CyberCod!
Bitzi: I'm sorry, Buster. We can return it.
Buster: (confused) Huh? Why?
Bitzi: Because you already have that one. See? (holds up a figure that looks similar, but decidedly not the same) I found it in your room right after I bought the other one.
Buster: That's TechnoTrout, Mom. He's very different. He has a speckled belly and he doesn't have CyberCod's kung-fu feet. (He demonstrates.)
Bitzi: Oh, thank goodness!
 (Arthur's Perfect Christmas)

In Goodbye, Things, Fumio Sasaki tells about a short-lived craze in Tokyo when the transit system offered a special anniversary edition pass. The card didn't offer any more benefits than a regular pass, but people still lined up for hours trying to get one. Sasaki decided to "pass" on it.

He also gives this very C.M.-resonant piece of advice: "Discard any possessions that you can't discuss with passion." Obviously, there are exceptions to this sparking-joy idea; many things are more functional than passion-provoking. But those things that we choose to keep around us, that we use to help tell our stories--they should have meaning.  And the worst offenders are things we keep because they make us appear trendy or intellectual or rich or cozily domestic. If we let them go, we might have to admit we're not any of those things. Big ouch.

What if we decided to detach, just a little more, from "collect them all?"

What if...we decided to be comfortably ourselves, and started to see the humourous side of our innocent but humbuggish attempts to "be somebody?"

Because each of us is, already, a limited special edition.

KonMari and the Infrequent Sewer (photos)

There have been periods when one or another Squirrel was doing a lot of sewing, or things often needed quick fixes, and it was nice to have a semi-permanent sewing corner. Even before we moved, though, we did some reorganizing and the sewing machine went to live in a box.  

Since we moved, the sewing supplies have taken up the two shelves in the closed part of the cabinet in the photo below. And the sewing machine was still living in the box, in our pantry room. I have pulled it out a couple of times, but I had to pull other things out to get at it, and it wasn't a lot of fun.

Today I decided to get a handle on the sewing stuff. I'll spare you the details, but you can see (in the photo below) that it's reduced from two whole shelves, to two plastic containers and a cardboard box of thread spools. That took up just the bottom shelf nicely. 

If I moved that stuff to the top shelf, would the sewing machine fit in the bottom?

Yes It Did. The cords are inside that red fabric thing to the right, which was otherwise the sewing machine cover.

And the advantage of that to the Infrequent Sewer, is that I no longer have to haul the sewing machine out of the pantry to sew at the dining table, so I am that much more likely to sew.

Totally worth the effort.

KonMari Closet, or, I'll try anything once (photos)

This wasn't so much a declutter as a reorganization and folding spree.

One thing I didn't like about the way things were was the big plastic bin full of summer clothes. I've never quite trusted it; I had the feeling it made things smell funny. The bin is still there, but now it's holding some other non-clothes stuff (that still needs sorting). About half the summer clothes (like t-shirts) came out and got put with the other clothes; the rest are in the blue fabric bin on the top shelf.

The hanging shelf used to be scarves but is now t-shirts plus winter gloves and hats. 

Bin of pullovers and sweater dresses. I had the dresses hanging up, but decided to fold them since they're really long pullovers.

Basket of scarves. I seemed to have a mess of scarves, so it was nice to corral them. I am donating a few that didn't spark-so-much-joy.

Drawer of folded tops

(I did do the socks etc. etc. too, but no photos--sorry.)

Less. More. The right to fry onions.

What more can be said about more vs. less stuff?

I remember a vintage Mad Magazine parody of home renovations, where weekend handyman projects involved turning an extra bathroom into a messy closet, and a knotty pine rec room into an attractive cement-walled basement. Perhaps satires of minimalism (if they don't already exist) will feature trendoids Upsizing, knocking around in Giant Over-sized Houses.

Some people object to the term "minimalism," preferring "intentional" or "conscious" over a word suggesting a cold, unreal sort of asceticism. Others object to hyper-romantic notions that small is necessarily better. Sometimes a family's needs change. A couple I saw in a video had lived in a tiny house for a year, but decided to give it up when they had a baby. They wanted to give her some floor space for crawling and toddling.

One writer complained that cooking caramelized onions for three hours in a tiny apartment created an indelible reek in everything she owned, including her bra. Comments on that story were largely unsympathetic, tending mostly towards "so don't cook onions for three hours." She did make the important point, though, that small-space living isn't always glamourous or fun, and it isn't for everyone.

For those who make a deliberate, conscious choice to live smaller, or with fewer possessions or clothes, does the romance rub off faster than the smell of the onions?

Or is the secret more in adapting? We live in a generous-sized apartment, with an eat-in kitchen and enough floor space for several (hypothetical) crawling babies. I probably wouldn't cook caramelized onions here, although we have baked cabbage rolls without too much olfactory distress. (To be honest, I didn't caramelize onions in our house either.) But we don't let garbage or laundry sit around too long, we wipe down damp things, and we clean the guinea pig's cage fairly often. We do have a kitchen vent fan, and a pretty good cross-draft when the balcony door is open, but why push your luck?

And in the end, we're not talking about onions at all, are we? We're talking about the things we feel entitled to do and have, never mind the consequences to us or those around us. Or to human beings half a world away who pick our coffee beans and sew our t-shirts.

Hey, where did that come from?

Because just as small spaces have inconvenient, less fun limitations, other intentional-conscious-minimalist decisions have their downsides too. If you buy expensive fair-trade organic coffee, you're probably going to drink less of it. If you wear 33 clothing items for three months, you may be fed up with your two or three pairs of shoes long before the season is over.

But you are getting less caffeine, and saving money on shoes. And saving time and energy spent figuring out which shoes to wear. And maybe putting money back into a people-helping coffee business, or the local store that sells it. Does that give you new resolve to stick with it?

You make the choice, you make a change, or at worst, you accept the situation you're in and try to find its good points. Maybe the tiny place where you can't fry onions is allowing you to live in a great city for awhile. Or letting you live on a smaller income. Or keeping you from having to own a lawn mower and a snow blower.  Maybe you have a bigger place, but having a tiny wardrobe or less stuff will allow you to share a smaller room and closet with your husband, and open up a bedroom for a parent, adult offspring, or friend to move in. (My grandparents did that for my aunt and uncle, and their toddler. Years later, the same aunt and uncle used their own basement as a granny flat for my grandparents.)

It's not about the adjectives. It's not about the fun-honeymoon side or the later second-thoughts side of choices. Everything may have advantages and disadvantages. So don't let either the fads or the critics blow away your decisions.

When you choose less space: it's not all that exciting, and that's okay

Note to potential downsizers: if you've been in one space for awhile, you may be used to certain things a certain way, and you're not sure you're up for a change. Additionally, photos of tiny houses and articles on apartment websites can make you feel like there must be a rare Zen art to finding cute ways to stash things. Figuring out how to cleverly store the laundry soap in a no-storage laundry closet can be as stressful as moving itself.

But it doesn't have to be that hard.

This is our so-easy-I-forgot-to-think-of-that laundry soap storage: on top of the washer.  Nobody's going to photograph it for Buzzfeed or Pinterest. It was just the obvious place to put the detergent bottle.

This is the only real storage we have in the bathroom that Mr. Fixit and I use, which is also the main bathroom: there's a very shallow medicine cabinet, and the space under the sink, which holds two plastic dishpans, which hold anything we'd rather not leave out. You can buy all kinds of shelf things for bathrooms, but we don't have room for them. And this is the point: we don't have that much to store in the bathroom anyway, so it works out.

This is our totally unexciting entrance closet. It has an old Stack-a-Shelf unit for shoes. It has coats. It has a few things on a shelf, and a basket for paper recycling. 

Are you seeing a pattern here? 

We are not in love with having to organize and store stuff. I do not say that out of lack of sympathy for those who are honestly crushed for space. And we do have a very nice storage room slash pantry, which a lot of other apartments we looked at did not have. Without that, we'd have a whole lot more hooks on the wall, vacuum cleaner in the coat closet, etc. etc. So you might think I just don't know what small and cramped is, or I've forgotten what life is like with little children,  and you could be right. (I did live in a studio apartment before I got married. It was usually a mess.)

This is the best advice I can give from a couple of middle-aged Squirrels (and Squirreling), who have gone from smallest to small to pretty good-sized, and back to small again: if at all possible, have a little less stuff than you think you have room to store. Then you will probably find you have a spot for it, or at least that you don't have to go out of your way to devise storage for it. Ten of something requires a special shelf or box; one or two, you can slip in or under something else, or store in the empty space on the washing machine. If you can live with the one or two, you have solved the problem.

Zen not required.