The Beginning of Minimalism

Our Background
This is not a post about the history of minimalism, but more about how our family came to embrace the idea for ourselves.  To give you a little bit of history, when Scott and I got together, I lived in an approximately 1600 sq ft urban house and Scott lived in a 2400 sq. ft. suburban home.  Since I was in my forever house, we agreed to live there once we got married.

Home Sweet Home

A 2400 sq ft house accommodates a lot of 'stuff' and we had great difficulty fitting it all, even after building a large garage (550-600 sq. ft.) on the property.

Please disregard the lack of landscaping- I can't believe I can't find a finished picture!

 Once our baby girl came along with all the 'stuff' that she required, we were bursting at the seams and agreed that perhaps we needed a bigger home in the suburbs.

We really thought we did it right.  The house is about 2100 sq. ft. and there is a 500 sq. ft. unfinished bonus room that we could finish out when we decided we needed more space.  We were living the American dream.  The problem is that it didn't feel that way to us.  When all was said and done, almost 50% of Scott's salary was going to the house, so we never had any money left for traveling or doing fun things.  Home projects like building mud rooms and learning towers, and fixing things started to overtake our weekends, so we couldn't even enjoy the fun events in town.  While the house was beautiful and we loved the neighborhood, we didn't love our quality of life. We just didn't know what to do about it.
Which Came First: The Movie or the Tedtalk?
Summer arrived and I truly don't remember which one happened first, but we watched both the movie  TINY: A movie about living small and a Tedtalk about minimalism.  They both spoke to us in different ways.  While I appreciated the movie TINY, I wasn't about to pack my family into a 200 sq. ft. home on wheels- that was just too extreme for me.  However, we both loved how the people spoke about the absolute freedom they had because they weren't worried about a mortgage or maintenance costs.  When we watched that first Tedtalk about minimalism, and then linked to more and more, we realized that we personally were slaves to our things and made a conscious decision to start downsizing.
Remember our Urban Home?
About that house in the city- yeah, we never sold it.  A minor league baseball stadium is being constructed a few blocks away and we decided to hold onto the house as a rental property as we waited to see what would happen to the property values.  Best. Decision. Ever. As we continued to let the idea of minimalism percolate, Scott came to me one night and suggested that we convert our lovely garage to a living space.  "Great idea!" I said, as the thought of double rent and what we could do with the extra money set in.  A few weeks later Scott suggested that we be the ones to move into the garage and continue to rent out the house as passive income.  He suggested that because we embraced minimalism and decided to remain a family of three, we no longer required all the space in the house.  It took a little while for me to get on board, but eventually I saw that it makes total sense for us.  Sell the house in the suburbs and allow the rent from the main house to pay for us to live in the garage for free?  Sign me up.  And thus began our need to embrace minimalism in earnest. We hope that you enjoy this blog and get inspiration and motivation as we fumble around during this process.  We would love for this blog to be interactive and to get as much input from you as possible. Do you have any advice for us?  Are you curious about anything we might be going through?