Living in a small space doesn’t mean you can’t maximize your space. When you choose to live minimally, you’ll have more space than ever imagined. You’ll also find it easier to think more clearly and live without any clutter.
Adapting a minimalist lifestyle might be difficult at first, especially if you’re used to living in excess or having more than you need. You’ll find it hard to throw away things that you’re holding on to that serve very little value, but then you’ll be relieved because you’ll have the things that truly matter to you.
The first step of working towards having a minimalist perspective is deciding what you deem necessary to keep. Once you do that, start organizing each room with what necessities go in them. For instance, in the kitchen, you can save a few pots and pans that you know you’ll need and put the rest away in a cupboard. You can also begin organizing spices on a spice shelf with the spices you use more frequently in the front, and the least used towards the back. For the bedroom, you can organize your clothes in a fashion that can make your mornings easier by choosing the outfits you have planned for each day. For the living room, you can use a futon for sleeping space; this doesn’t have to be limited to guests but also for you after a long stressful day. When you have a futon, you’ll be able to save space for when guests want to stay over. Find the most comfortable futon you can afford and it will make it easier to manage the chaos of family and friends after a party or dinner.
The next step towards a minimalistic lifestyle is to declutter. For instance, when organizing your closet, you can put all other garments that aren’t in the season in a box to the side rather than keeping it stored in your closet. Doing this will make spring cleaning easier as everything will be in one place. If you have too much stuff that you’re not willing to throw out, you can buy a storage unit. However, you should remember that storage units aren’t cheap and they do require maintenance from time to time.
The hardest part of living a minimalistic lifestyle isn’t organizing or decluttering your closet but curbing spending habits. To maintain a minimal lifestyle, you’ll have to make sure to seek out quality objects as it’ll mean you won’t have to replace your items frequently. Although quality objects tend to be pricier, they tend to last longer than cheaper objects which don’t last long. Maintaining healthy spending habits means it’ll be easier to keep your life aligned with your minimalistic mindset. It’s easy to forget that overspending and overshopping will result in more stress as you’ll have to find newer ways to keep them in your living space.
Keeping up with a minimalist life will be difficult if you’ve become used to living chaotically. Although cleaning out everything you might think is necessary will be difficult, when you’re working on and finish clearing out everything, you’ll gain mental clarity. The difficulty of removing clutter only comes from an attachment to objects. Once the attachment to any objects you own is removed, it’ll be easier to get rid of them. For some people, their stuff serves as a comfort zone but the most productive individuals not only adapt minimalism in their homes but also in their apparel. It goes to show that when you’re adapting a minimalist lifestyle, you’ll learn to de-stress and detox yourself from the superficial in your life.
Minimalist living isn’t focused primarily on having a clear living space but also the clarity of lifestyle and mind. Both are products of one another, and once one trait is mastered, then the other will follow.
