Our Minimalism Journey

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Sometimes less is more and we have gone on a journey from extreme minimalism to a more conservative minimalistic approach to life.

In today’s episode we share our minimalism journey and how it has changed our lives for the better.

Resources Related To This Episode

Living Big In A TIny House

Minimalism, A Documentary About The Important Things

Transcription:

So sometimes less is more and an ally. We’ve gone through a big journey towards extreme minimalism when we lived in the van and then we’ve come back out of minimalism but still have minimalistic aspects to our life. So today we wanted to talk a bit on minimalism, how it’s changed our life and how we think it could improve your life as well.

She probably thought, why minimalism? Okay. Like why we even like where did we even hear about minimalism avenue the night?

Well we started learning about minimalism when we started looking into tiny houses and then started looking into moving into the van and minimalism. So if you haven’t heard of tiny houses before, they’re, these houses that people build on trailer bases basically about what? Two and a half meters wide by seven or eight meters long. And so they build these, they look like matchbox, how’s it? It’s like they’re really cool and I got super except assess with them and watching them on youtube. And a lot of people who are in these tiny houses talk about minimalism because they need to cut down the amount of stuff that they have in order to live in these tiny spaces and how by cutting down their stuff, they’re actually feel happier and more free and we were feeling pretty trapped at the time and I was in. It was Kinda like, oh this is, this is actually an exciting idea that by having less you can be happier.

Yeah. And I think as well our life is just full of junk. Like we just always felt like the house was so messy and allies would just messy and disorganized. We would always have to spend all of our free time organizing our junk. So we got to the point where we were like, well, we just don’t have any junk. Then we can spend all of that time that you would be organizing your junk. Doing something fun.

Yeah. And because kids, kids are gross rubbish for the kids. Just like they keep everything. Our son, grandson, he’s six. He is a hoarder. He is such a hoarder that when you take a toy that is broken and you throw it in the Bin and then you put something on top of it so the kids don’t know that you’re telling me. Somehow he finds it, gets it out of the being and keeps it. So yeah, the kids have a lot of stuff, but we also had a lot of stuff, a lot. I had so many clothes that I never would wear basically. Like how many beds, shirts do you read? Okay. So let’s talk about the process that we went to start downsizing and minimalizing our lives.

Okay. Well I think we just started with it was what is it? Every wardrobe or it was something like if you haven’t touched or used that thing in the last six months, you throw it in the bin unless it had like serious sentimental value like baby or like photographs

or something like that. Yeah. So there was a lot of stuff that was just in tubs. We just had all these tabs that would just be eating in our garage. Like every time I moved houses like 15 heavy tubs of all this like crap who’s kept lugging it around with us and so I think our approach to becoming minimalist because we knew that we were moving into the van. It was very focused on what’s going to fit in the van and how do we need to change our life for the van. But it was also. We were maybe six months out from moving into the band when we started looking into this seriously and it was very much one step at a time. For us. It wasn’t, okay, let’s like become complete minimalist center and they have one chair straight away. Everybody else did on the floor.

It was like, let’s tackle one thing at a time and we found the easiest place to start was our wardrobe. I had an entire big box full of old clothes and so went through that. Basically threw everything out except like one pair of shorts. I think maybe two pairs of shorts that I absolutely loved. And then we kind of kept the things that we loved, but we reimagined our wardrobes to think about what do we love to wear, what are the things that we love to wear and let’s just buy that and let’s just wear that because they say you only wear like 20 percent of your wardrobe anyway. And so that was like an easy place for us to start as well. It was kind of like a mindset shift from I have to wear something different every day to what do I love to wear and I feel so good in this that I want to wear it every day.

And like I don’t care if I’m wearing the same thing everyday. Like Steve Jobs, like we went that way didn’t we? And so Kelly’s wardrobe now is entirely black. All black black and everything. And then I have my show and then I have white tee shirts and black tee shirts. That’s about it. And then they’ll go in jeans and shorts. And yet when we moved into the van, we had this tiny cupboard. We have shared a tiny cupboard and the cupboard was only like what? Like this speak or something? Yeah. Yeah. So it was like, what did we have? We had like one pair of pants, one pair of shorts, two or three tee shirts and a hoodie. And like we have like one pair of shoes and the furtherance I think. Yeah. And so we just had one of each thing that we need and you would just wear that one thing and that was fine while we’re living in the van.

And then we decided to settle up here in Noosa because we found a kid school, what we found a school for our kids that we really liked. So we settled up here and we move short term into this giant mansion because it was only short term rental that we could find and we had just come out in our van with our van stuff. And so we had these like camping chairs and this van rug in this giant space. And so I feel like in that moment, yeah. Um, and we got to experience two things. We got to experience the huge space because it was like a mansion with water views. And so we got to experience that was like, which we didn’t like because it was just too big and cleaning that house was insane.

Terrible. We didn’t clean it until we left. He didn’t want to.

But then we also got to experience that extreme minimalism of having nothing in a space and we didn’t like that either.

Yeah. So yeah. Well that was a good test, wasn’t it? To kind of gauge just how big a space you wanted to live in. And, and it was so obvious because we had no furniture. We only had like camping just like in Iraq. So it was like a joke really. But you did feel like all of a sudden I don’t need this so we could go smaller and it wasn’t hard.

Yeah. And from there we moved into a two bedroom apartment and so we gave. Was actually two bedrooms upstairs and a downstairs. And we actually gave our kids the bedrooms upstairs. And then we lived on the sofa bed for a while downstairs. So the land room became. So it was kind of like living in a tiny house where yeah, we, we had downsized quite small, there was no backyard. We had like a front deck and the little courtyard cleaning wise, that house was awesome. It was so easy to clean and to keep tidy and things like that. That was really good. But what we didn’t like about that house was not having our own bedroom. We just have to make your bed. We just kind of stopped. Yeah. And then the kids come down at 5:30 and jump on you. Whereas like if we stay in bed at 5:30, the kids are coming into room and play so we can extra half an hour. Um, yeah. So we didn’t. But then also I feel like we wanted more space but not too much

was doing all of these little moves was really good because it was like little tests of okay if we bought this size house or if we bought that size house it was like exactly what do we need rather than just like having. I feel like you just naturally can meet to something bigger and more like just in case it’s like just in case. Yeah, with like everything you’re like, oh, I might need that jacket orders by that. Oh, I might need that for like one night out, so I’ll buy that.

Yeah. Well and a lot of people like, oh I might need a fourth bedroom in case someone comes to this day my need, you know. So there’s a lot of, a lot of.

Yeah. Like if you just, if you just pay for that Airbnb for that one person that’s like $200 any you have like an extra hundred dollars a week rent. Like it’s like particular like why would you just buy for nab?

So your families coming up to say they don’t, they don’t have to stay with you, you can get an airbnb and it works out. But

okay.

But as well that we worked out, we didn’t like the small space because of the noise. So with three young children they can get very noisy and it can be very abusive to the years when you’re in a very small space. And they’re just extremely loud and so I think stepping up to from a two bed through to a small three bedroom house, which is what we’re in now, this gave us that little bit of extra space and we now have more outside of areas that we can escape to, to have our coffee. And so yeah. Then I feel like the noise was a big thing for us because it was just too noisy in such a small space. It’s more about workable space then having large space I think. Yeah. And so we kind of went extreme minimalism in the van and then we kind of made some steps away from minimalism, but we also still take a very minimalistic approach to our life.

Like the car that we drive is a Honda Jazz, which is a very small car and we make that small space work. He’s a clown guy. Do you think it’s funny that this is the biggest guy that I give them forward, but it’s awesome. But it’s also even filling our spaces. So many people when they purchase a house and the bigger house you buy, you feel like you need to buy things to fill that space and also being aware of being aware of that and choosing not to fill the space or choosing not to just go ahead and fill it, but to wait till you find that one thing that you absolutely love. Totally. Yeah. You buy that one thing that you know with what you purchase is really is thinking about why do I want this and is this the best thing, the best object to solve that problem.

And so yeah, I don’t know what else we can say on it because we’re not pure minimalists. Like some people I wish we, I wish we were more minimalistic but there’s some aspects of my life where I’m extremely minimalistic. Like in my wardrobe, like I have white tee shirts, black tee shirts and white singlets and that’s it. I’ve got two shelves for my clothes and I’m extremely happy with the fact that I love everything that I wear and I can wear similar things and just mitch mix and match the jeans or the shorts, but then there’s other areas of my life that need improvement. Like the amount of Gamecube controller as I have is freaking ridiculous.

I still have this box of chords of like Justin case for most people. There’s areas of our lives that are kind of like. They’re like, it’s sensitive to kind of just throw that all out. Like clothes. You obviously don’t have that much attachment to close and that’s why it was easy for you, but I’d imagine that everybody will have some area of their life where they’re like, oh, that’s special to me, and like we’re not saying that you had to go and throw everything out. It’s more just like keep the special things and streamline everything else. I go, well, why don’t we talk about to close this off. What impact has minimalism and had on you and your life and your happiness? I definitely think we’re happier because there’s less time spent on chores. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the kids as well when you’re not spending every other weekend at Kmart buy more junk just because it’s cloudy outside or something like they, their focus isn’t on things anymore because our focus isn’t on things and it’s definitely like trickled down through who they are and what, what

they play with or what they enjoy. Yeah.

Then I feel like it has had an impact on our relationship as well as our relationships with other people because we’re not focused on spending our money on things in acquiring things. So we’re not spending time on facebook looking at the ads on facebook and wanting to buy stuff even though I did actually buy a wallet the other day from instagram.

Totally regret.

So we still make mistakes but um, but just even when we go out. So we drop the kids at school and then we’re going to go out on our date. We don’t think let’s go to the shops and let’s go hunting around the shops were things we think about, okay, what do we want to do? That’s gonna make me happy. Yeah. And what’s going to be a good experience? So we’re getting, we’re getting away from that materialistic thing where you always feel like we’ve stopped searching for things that will make us happy and we don’t believe that things make us happy anymore. So we’re not searching for that. Like this experience now. Yeah. And so there’s still things that we buy and there’s still things that you need to buy. So it’s not like we don’t buy anything. Like some people can do it way better than us and the more extreme, but it’s just you don’t have that focus on the materialism and that focus on I need to purchase more in order to feel happy. I need a bigger house, I need more expensive things, I need a bigger, better car. Yeah. So that’s been a big impact for me to just stop thinking about that sort of stuff and just start focusing on the here and now you are family friendly

like yourself and not what everybody else is doing. Isn’t it? Like being okay and comfortable. We’re not comparing anymore, not ourselves in any way to anyone else because we’re happy with our choices and how we live our life and so then it doesn’t matter. Lucky if our customer or, and we’ve chosen to have a small cars there that we have more cash to go do fun things and that’s our choice and when you don’t really look around you as much

not trying to keep up with the Joneses, you don’t have that envy. We went to that barbecue at the people’s house and they were really rich and they had this giant, gorgeous house that we went to on the gold coast and we went with friends.

Yes, yes.

I was going to say we went to the house and I remember thinking this house is way too big. We would hate this. And then other people were pining after. Yeah.

How amazing it was. Yeah. So you don’t actually remember how that story went downhill real quick. Let’s imagine you being dropped in the ocean. Shout out to Ben, that

analogy. That was a good one. Um, so yeah, so I do, I do recommend that people go ahead and check it out. Minimalism, checkout tiny houses. There’s a documentary on Netflix called the minimalists that we watched. That was pretty cool and we’ll also some links in the description down below to some tiny house tours if you guys want to go ahead and check those out. I feel like eventually when we buy our own house, I would love to have a larger tiny house. I wouldn’t want something big but just really well designed but still small spaces would be awesome. So we’ll link up to that stuff down below. But yeah, just be more thoughtful about the things that are important in life. Is it going to be things, is it going to be material things, is that what’s going to make you happy? And for us we decided that that’s not what makes us happy. There’s a certain level of things that we like to have, but it’s not extremely high and we’re not striving to constantly acquire new things and we feel like that’s had a benefit in. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well that’s it from us today guys. We hope that you enjoyed this video. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel because we’re releasing new videos almost daily, and until next time.