Simple Living – Take 2

July 9, 2012 in My Simple Living

Our major move toward simple living was about 14 months ago.  We moved out of our house into a two bedroom apartment.

We were adopting simple living and minimalism

We went from about 2000 sq feet to about 900.  Here is a picture of our move last spring:

Here is our moving truck and my dancing children.  Such cuties :)

What we moved with us filled our 2 bedroom apartment and  a 1 stall garage.

I really thought we had become minimalist.

However over the past year we have kept cutting back.  In November we dropped the garage and had cut lots out of our apartment.  Several times this spring we have donated or sold more stuff.

So when it came time to renew our lease and they wanted to increase our rent (again) we decided to look for another place.

This time we knew we needed even less space because we weren’t filling our 2-bedroom apartment.  We settled on a small 1 bedroom closer to friends and a good walking trail.  Now we have less than 700 square feet.  Here is a picture of our move this time:

Moving as a minimalist is a new and different experience.  Because we really don’t have that much stuff I decided to see what I could pack, move, and unpack in a day.  (probably crazy, but I wanted to really get an understanding for what we still had) I spent some time each day the week before the move deep cleaning so we could get our deposit back but nothing was put into a box or basket until the morning of the move.

As luck would have it both kids got sick and were running fevers.  Poor things :(

The Friday morning of the move I got up and packed up the house.  I took two trips, 1 in the morning to get our keys and one in the afternoon with our Prius to start bringing things over.  I brought bedding and most of the kitchen over in these trips and got the kitchen unpacked.

Bryon got off work around 3 and had the moving truck at the apartment at 4 where his parents met us to load up the bigger stuff.  We got the rest of the apartment loaded up, moved, unloaded and the truck back by 7 so we could all go out for pizza.  We got home, put the kids to bed, and moved a few more things around.

Over the weekend I unpacked the last few boxes, Bryon put up some shelves, and we hung a few pictures.

By far the easiest move I have ever done!

To be fair, no matter who you are, moving is a pain.  No matter how much stuff you have it always seems like more (too much) when you have to move it.

In the time we would have been unpacking (if we had the stuff we used to have) we got to do lots of fun activities as a family.  Sunday we had a ‘vacation day’.  Here is some of the stuff we did:

We went to Fort Atkinson’s living history program.  This was the coolest part.  Lily is learning to write her name with a feather pen.

Then we headed down to one of our favorite parks.

This was one of our favorite places to walk but when the Missouri flooded last year it got torn up really bad.  Not sure when we will be able to walk the 7 mile trail again but we had fun climbing on the log piles and putting our feet in the water.  It used to be a forest.  Lots of the trees are still there but now it is covered with lots of sand.  The trail is completely gone.

Then we grabbed a picnic and headed to see a Shakespeare play.  It was a production of Shakespeare on the Green by UNO here in Omaha.  They did ‘Comedy of Errors’.  It was so good we went back last Thursday night to see it again.    I have never been great at understanding all the lines but I love his comedies.  Here my kids are dressing up while waiting for the show.

My little dolls :)

So there is our moving weekend :)

We are adopting minimalism more than I ever thought we would.  I will post more about how it is all working for us and the kids in the next few weeks.

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Written by: Lorilee Lippincott

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