Making The Cut: Moving Edition (Again)
Making the Cut is a series on the smart and simple solutions that have (or have not) earned a place in our home.
Executive summary: While not planned this way, we are moving twice in 11 months, and this time to an even bigger home that feels positively palatial to minimalist me. But I find that I already have most of the things I need from the condo — it’s mostly a matter of figuring out how to stretch them in a bigger house and supplementing with no more than a few new items here and there, because I simply cannot deal with more stuff!!
This time last year, our family of four was living in a 1br 800-square foot apartment. When we moved into our 2br 1,300 ft² condo last March, we had a lot of space just sitting empty, which was rather awkward. I racked my brain for ideas on how to fill out our new home, but in the most functional and minimalist way possible (I shared a list of ideas here). In the end, I did make a number of purchases, and cringed at every one. But here’s the thing: every item we’ve added has proven useful! With the kids growing physically larger by the day, it’s helpful to upsize certain things, like the living room seating area and dining table, to provide more elbow room (not to mention it allows us to have the grandparents over, which is happening more frequently than before). With the items we’ve already acquired for the condo, I think we are 90% of the way to filling out our new 3br duplex — which is a mind-blowing 2,200 ft² — when we move next week. I shared a roundup of what we acquired for the condo last year here, and it basically boiled down to:
More seating in living room
Piano
Bigger dining table + more chairs
Furnishing the primary bedroom with nightstands and seating
Furnishing the guest bedroom with foldable bed frame and mattress
Increasing toy and book storage space for the kids
Rugs/runners to add comfort and color to larger spaces (especially the non-carpeted areas)
Misc small items like towels, a piece of art, wall hooks, etc.
Window curtains and rods (we went from 2 to 7 windows)
Light fixtures to kick the interior design up a notch! (I swapped out 9)
So it wasn’t a particularly short list upsizing from our apartment to the condo, but we were veeeery minimal before. I’m trying to keep the list of purchases shorter this time as we move from the condo to the duplex. Even though we’re ratcheting up by 900 ft² overnight (how did this happen?!!), I hope to stretch what we have to make it work. The purchases will boil down to:
New sofa for the living room! The old one will go in our primary bedroom “retreat” … I guess the architect couldn’t figure out what to do with this random 100 ft² rectangle, so it got attached to the primary bedroom to sound fancy
Canopy bed and nightstands for the primary bedroom
Misc rugs/runners, another piece of art, throw pillows, towels for an additional bathroom, etc.
More and longer curtains, to fit the higher ceilings (we will have 13 windows, although a few don’t need covering)
More light fixtures to swap out (4 more than the condo)
Then there is the yard. This is the wild card. The backyard, while small, could use some TLC and I have no idea how much to even budget for an overhaul, but surely it will be five-figures. This is a project we’ll punt to after we’re all settled inside.
I probably consult this floor plan at least once a day, as I ponder how to stretch what we have in a 1,300 ft² home to suit a 2,200 ft² home.
The list is not nothing, but it’s not long considering how much more house we have to fill (70% more)! While we do need to add a handful of items, I’m proud of how I’ve managed to repurpose what we already have, e.g.,
After an hour of mapping all the dimensions by hand, I figured out how to allocate our existing 6 curtain rods to fit the new windows. These were pricey/ very nice rods so I’m happy that we will be able to use them all in our new home, and without needing to purchase a single additional rod either! That will save us hundreds.
Likewise with our light fixtures, every one that I’ve purchased over the past year is coming with us, with only one spare.
Not all of our curtains will fit the higher ceilings of the new home, but I am keeping several to shorten into cafe curtains.
I was one minute away from giving away our tension rod (the one that holds up the privacy curtain in our flex space/ tiny guest room) when I realized that I could use it as a hanging rod in the new laundry room for drying clothes/ towels/ etc. Yes!!
I was one click away from posting our queen bed frame on our local Buy Nothing group when I decided that it could go in the new guest bedroom. Currently, we have a full-sized folding mattress and folding frame for the guest room, but I had a eureka moment when I realized those can be moved to my parents’ home, because my daughter will need something to sleep on there when she outgrows the crib mattress (which is happening, like, right now). So that means I won’t feel guilty about replacing the setup with a queen-sized folding mattress to put on top of the bed frame. Upgrade for the guest bedroom with nothing wasted!
I’ve been playing a lot of “furniture musical chairs” and have found a home for everything, on paper at least. Same goes for the art/ wall decor. I am doing my utmost to not add a single item more than we must; in my mind, it’s “bad enough” that we’ll have so much unneeded square footage, not to mention a yard that I would honestly rather live without. I’ve explained (post here) that it wasn’t exactly by choice that we bought this duplex, but it was a case of taking advantage of the Stanford faculty housing lottery when the opportunity came up. Could we have stayed in our condo “forever?” Sure, and that had been the plan. That is, until we won the housing lottery and thought “this might be the one chance in our lifetime to try a single-ish family home, because if we pass on it, we might not win the housing lottery again till the kids are in college, and then it would really feel silly to upsize at that point.”
I’ve been slowly packing and assessing our belongings all week, as the house is literally down the street from our condo and we can transport a few boxes over every night (anything to take a little pressure off the actual moving day). There’s nothing like moving every year or two to reaffirm my commitment to keeping my possessions minimal (which was the original catalyst behind my minimalist journey, after all). Now that this is hopefully our “indefinite home” for the long run, I will need to be more vigilant than ever and not fall into complacency. I’ve seen how easy it is to just shove things away into a large home and ignore them for literally decades, as the piles of clutter grow and grow and grow. I do not intend to let that happen, over my dead minimalist body!!