Friday Share: A Confession

image from style-files.com via pinterest 

I have a confession to make. I'm a little bit addicted to lifestyle and interiors blogs. It's a slightly healthier and cheaper option than it's parent addiction (now cured) which was homes magazines, or 'house porn' as I affectionately thought of it. Mine is a deep love for beautiful cottages and old houses, white washed walls, crisp linens and wildflowers from the garden in a jam jar. It's a love of spacious loft conversions, funky textiles, ingenious DIY and reclaimed wooden floorboards. Tiny clever homes, canal boats, windmills, I could go on (and often do).


Reality check. We live in a 2 bedroom flat which comes as part of our salaries. It's ours for as long as we're employed by our university, perhaps until early next year but hopefully longer. There's plenty of space but the furniture is shabby and the walls are covered in old sticky backed plastic and are in dire need of a repaint. Our linens are garish, our pots are battered and our bathroom has smelly drains. Sometimes I dearly miss my lovely white wedding present bed linen (in storage, I couldn't part with it) and cast iron pots (ditto, bad minimalist!) After a lazy evening of interior blog binging I look at our home with a critical eye. 


When I do though, I am reminded of all that is good about where we live and why we live here. 


1. No rent to pay, that has to be number one. We never have to worry about rent or utility bills, that's pretty amazing.


2. When the walls are damaged, there's no need to be precious. We can sellotape our own art gallery up on the wall (picture to follow!) The boys love seeing their pictures up and I don't have to worry about the paintwork (we've always rented and this has always been a concern). 


3. It won't break my heart to say goodbye to any of our linens, pots or crockery when we want to up sticks. What we have suits us fine and will last us until we want to move further away (when we leave Asia I'm guessing). 


4. Our house is easy to clean. We don't have much furniture and all the floors are tiled. A quick sweep or mop and we're done. No carpet to worry about. Painting and plasticine play are not a problem. 


5. When I miss having a garden I can take a walk around the lush green campus and enjoy the flowers in bloom. 


6. Ours is a happy, lived-in home. We all spend a lot of time here and it suits our lifestyle very well.


7. Did I mention that it's free?


This isn't our perfect home but it is our perfect-for-now home and I'm very happy to be living here. It's worth remembering that when I was living in the UK with my good pots and lovely linens, there were many other things I was fantasising about. Like a husband who was home during the day, a chance to live somewhere exciting and a new career...


We got rid of most of our belongings because they weren't making us happy. I don't need fancy pots to cook with or shelves full of books to read. I enjoy looking at lovely things but I don't need or want them in my life. 


I'll most likely keep adding beautiful interiors to Pinterest but I'll try to keep it in perspective and remember how lucky I am to be living this life. 


Have a happy weekend. 

Getting rid of books

My minimalist journey began with books. I read an article which referred to Karen Kingston’s idea that books are ‘collections of old ideas'. At the time this was so distant from my own views on my prized book collection that I was shocked and dismissed the idea as absurd. Somehow though, I couldn't quite get it out of my mind. I read Kingston's book "Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui" in one sitting and while not all of it appealed to me, gradually I began to question why we had so many books. 

I come from a family of big readers and big book hoarders, as does my husband. Every time we moved house more and more of our boxes were full of books. When we visited our parents, we came away with more books from our childhood. We accumulated hundreds of books while at University- some were required reading but the majority came from the magical second-hand bookshops in Edinburgh, favourite haunts of ours during our student days. At Christmas and birthdays we gave each other books, we asked relatives for books. When we started our family, piles of children’s books began to accumulate too, as presents and bought from charity shops. We were also then given the 'legacy' books, those that had been kept by previous generations for us to have. Still only in our mid-twenties we already had hundreds and hundreds of books in our home and more in boxes still to collect. 

Something had to change or we were never going to be able to live the life we want to. Our books, while stimulating and much loved, also had the potential to hold us back and weigh us down and we did not want that to happen. 

So we started to get rid of them- shelf by shelf, box by box. Each time we slimmed them down the out pile went straight in the car for the next charity shop run. We sifted through the keep piles at least two or three times over the few months before we left the UK, each time managing to get rid of more. My husband's grandparents had very kindly agreed to let us store some belongings in their attic and both they and my mother-in-law assured us that there was no need to get rid of books. They were aghast that we were even considering it. To have huge piles of books getting damp in an attic for us to deal with in the future? No thanks. I'd much rather give them to charity, let the charity earn some money and release them for future readers.

It was an emotional process and some we did choose to keep- our very favourites, some of my husband's beautiful photography books and a few that we loved and could not be replaced. The legacy ones? Unless we truly loved them ourselves and not because we felt we should- out they went. It felt great.

Now that we're thousands of miles away, I don't miss them at all; I just want to get rid of more! Still, I feel proud at how far we've come and no longer feel I have to be surrounded by all the books I've ever read. We don't need hundreds of books on our shelves to prove that we are intelligent or well read. 

Somehow we still managed to bring lots of books with us to China but they were all children’s ones. Our sons are 3 and 1 and the Kindle doesn’t really cater for them yet! The baby board books will go no further though; we’ll find a good home for them here and lighten our load even more. Next time we live in the UK we’ll be making much better use of our library cards and as for now I’m really enjoying my Kindle and my ‘collection of new ideas’!

How do you deal with books in your home?