..make me smile, that is.
The warm weather during the last days, plus sky-high humidity, wasn´t exactly my kind of climate, so, we stayed mostly at home waiting for things to cool down in the evenings.
Now,we are lucky to have our balcony pointing to the east, which means getting the most of the morning sunshine as a special breakfast treat, and getting into the shade by noon before it gets really hot. The only thing we can´t do from there is watch the sun set. But that´s something I can live with. DMIL´s flat has a balcony that points to the southwest, and she almost never gets to use it during the day because it´s just too darn hot there.
The ideal flat, then, probably would have two balconies:).
But ours is just what we can use best just as it is.
We have two chairs and a round table out there, and we´ve been having dinner out there every day unless it happened to be raining at dinnertime. I got us a big, gastronomy-style tray, with a non-slip-coating, and it´s big enough to put our place settings on, plus the smaller plates for bread or such, or the cheese platter for breakfast, and the glasses for drinks. I know that´s probably making us appear uncultivated, but we do set the table on that tray, carry it out and set the tray down on the table with the already-set place settings on it. Which saves us the old juggling act with a small tray threatening to topple over while I try to take the stacked plates off it and put them directly on the table. That was actually one of the reasons why we hadn´t used the balcony much for eating there, that it was such a hassle to get everything out there. The investment in the big tray has paid off already (it wasn´t that expensive, but we hadn´t found one that was that big sooner), and best of all, it did find a home at once in a corner besides the refrigerator when not in use.
That tray does actually show several things that I have found to help me when deciding whether I should buy something or not.
-it does allow me to do something I like to do easily that used to be a hassle
-it has, apart the cost of the initial purchase, no follow-up costs
-it is something I can use for a very long time,
-it has a home of its own in my flat and may be put away when not in use,
-and, most importantly, I did not have another almost like it already, so, it does not add clutter
Now, I don´t claim to be a perfect minimalist, but these criteria are what I apply to my purchases nowadays.
They may, of course, be applied to the existing stuff, too.
There´s a saying in German that translates roughly to "out with everything that doesn´t pay for its rent". While that may sound a bit extreme, it´s a good reminder of the fact that there really is a follow-up cost to owning stuff. You have to store it, clean it, insure it. You need apartment space to store it in, or a bigger house. Both of which must be paid for and heated.
I think it was Peter Walsh (Disclaimer: I´m not affiliated in any way with him or his company) who suggested calculating how many percent of our housing cost were spent on giving a home to things that are simply clutter. Things we do not need, use, or love. Things that perhaps even give us bad feelings every time we chance upon them.
If you haven´t tried that exercise yet, sit down before you do it, because very likely that´s what you´ll want to do afterwards anyway.
And that should be the perfect motivation to reduce. At least that´s what it was for me. Not that I want to move anytime soon, but having DH (and all of his stuff) move into an apartment that I had originally intended to be a roomy place for just myself, my books and my kitchen stuff :) pretty much filled up all of the available space in a jiffy. Which is not what I want, really.
Besides, there´s still the plan to look for nicer furniture for our living-room. Apart my somewhat eclectic tastes, whatever I put there must hold everything I store in the living-room. So, this, too, is a great chance to think about what I want to have to pay for storage room for. Now, I´m not in a hurry because I haven´t found the right bookcases or shelves or whatever yet anyway. But I have, during the last two years, gotten rid of plenty of stuff that clogged up my old cupboards and shelves.
One side effect of that is suddenly being able to find a home for a lot of things that used to be left outside on the kitchen counter or in the open shelves, which in turn does make it easier to keep some semblance of order in our flat.
And that is the other thing that makes me smile about my flat today.
Julia
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