*And So It Begins

The first big steps to streamline how we live have begun. We have just sold our 3 bedroom house and bought an open-planned house instead. By ‘open plan’ I mean one big room. WOW! Dedication, right?  Well, I’d love to say that but really the house situation kind of came first and kick-started the whole realisation that we were using up so much unnecessarily.

Feeling restless, we casually started looking around at what kind of houses were available in our price range. The more we looked the more we felt that nothing really worked for us. Three rooms, a guest room, study - do we need a work room in the house for me? Maybe a garden flat? Oh, and a big lounge with a fireplace maybe. But none of the houses felt like us. Even though they had all the things we thought we wanted.

It was around this point that we started to pare down what we really needed and wanted in our home, and discovered that we really didn’t need most of what we thought we needed. It’s funny how you just get used to the way things are. We looked at our current home and realised that we live in the kitchen mostly. It’s fairly large and sunny and it leads onto our beautiful back garden, so when we have guests we all gravitate to the heart of the house, our kitchen and garden. So this is an important room for us. Tom is a writer and amateur photographer. He needs his study - and I need him to have his study! So that’s the second important room. What happens in our lounge? We watch TV. That’s it. A whole room just to watch TV. There is our bedroom were the bed is, obviously. And then another room that was a guest room but so seldom gets used we tend to fill it with stuff that doesn’t go anywhere else.  I wonder if we would keep that stuff if we didn’t have the room to keep it?  And a bathroom. I do need a bathroom. With a door.  I’m not that much of a hippy.

Having just decided we wanted one room and would find a way to build it we met the perfect estate agent who swept us up and showed us this house that had not even been listed yet. It felt like it was meant to be. It is basically one big room with a bathroom off the side and a scullery type space on the other side.  It looks small, but I really am pretty sure it is more or less the same floor space as we  actually use in our current home. It is on the edge of a beautiful large property - so much outside space! A panhandle property, it’s tucked away behind the front line of houses. We plan to build a wooden wendyhouse on the other end of the property for Tom, a proper man cave. There are already two smaller wendyhouses on the property, one for garden storage and one for all my stuff!

The next big step is that I have decided to close my shop and studio in town now that I will have space at home to work. I do prefer the scatterbrained way of working on my designs while stirring the stew for supper. My business will be run from my online website and I will do select markets and festivals as opportunities present themselves. This evolution of Kisma Kreative will allow me more flexible time and I can run a more efficient household and business in my own unique way. I am pretty damn sure I can save us loads of money on the grocery bill by having the time to think about how we use what we purchase.

I really am quite excited about our new adventure. Now while we wait until the house is ours we will have to do some cleaning out, passing on and jumble sales to make sure we only take what we need with us into the new house.