I’m admittedly a person of strange hobbies and habits. Since I can’t yet afford to build the (very) small house of my dreams, one of my favourite outlets is to diagram small space structures and live vicariously on paper. It dawned on me last weekend that in my current living space of ostensibly three rooms – a large kitchen/living area plus two separate bedrooms – the main space is roughly the size of what I hope to construct someday. When my brain goes into overdrive on this topic I can’t stop mentally rearranging the furniture and I figured it was time to take it out of my head, off the page, and into the real world for at least a test drive.
I’ve spent the last few days deconstructing every haphazard pile of possessions I own into its component elements and re-evaluating what to keep, how to eliminate packing overhead, what can live in storage, and generally how to be more efficient in my space. I think I’ve literally touched every single thing in the place at least twice. It’s packed to the gills here having gone from a 2400 square foot split-level on the mountainside to an 800 square foot apartment for what I thought was going to be a temporary situation. Honestly I had no clue I’d be stuck in this housing limbo so long so wasn’t particularly careful about how I arranged my world in a dash to get boxes out of the snow on a cold December moving night. It’s been a cramped maze worthy of the Daedalus’s labyrinth ever since. There might be a Minotaur lurking in the pantry for all I know.
Mind you, my life isn’t particularly cluttered. I did a major possession cleansing when I came to Canada more than a decade ago. International border agents tend to have that effect on people. When required to list everything you own by a guy with a gun strapped to his waist you try to make the list as short and uncomplicated as possible. And yet again I filtered my goods when rushed through a forest fire evacuation on the mountainside a few years later. Forget pretentious minimalist dogma, when there’s a dozen soot-covered firefighters setting up sprinklers on your roof and they tell you to be gone in four hours you gain a clarity of thought like no other. Grab the cats and the hard drives and go. I used the opportunity to further inventory the heap O’ stuff and jettison the surplus.
It’s been a mildly bittersweet exercise this week since many of the boxes I’ve lugged across the continent haven’t been opened in over a decade for lack of proper space but on the up side it’s like Christmas morning with every box. Amateur archaeology on a personal level. Forgotten treasures as they say but that’s likely just my memory playing silly buggers as I get older. At least a dozen times these past few days I’ve said “I thought I lost that!” while holding some hidden gem. A friend who called in the middle of this madness said there’s a translation of a book making the rounds just now that instructs readers to “hold every object and evaluate whether or not it brings you joy”. I’m not that Zen but I’ll just say it was pretty damn joyous to find my missing vice grips and a wayward paella pan yesterday. I’ve needed both of them for ages.
So while the sun was out I shuffled everything into the car park then back into the flat for an efficient game of furniture Tetris. The bed didn’t actually migrate into the main room but I’ve got some expendable larger pieces of the same dimensions as placeholders in that corner to complete the experiment. When you live alone you can inhabit one giant room like this if you employ a few carefully placed room screens when visitors come calling to hide your unmentionables. In my case that’s lobster-themed pants and the complete boxed set of Star Trek. Otherwise, my two extra rooms are pretending to be a greenhouse and a storage shed which of course can become reality later in the spacious twenty-five acres of the farm. Perhaps even two or three of each over time at the rate I accumulate orchids and barbecue grills.
The verdict is actually rather encouraging. Stripping away the vast quantities of gardening supplies and elderly wine that fill the corners of my living space makes my environs downright compact. Ninety percent of my daily food, plant, and computer focused world can occupy less than 400 square feet.* The newly arranged kitchen even feels spacious – I can once again walk across it without playing dodge ball with my dutch ovens – and the cats are beside themselves with joy at all the nooks and crannies which they’re certain I’ve created exclusively for their pleasure. Not to mention the sunny window perches with landscape views they managed to sneak into the plan. I can’t blame them. I’m easily entertained these days just staring out a big window at the trees too.
* That’s one large room 25 x 16 feet (~7.5 x 5 metres or about 37 square metres). I’m not counting washroom space or clothes closets (which is perhaps another 100 square feet) or any of the dimensions of the aforementioned storage sheds and greenhouses I’ll need. But then, I don’t have to construct them to the same standard as heated living space either, i.e. they’re cheap to build.
I’m not sure how much merit the tenets of Feng Shui have in the real world but the complete and utter refresh of space certainly helped my mental flow that’s been much battered of late. A bit of overdue spring cleaning if you will. Just in time for the long haul of winter too. I highly recommend it along with nightly shots of whisky to ease the aches and pains of moving all your worldly possessions around, even if just a few feet to the right. Now I’m going to go vacuum my rediscovered floor space and make a long overdue paella.
