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Photo by Noble Gill

While thinking on how to put my thoughts into words for this post, I thought it might help to start out by playing a game of ‘I Spy’. Here’s a room, and with my little eye, I spy:

Photo from instagram @mamawatters

4 large clean windows with sheer curtains allowing in lots of natural light creating a sense of cleanliness/spaciousness.

Clean wood floors that reflect all that natural light.

Clean white walls that imitate that natural light.

Trim that doesn’t touch the ceiling creating an optical illusion of depth/height.

A minimally decorated room or a recently cleaned for this picture room.

What do you see?

Here’s another room:

Photo by Unknown

I spy:

A vaulted ceiling, creating a sense of spaciousness.

A skylight increasing natural light and giving a sense of spaciousness.

3 windows giving natural light and creating a sense of spaciousness.

Reflective wooden floors, giving a sense of light and cleanliness.

A cozy artsy room.

What do you see? Did this room make you feel a little claustrophobic? Is it too cluttered for your taste? A little too dirty?

Ok, here’s another space:

Taken from Homebunch.com Photo by Trent Bell

I spy:

Natural light flooding in from the room down the hall.

Off-white walls that give a sense of cleanliness and light.

Clean wood floors that reflect light, giving a sense of cleanliness.

A high ceiling, giving a sense of spaciousness.

A hall door that allows in natural light when shut.

More natural light flooding in from somewhere outside the picture.

A nifty false stairway, giving a brilliantly created sense of width/space.

Here’s what I don’t see: I don’t see the socks that aren’t quite dirty left next to the tennis shoes in the hall. Or, the colony of wild toy stallions that a child decided were stuck on an island, right in the middle of the floor… I don’t see the 3 (ok 5) in the process of being read books, stack of paperwork, laptop, and day old coffee cup on the table in the library. The laundry that isn’t dirty enough to be washed flung over that nice overstuffed chair in the bedroom. The journal and five pens on the floor next to the bed. The favorite hair tie and umpteen bobby pins on the dresser. The heels thrown off in a hurry for comfortable flats that haven’t made it back into the closet yet — kicked over a few times out of the walkway — oops, is that the other heel under the bed?

So what am I getting at? We, Pinterest loving people, can scroll and flick over pictures and pictures of rooms that catch our eye. Something stirs within in us, ‘Maybe I should be more of a minimalist?’ aka ‘If I were more of a minimalist, could I attain that?’

But let me ask you, what are you actually seeing in those pictures? Is it minimalism? Or is it a naturally lit, high ceilinged, staged, and clean room?

Here’s another room:

Photo from uglyhousephotos.com

Ok, remove the office chair because it doesn’t belong. I spy:

Old dirty walls

Old dirty carpeting

Little natural light

Old dirty blanket

Old dirty fan

Dirty and unmade bed

If you painted the walls white, stripped away the carpeting and put in nice wood floors, took down that blanket and put up sheer curtains, cleaned the window probably, put a mirror on the wall to reflect light, took out the closet door, replaced the fan with some sort of industrial open lamp, slapped a mattress on the floor with a white blanket and a few puffy pillows, maybe a painting of bamboo, and stuck a plant in there – au voila! Clean bedroom. If you stuck an undisciplined, dirty person back into that clean room, it would eventually look like that dirty minimalist bedroom up there.

Oh dear, here comes the attack on minimalism. No, I’m not attacking minimalism. But I’ll be honest, I don’t particularly like the word. If you’re going to try and be more efficient and/or more clean, that’s not minimalism. That’s learning how to be efficient. Which takes discipline. Which takes forgetting yourself. What you’re trying to accomplish often won’t make you happy in the present, it will make it so that you suffer less in the future, which often takes denying what makes you happy in the present to attain your goal. That is not easy.

Do you like uncluttered bathroom counters? Then you’ll have to learn how to manage your time efficiently enough so that you can put away your makeup, wipe off the counter directly after you get lotion on it, and put away your blow dryer before you have to walk out the door. If you didn’t have time, you’ll need the time and discipline it takes to do all that after you get home. If I didn’t wear makeup, I wouldn’t have to put it away. True, or you could just learn to put it away.

I have been in homes as beautiful and clean as those white walled, naturally lit rooms on Pinterest. But do you know what was the most maddening part about being in them? Their owners weren’t minimalists — they were disciplined.

If you struggle with buying things you don’t need or actually even want (meaning you want to have bought something, but it didn’t have to be that something), in order to stop wasting your money, you’ll have to discipline yourself. Maybe you don’t have a buying problem, maybe you have a shopping problem where you don’t understand what you like. You buy things you can’t incorporate into your life and waste what little money you do spend. Buying a shirt on impulse that doesn’t actually look good on you, and you won’t wear when you get home, is just as much of a waste as buying more shirts than you’ll ever have time to wear. It takes discipline to see what you actually like to wear and to resist buying that hot pink faux fur shag coat. The same rules apply to your home.

When you look at those ‘minimalist’ interiors, what do you see? Are you into minimalism? Or are you into clean rooms? Natural light? High ceilings?

I don’t particularly like white walls, but I love a room with floor to ceiling windows and skylights. Unfortunately, I do not have that kind of house. I have a rental with cream colored walls. Low ceilings. A large bedroom with a single tiny window that is so out of proportion it makes you wonder if the person who designed the house was even an architect. There’s carpting in the bedrooms, so I don’t get that clean sunshine feel in the morning. Plus, it’s a rental, so I just wonder how many people’s DNA is forever embedded in the fibers. But, even if I did have that house, with all the natural light I could possibly manage to afford with a heating bill, I wouldn’t consider myself a minimalist.

I love walls of art. I love walls of books. I like leafy potted plants everywhere. I like pictures of family on the wall — I’m willing to dust them. I like coziness. Blankets, pillows, candles, anything that shouts ‘cuddle me’. When I see the laundry on the couch for the fourth day, I do not think, ‘Ugh, I should become a minimalist.’ I think, ‘You need to invite someone over so that you can get this laundry done.’

What are my goals? To have a home that is warm, welcoming, and interesting. I would like to be disciplined and keep up on the laundry and bathroom counters. With that in mind, I will try to carefully select what I want in my home — it will be a lifelong effort. I view my home (wherever it happens to land) as a moving castle and I am its art curator. I do not want my home to be empty. Life is full and abundant — I want my home to say that.