Family of 10 minimal home tour

Minimalism isn't some holy moral pursuit that makes you a better person if you have less items. It's about finding the balance for your own home and family that makes you not overwhelmed with caring for your home. If your house is always a mess and you can't keep up with it staying tidy and functional, and note I did not say perfect and show-worthy, then you may be more attached to things than peace and sanity, which is a sobering reality. It's possible to live this way for so long that you don't realize a home full of people

doesn't have to be impossible. Steady and consistent work, not one and done to be sure, but not impossible. And that's my goal in my home. Okay, two years ago, I did a home tour in our farmhouse. I was about this far pregnant with our last baby and now that we are in a different house, obviously in town, if you can hear all the noises of the road and lawnmowers, we are not currently in the

country. Next year this time all you're gonna hear is kids playing and bugs chirping and whatnot. But right now I wanted to share with you how we keep our home manageable with a family of 10. Now before we go inside I do want to preface this by saying that 10 people live in a under 2,000 square foot home or thereabouts. I don't know the exact square footage but pretty sure it's about what it is. And so there's a lot of stuff. It's not going to look like a minimal home tour

where you see one very minimal straight line, streamlined type of couch sitting in an open room. In some ways it is a cluttered, cozy house but the entire goal is to make it to where I don't feel like I am constantly cleaning up after everyone and I have found ways to make that the case I don't feel like I am constantly cleaning up after everyone. And I have found ways to make that the case. And I can remember back when I had less kids,

but more items, just spinning my wheels, feeling like I was spending all of my time cleaning up my house. And I can truly say I don't feel like that. Now again, like I said earlier, consistent, steady work. It's not like I can just neglect it. If I neglect it for a whole weekend, it's a mess. But I can always pull it back together quickly. That's the

goal. It's my sanity here. I'm going to show you some parts of this house you maybe haven't seen before. Just like in my minimal home tour I did two years ago, I'm going to show you inside of drawers and cabinets and spaces. I mean not everything, but as much as I can and just explain how this practically works for a family of 10. If you haven't yet seen the other video that I did in our farmhouse when we had nine people but we're still committed to the same minimal-ish type of home, I will leave that link below or you can just search on YouTube

minimal home tour farmhouse en bout. All right, let's go in. One place I don't like to be super minimal, although I like to keep it simple, is in stocking my pantry. I like to have everything I need so I can quickly pull together from scratch meals. This makes it to where life can be a bit more simple and that's what we're trying to do

in simplifying our homes. I wanna say thank you to today's video sponsor, Thrive Market. Thrive Market is currently running their back to school sale and this year is their biggest one ever. You can get 25% off top rated picks from your favorite categories so it's a great time to check out Thrive Market. If you live in a rural area like I do, it can be hard to source items especially for

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They also have a cool deal where if you don't make back your annual membership fee and savings, Thrive Market will credit you the difference. Join Thrive Market today at 25% off back-to-school essentials plus use my link thrivemarket.com forward slash pharma sambun and get an extra 30% off your first order and a free gift. Okay the first space to share with you is just this entryway. There's really not much that we store in this entryway at all. Purely decorative. So I

have this little table here. There's two baskets underneath and two drawers and I don't think there's anything in them. We'll open them to see. But there's really no reason to stash clutter in this area because it's not a space that we use as a family except just to pass through to go upstairs. And I'm okay with having pieces in my home that are beautiful but that I don't fill up with things. So what you'll notice is

I don't have or even enjoy a minimal aesthetic. I actually like a collected, country, vintage look. Very imperfect, which is not what you usually see with minimal. Like there's several rugs on the floors and art on the walls. And there'd be more art if we were going to be staying here

because I would just be decorating like crazy. But we kind of moved in. Knew we'd be here for one year. But I like that kind of aesthetic. I don't mind if things are on the walls and there's furniture. I just don't like when things can be constantly pulled down and rearranged or it's hard to get to something because there's so many things in the way. So I

like it to feel functionally minimal but visually I enjoy the look of a more collected home. A few things I do want to also note about this home and the fact that we are transitioning and only living here for about a year, slightly more, from one farmhouse in the country to another farmhouse in the country. Because of that I have a lot of things that if we were staying in this house indefinitely I would get rid of because they don't really fit. It's a little too cluttered.

But the home that we moved from and the home that we are moving to are quite larger. So I know when we moved from our original home on Boone Street that was 1600 square feet to our larger farmhouse, that I didn't have enough furniture.

There was certain areas where I would love to have a little chair in the corner with a lamp and a nightstand or a little table to put a lamp or something decorative on and this house if we were staying here there's not as much space for that. So for an example in one of the kids bedrooms there are two chairs that are really cramped. Actually now we have one

chair in one bedroom. One in another. Still though, too cramped for those spaces but I know that we have all kinds of space in the new house where I would literally be buying furniture and that's a short-term thing coming up so I'm willing to live with that inconvenience. However, if we knew that we were staying here, those would be gone because I don't want to be shuffling around some chairs and there's books that get underneath them when I'm trying to read to the kids at night. It's not ideal and you can

quickly see how setting up your home creates either a lot of tension and how it operates or can be a lot more streamlined and I've just reaped the benefits of that over and over again. Because this house has no basement, everything you see is what we have, except for there is a garage. Where we get into trouble at our homes is when we keep things that we might use someday,

though we haven't used it in a year, we have no plans to use it in the next year, and those things accumulate. And I still struggle with that. I go around my home and I think logically, and still there's a little bit of pain each time you take that item and put it in a bag to donate

to somebody who really could use it right now. The problem is when we don't realize how many items are like that and how hard it's making our life and our homes and not addressing that slightly painful decision of oh maybe I would need this someday. So talk more about that. Let's go into what we call the library. Okay I honestly cannot wait to declutter this library. There are so many books in here that one we inherited so they came with the house on the bookshelves and then we took books from every

part of our house which we had a lot of spots in our last house where we have like a small kid bookshelf in the kids room that I would read to them at night, and then we'd have a homeschool area that we kept in another area of the house where we did most of our homeschool. Here all of our books have come to one spot except some stragglers that we are currently enjoying. But what I have found about floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookshelves is they look better with more books. They look bad when you don't have a huge collection. So there are quite a few books

that we don't necessarily use, we really don't need, but I think that they look better because what happens is when you get a half a shelf of books, half of them fall down. Let me just say that for me personally, and I know there are a lot of people who differ on this and I think it depends on like so many factors on whether or not this would be a practical thing for you, this is not something I would want. When we originally saw this house I thought this was so cool, but visually for me it's just too much clutter, especially because we don't have a beautiful book collection. So we have

homeschool notebooks and workbooks and then we do have some beautiful books, but then most of them aren't. We don't have enough. I think if you had a lovely curated library that you could floor to ceiling stack every single shelf, this would really look great. We also have the added, you know, we have 10 people in this house and so we have toddlers taking off books, we have older kids who are just simply, you know, wanting to enjoy the books which is great, but I personally would like a more curated collection and a lot of these aren't coming with us to our new farm

house. And the way that we will do books in the new house, I am thinking we'll kind of go back to how we did in our last house where we have homeschool books in a certain spot and only the books that we're currently using for homeschool because what happens is you keep so many extra things thinking this is great I might use this someday but then when it's one and 100 other things you never find it therefore it's useless because you never even knew you had it and that just that happens over and over again to us. I think we are naturally not tidy, not organized and pack rats here in our home. And so it's

something I'm constantly working on, constantly fighting and I've seen the benefits of it but we just really have to fight that mindset that if we have more things we actually have them because we really don't. If in the moment you want it, it's not there. You'll just literally never use it. And I think if you are honest and look around your house, you will see, and I've seen personally, and if you're a more decluttered person by nature, you might not ever see or realize this was even a thing. But there are so many things that when you

look at it, you realize you haven't touched or interacted with that item in five years because there are too many other items. So when you have more, you really have less and I'm just all about having a more curated selection of things that are well used and loved. Either way I do think we'll keep more books than the average minimalist, but the whole point is to manage less inventory and enjoy your home and your life more simply. But there are ways to do that with books and this current way I'm doing in this house isn't the way

I'd recommend. There are a lot of inspiring ways to display and organize books, maybe design books stacked on a side table in the living room, homeschool books in a dedicated homeschool closet with shelves, novels on built-in bookshelves next to a cozy chair and a lamp, kids books in a small shelf in their room for before bedtime reading, a few treasured and worn cookbooks displayed in the kitchen for easy reference, and maybe one cabinet in the kitchen for the others you can't part with. In the current situation that we have, they just aren't usable in this way. Okay, in this same room

let's talk about this treasured little cabinet. It's been a fun little spot. Like I said, this house is small and it doesn't have a basement, which in some ways it's kind of nice because if you're storing something in the basement you're kind of just saying, I don't want it but I also don't want to part with it and so I'm going to delay that decision. At least that's to me what I use basements, attics, and that being said, this is a hard-working little cabinet. It's full of musical instruments, games, some homeschool writing utensils and whatnot

because we use this room for homeschool during the homeschool season. This is the table that we sprawl out on, we have all of our homeschool stuff on these shelves, we have the writing stuff, we have their music lessons and things to write with. That is primarily what this cabinet is for. I also do use the bottom to store my five gallon buckets of grains because it's just a really good place to do it. Don't really have anywhere else in the house to do that. Puzzles, games, that's what we stash in here. This

has been recently organized in anticipation of this video, very happy that I did that, but also I do want to point out that this gets crazy. People shove things in here constantly and it just needs to be addressed. Now I hadn't addressed it since we kind of stopped doing school around May, like regular school kids, and so it just needed that summer refresh, that summer clean out. I don't mind keeping extra games and puzzles that we might use if they're not getting constantly disorganized and when

I start drawing the line and when I start thinking okay maybe we have too many things to manage, it's when I find like scrabble tiles up in kids rooms or certain parts of games are missing pieces and you know you're never going to put them back together again. That's when I know I need to address it. But if they stay high up in a shelf, in a cabinet, and they're getting appropriately used, pulled out, onto this table, used for family game night, put back away, I'm

fine with keeping a lot of extra of that. It's when it feels like more of the time is spent collecting the pieces back together from around the house that we start addressing things and thinking maybe we have too many of these things. That can vary from family to family. So I know families who are naturally more organized where when someone uses something they put everything back and I'm guilty of this too, so is my husband, so are all of our kids where we don't necessarily naturally think of that. And so I do feel that we can manage less games and puzzles than a family that could have

maybe 50 games stacked up and it's never a problem. You're not finding yourself collecting pieces from around the house or picking them up, they just are up there and you're able to get them down for family game night, put them back. If that's your style then you don't necessarily need a super minimal game cabinet. Ours becomes crazy quick. We have a lot of creative kids that are pulling out paper and markers and colored pencils and we have to keep inventory low to maintain that creative flow without a super messy house. This is

the shoe closet. Now it is so much more manageable now that winter is over because I could finally get rid of all the coats and the snow pants that were hanging on this rod. It is not an ideal place because if things are hanging there then you can't get in and appropriately look at the shoes so things get crazy quick. Once those are removed, which I was very much looking forward to doing, we actually can store quite a few shoes in here. We don't have a ton of shoes per child. Usually one or two, at the most probably three, seasonal

pairs of shoes per kid. Now I do also have some snow boots stored in here, just in the back because I know we'll use them again. I don't really have anywhere to go with them unless I like packed them up and brought them out to the garage, but that feels unnecessary. When we'll probably just be moving

in the middle of winter this coming year. And they don't bother me because they're not getting pulled out constantly. Now, if they were constantly getting pulled out or one of the kids went back there and would put them on thinking those were the right shoes for the day, then I would probably readdress the way that's working. But so far for right now this is working fine and I'm not the type of

person that worries too much about keeping things like this super organized. If all the shoes are just thrown in here but I can still see them and put them on the child fast, then I'm honestly okay with them just thrown in. Now I will say every couple weeks or so someone will get the notion whether it is one of my sons that is a bit more of an organized person who likes to see order or my husband or me is typically one of the three that this

will actually bother enough to address but it's infrequent. For the most part I can live my life with shoes just thrown in there. So that does happen on occasion that they're lined up but for for the most part, we're okay with as long as your shoes are in here and it's wide open so we can still see where they are and we can get out of the house

at an appropriate amount of time, then we're good. Which the way that we can both keep this messy and still find shoes fast is to just have less shoes and to know that they all go in here. Where we get in trouble in our house is when we have multiple spots for things. So if somebody were to store their shoes up in their room or to leave them in the van or in the stroller or by the trampoline, that's where you run into trouble. It's not so

much whether or not they are lined up perfectly in this cabinet in little pairs, it's just that they make it to this little closet at all and that we don't have 50 pairs of shoes per person which would be 500 pairs of shoes. That wouldn't work. We do also keep our two teenage girls shoes a bit separate in a dresser by the front door. This just is a way for them to find their shoes more easily, although they don't all always make it in there. Again, but just between those two spots we can usually find things. Alright let's head into the dining room. Okay our dining room again

pretty minimal. Large table and chairs that seats our entire family and then we have this hutch behind me. It's a vintage or antique piece that I found for our last home that fit perfectly in the kitchen and I think it looks really nice here but I can't really think of a spot that it'll work in our new house. Maybe I'll think of something but as of right now I think probably a lot of these dishes and the hutch itself will have to go to a different

home when we move there. Now the dishes that are in here I don't even use. These are just purely decoration except for when I take one of the pictures and put flowers in it, which I do all the time. So the pictures, I will for sure find a place for those in our new home. But a lot of these dishes, they're just in here to decorate this piece. And again, I am totally okay with decorative clutter. Nobody ever touches this, so it's

not a problem. We don't have kids getting dishes out and breaking them. It is almost just like a piece of art for me and that is the only function that it serves. So when it no longer serves that function a lot of this will probably go. Now I might keep a few stacks of plates in case I want to decorate with plates on the wall. We'll see. But if there's no place for it in the new home, what I'm gonna try to avoid doing, that I made the mistake of doing in our last house, and then we ended up, when we moved,

I realized I had never even used it, and just went straight to the thrift shop, was I had boxes of china that had no place, that just were sitting in the basement with no intention of me ever using them, and that's what I try to avoid.

This little pie safe here behind me, again, I think it looks pretty in this dining room. I'm not 100% sure I have a spot for it, although I might. There's a few spots in the new house that might work for it. I don't have anything stored in this. It is just an empty piece for decoration. Sometimes some toys go in here, but for the most part, that's it.

All right, let's head into the living room. The main attraction for the kids in this room is this couch, which I have thoughts on this that I'll not go into right now. Every single cushion on the bottom and the backs can all be removed. And so people wonder about the lack of toys

because we do not keep a ton of toys. We have a few Nerf guns in a basket above the blanket hutch and then we have a little basket of Duplos and then upstairs we have a big container of regular Legos. But the kids find plenty of ways to still make toys and games out of things that are just part of our home. So this becomes a fort more often than not. It's hardly ever put together except for unless I'm making a video, simply because it's like a million different pieces.

They have a ton of fun with it, but I do like toys, if you will, that don't have to have all the pieces to work. So that's why I like Duplos, that's why I like Legos, that's why I like this couch I guess, because it can be a lot of fun and then when it all gets put back away if you're missing that one piece it's still fun. So this room is a hard-working room, it gets played in all the time, but our kids also do spend a ton of time outdoors and so we make sure in our outside area to have a playground, a trampoline. They have things like water guns and bubble guns and little baby pools to splash in. I do try to keep the toys really minimal and that works great for my children.

My children aren't huge toy kids. When they get a new toy, they usually play with it for about a week and then they lose all interest or they lose pieces. Now my tip for that is to utilize the thrift shop, both to purchase toys and then to return toys. Make it to where it's a cheap way to store your toys.

If the thrift shop is doing the work of putting everything away, then that means that you aren't constantly, all day, putting toys away. Just getting a few new items, let your kids play with them, they're a couple bucks at the thrift shop, and then when they're sick of it, pack it back up, bring it back to the thrift shop, make it a

weekly routine. I have a thrift shop that at least I try to go to every single week, and we will do that. We will get new items, we will return other items just because it's a good way to rotate toys without you having to deal with and manage so much inventory. Which is what I think most homemakers spend a large amount of their time working on. Not preparing meals, not doing laundry, but managing all of the items. And I'm there with you. I'm there with you. There's still so much stuff with any size family, but it doesn't have to be overwhelming.

This armoire behind me is where we store blankets for this room. So a lot of times there are blankets everywhere too. I try not to keep too many, but I do have a lot of children and I also like air conditioning.

So if they're curled up here on the couch, they almost all grab a blanket. I'm not a person who gets too worried about how it looks inside this cabinet, so as long as I can just gather up the blankets and put them back in there, that is good. Now I can't do that if there are too many blankets because this is a small cabinet. This little area here with the two chairs, two lamps, and the two tables, it really honestly never gets used. Nobody

ever sits over here, but I find it to be a beautiful little spot and so I like that the chairs are here and it's also not a huge problem. Now I will say that the pillows make it into the blanket fort area, but one great thing about cleaning up this living room is it's really straightforward. Anybody in my family, except for the three-year-old and the one-year-old, can pretty much handle it,

or at least as a team effort, they know where to put the cushions back, where to put the Duplos back, and then the Nerf guns on the basket, on top of the blanket armoire, and the blankets in the armoire.

It's an easy place to clean us and that's the goal. This room behind me is my girls sewing room and a lot of times it's kind of messy because in order to be creative with sewing that's one of those things where it's nice to have a lot of fabric. Now you still should go through it on occasion and make sure that there's not anything in there that you're like I'm never going to use this. You don't want to have an overabundance so that the place isn't inspiring.

But also, that's another place where hobbies do require you to keep a few more things. And if you're actively pursuing the hobby, it makes sense to keep the items associated with it. And I can say for sure that they sew every single day in this space.

And so it's not always clean but it is something that they can manage on their own and that's something when you have older kids, so these are teenage girls, they have things that they're responsible for managing that you can take off your plate as long as you're not a perfectionist about it which I ditched a long time ago. I like to talk about laundry because I think that it is such a point of resistance in so many homes And I can remember a time where it felt more overwhelming for me than it did now. And we are ruthlessly minimal. I say that and there's still so many more things we could get rid of, but

in the laundry space, to the point where if I were to do a once a week laundry day, we just literally would not have enough clothes. I keep five of my children's laundry in this small laundry room full time so that when it goes from the washer to the dryer it can go directly to where they can grab it and they can get dressed here in this laundry room

and put their dirty clothes directly into the washer so it never has very many steps to move from and keeping a minimal wardrobe is the only way that we're able to do that. I also have a basket in here for the two girls that they then take to their room, deal with that there. Again, they manage their own stuff, so however minimal they are

isn't really a big concern for me. And then I have one more basket where I put mine and Luke's clothes, and then one more son. So when I come to do laundry, it's all done right here. I'm not folding things, making huge piles, then go taking them all throughout the house. The only thing that I need to deal with

is taking mine and Luke's and one of my son's clothes upstairs and putting that where that goes. And that doesn't even happen every single day because we mostly just live out of this basket too until it gets too full for the three of us to actually have our clothes in here. And I could probably even set this up to be more efficient by finding a way to store everybody's clothes in the laundry room. And this isn't even a large laundry room. We just have a dresser where I keep three of the kids clothes and then two baskets that

we just have kind of on the floor where I keep two more kids clothes, that's five, and then two large baskets for those other two ways that I said that we organized by putting the girls in one and then mine and Luke's and the sons in the other. Taking a more minimal approach has made the biggest impact in this space and in this chore more than anything else. Because I can come in here a couple times a day and with just five or ten minutes each time,

probably less, probably like five minutes and not just me, other people in my family know how to do the quick sort. We can stay on top of ten people's laundry doing it this way. Now we also use this space to keep diapers and wipes because like I mentioned in our last minimal home tour or any home tour probably, we use our dryer as a changing table. Luke came up with that years ago and it's just a

really great place because you don't have to bend down. We also keep towels. So there are only two bathrooms in this house and the upstairs bathroom we keep the towels in the bathroom. There's only two towels in there so I'll show you that in a little bit. And then we keep towels for the downstairs bathroom just stored right here because they're actually really close to each other. They're just one room over. So that's another thing when we are unloading the dryer we can just put the towels right here as

well. So everything's just so central. We also have a spot for socks and then tea towels that go in the kitchen and it's all really close to each other which makes that washer dryer sorting job just so fast. We also keep in here things like batteries, cords, chargers. I have a whole container labeled curtains and that's just because I don't know what I'm doing about curtains in the new house and so I don't want to get rid of the curtain rings and the pleater tape because there's a good chance that I will want to pleat and hang curtains in that way. Things like heaters, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, that all is stored in here as well because those are things that we do need

seasonally and so I'm not gonna get rid of them and I think in the last house this was stuff that I kept in the basement. We also have our Berkey water filter in here. We have a filter installed right in the sink that we can use in the kitchen as well but then this is another place for us to get water. We recently added an ice maker right next to the Berkey so we

take the filter Berkey water, pour it in the ice maker and we have ice right here because our refrigerator doesn't have one that works well. This is a hard working little tiny room but it feels manageable so that's the main goal. I also do have some baskets and storage containers that I plan to use in the new house that are just on the top shelf. We do also store swimming gear in here so we can just grab this basket if we are going to head to the pool and when it's out of the

dryer I can just throw it right up here. I try to keep as many things centrally located here in this laundry room so that I can not have to leave when putting things away. We do also have this spot for hanging clothes. We don't hang a ton of things, but there are some things that I like to hang. Because our kitchen's pretty small, at the end of the hall, so the kitchen's just right there,

and this is at the end of that hall, we keep extra things that we do use, things like the toaster, things like the Instant Pot, blender that don't fit in there well. You can come here to get the ice cream maker, the Ninja Creamy. Now there are some things in this cabinet that we're really not using right now, but I anticipate needing them for the homestead. So things

like vacuum sealer, canning supplies, some infrequently used items. We also have like our waffle maker, but this to me I really like having an extra place outside of the kitchen to keep these things that you don't use every single day but they're not too far away. A few steps away from the laundry room I have our socks. Looks like a few stray different colored socks made it in here. But I try to buy all black socks. I don't know where these green ones came from.

For the boys that way we don't have to worry if one gets holes or one gets lost. We just put them in here. We usually keep a small size and I don't see any large ones, but usually there's tons of large ones.

I think the big boys wore them out and I need to order more. But usually there's a large size and a small size. They all get thrown in here. Girls keep their own socks, but this is where to get socks. And then these bottom two drawers is where I'm keeping right now. Snow gear, just because again, I don't want to put it in totes out in the garage. We don't have a basement. And so that is just shoved in there for next winter.

I keep office-y type of stuff up here. I try to keep it pretty minimal. A few paint samples for the new house. The drone, the cameras, the tripods, some things like tape. I have some things that I've created that I occasionally like to show for my business. And so I keep that in there. Hard drives, scissors, office-y type stuff.

That's where I keep all of that. Bathroom here. Now this is a hard working bathroom. It is one of two bathrooms in the house. It's the only main level bathroom. So it's a little challenging and I'm really looking forward to,

like, especially my girls having their very own bathroom. So they have a pretty minimal hair accessories collection that we just keep in a little basket. They keep all of their makeup, their toothbrushes, nail polish, that kind of stuff in the medicine cabinet. And then, like I mentioned, just down the hall,

I store the towels, so it's not looking cluttered, but there are things stored other places. Like I also keep extra essential oils in the laundry room in a little wooden box. And so I try to only keep the things that you actually need to use out of this room in the room.

Now it's minimal, it's manageable, it has to get cleaned like daily because kids are in and out of here going to the bathroom all day long. But I am looking forward to more space. Alright, let's talk about the kitchen. We have a much smaller kitchen in this home than we had in our last home, or than we will have in our new home. Now that's partially because in our last home and in our new home the kitchen and dining is all kind of combined in one big room and so it feels larger. But something I noticed about this house was even though it is a small

footprint, it's kind of hard to tell but you can't move a whole lot of people around in this kitchen very well, It does have very efficient cabinet space to the point where I don't even have every cabinet filled. So it actually functions really nice and because it's small too, I can stand here, the dishwasher right below me,

I can put everything away really fast because all the storage locations are just right here. And then the pantry behind me. Sometimes I feel like I'm so much more minimal until I start showing everything, but most of this stuff does get used at least yearly. So I have a whole bunch of random baking things that I'm not using all the time, so they're not really accessible to the stove in the range, but they're used enough to

justify keeping them. Things like a baguette pan, cake pans, bread pans, even though for the most part I find myself making boules in my Dutch oven, so that's why they're right by the oven. And then supplements and spices we keep in here. And baking things like vanilla, baking soda, baking powder. We have a Lazy Susan. Luke and I mostly are the ones that get into that cabinet. There are a few things that we only keep one of.

I've seen people on YouTube do a I only own one of thing, and the other day I was thinking, and maybe it's interesting, that we only own one spatula. It gets used just all day, every single day, and it's really honestly fine having one. Now I'll take it, like last night we made breakfast

for dinner, and I'm using it to flip the eggs, to stir the potatoes, but I'm just standing there at the stove using it for both. And I could see possibly having two, but I don't see why I would need to make this kitchen too cluttered having too many of a singular item that really it's not a problem

to only have one of. And I only have one whisk. There's probably lots of things I only have one of, but the spatula was something that I think I thought that maybe, I don't know, I could see having more of them, but it actually works out great to only have one. This could be reorganized and there are probably some things in here that I really don't use, but it hasn't been a big pain point. Most of the things in here, we only have one of, like one ice cream scoop, one garlic press,

one pizza cutter. We do have a few more than that wooden spoons because I use those for serving spoons and so you need multiple at one time. Let me know in the comments below, what are some things that you only have one of that's not a problem, but you maybe would have thought it'd be a problem

before trying it. So to the left of the stove or the range, I have my two Dutch ovens that I bake all my bread in. Notice there's a hot pad under that one. That's because I put it away hot. I do that all the time.

Like I just wanna clean up, get this clutter out and I put it there. So this is great because I use these to bake bread all the time and that's all that's in there. So I have to shuffle things around, which is right there. This one's a bit more cluttered because we don't restack things like we should, but that's baking dishes. This is canning lids, milk lids,

fermenting lids and straws. This to me is a good category. And then hot pads, which again, next to the stove, I use these constantly. Do I keep anything? No, I don't think I keep anything in here. This is where I keep sheet pans. And then measuring stuff. This is in the wrong spot. I'll have kids do that on occasion. Liquid measurers, strainers, funnels, and my tea's grater, silverware knives, immersion blender. We don't fold, so when I come from the laundry room

with tea towels and things, they just get thrown in here. Then we do water bottles in here, and Tupperware type stuff in here. The store has bowls, strainers, cast iron, and cutting boards. We inherited this china set and my daughter thought

she would do a lot of tea parties. So far we haven't. So if that doesn't happen while we live here, we're probably just gonna have to bring this up to the thrift shop. But I never ever open this cabinet door.

So it's really not a problem. And if I needed that for something else, it would be gone. But currently I can fit everything just fine. Okay sometimes this one looks pretty and I have everything on pretty and sometimes it doesn't but this is just a little pantry area. On this side of the kitchen we keep milk jars and we save some egg cartons for the lady that we get milk from. So we only need to get into this a couple times a week when we

get milk. That's why I keep it on this side of the peninsula. Anything on this side is annoying to get to. So when we're emptying the dishwasher, we set all of the half gallon mason jars for milk and all of the coffee mugs, which are kept over here, up here and then come around one time and put them all away.

Not super efficient. I wouldn't want to keep things that I'm constantly reaching for like our spatula, that'd be crazy, or measuring cups over here. Just things that you use infrequently or you actually use over here. So for example, we make our coffee over here. So we keep the coffee mugs in this drawer. I don't even remember what is in this. Let's see. Literally nothing. So like I said, this kitchen has so many cabinets that there's nothing in here.

I know at one point there's coffee in here. We kept our other coffee grinder that we use for decaf in here. That's why there's coffee. We just need to dust that out

and then come sweep the floors.

And then coffee mugs here. This gets messy because coffee's always flying everywhere. I'm always cleaning up over here, but it's still dirty, but it works great for coffee mugs. I do store coffee in here. I'm in our bedroom now and this is a relatively small bedroom, so it is crucial that we are minimal in here. We only have one small closet, a dresser, and then I have a trunk where I keep extra sheets for the house, and then I have a sturdy crate that's wicker where I keep tanks,

t-shirts, bras, underwear, hose, things like that. Very few of any of those things. I also do have one basket in the closet where I keep comfy things like jammies and leggings. So the way that we work this is Luke has the dresser, we did this in our last house too, he has bulkier clothes and he keeps more clothes than I do and that's something people ask about a ton on any minimalist type channel, which I'm not really a minimalist channel, but I've heard from other minimalist channels when I listen to them talk, they'll answer questions and

people typically say, well what if my spouse isn't as worried about keeping their things minimal? And I don't worry about that because it's not my stuff to manage. I don't have to do any extra work because someone in my family keeps more items. So another example of that would like I said earlier, my daughters. I don't deal with their clothes. I don't even go in their room. If it's a mess, it doesn't really bother me at all. It's not my problem. Now the thing is with my husband,

he's not a messy person. We both are the type of people that you know if we're in a hurry in the morning or something and we change and we're out the door it's okay if the beds unmade and there's clothes on the floor that's not gonna bother me. So we both do that kind of thing. But typically neither of us are total slobs. Like we're not leaving stuff out. So his stuff isn't everywhere. It's on his half of the closet and it's in the dresser and then he has his nightstand drawer that I won't open because that's

his nightstand drawer and so if he keeps it cluttered, whatever. But for my personal stuff, I find it easier for me to get dressed and to be ready for the day when I have very minimal wardrobe. Now I do have my summer and my winter stuff all in one place just because I sometimes will store things away because we're in this transition house I don't really know like where we'll store things and I haven't established places long term like that so there has been times where I'll have

a tote of clothes that I swap out. I have found personally that if I have a favorite pair of jeans, I only wear those jeans. If I have a favorite skirt, I will ignore all the other skirts to wear that. And sometimes I used to in the past keep more things thinking, well, at some point I'll probably want to wear this again. And what I found year after year is once something falls out of my wardrobe for whatever reason, it doesn't really make its way back in. There's been a few exceptions to that where I think,

oh I would love to still have that item, but not enough to justify having an overly cluttered closet. I really have enjoyed keeping such a small amount of clothing. It doesn't make me feel any less prepared to get ready for the day. In fact, in a lot of ways I can see what I have, I only have my favorite things, and I like what I have. And if I need to add some staple pieces, there's space for that. Or usually it's because something either wore out, like there's holes in the knees, or I outgrew it. Like a few

years ago, I always used to bounce right back to the same size after I had a baby and from the time I was probably 18 until I was 35 I wore the same size jeans. It wasn't until I was around like 37 maybe that I realized I'm never going back to that size. I'm just not. Like it's, my body is just gonna be here now because I, you know, I'm a little bit older and things like that happen. And so I got rid of them because I'm never going to be that size. If I ever were, which I won't put any effort into doing that, I could go buy one pair of jeans or two or whatever at that time. So this actually is a real freeing thing for me.

It makes it to where I only see things I want to wear. It's streamlined, it's easy, I don't spend a ton of time getting ready, which you all probably know I just simply don't care that much about fashion. For those of you who do, you probably spend more time and have more items and that brings you joy and we all have things like that. Like I have just a stupid amount of design books and I have zero intention of getting rid of them because I look through them all the time. I use them, I love them, and so that makes sense for me. And so I know for a lot of people they wouldn't keep a minimal wardrobe because their maximalist wardrobe, it's worth the

effort it takes to curate and manage it because they love it so much. So obviously take that into consideration for you. And then we recently upgraded to a king-size bed, which means that I no longer have space for my chair where I sit and record podcast episodes and the bed. So we have the nightstand in a really funny place. In our new house we will have space for a chair, two nightstands, and a king-size bed. So that's why we upgraded and why I kept the nightstand. Then I

have my office here. I keep a lot of my everyday used office supplies on the windowsill. I have a little table that I keep my microphone on and I fold that table up so that I can pass through to my bed. And then when it's time to work, I fold that table down. So this is where I get done voiceovers and podcast episodes just up here in our room. And it's not super spacious, but it actually works out totally fine. Now

in my nightstand I keep little medical supply things that I like to keep on hand like a pulse ox reader, one of those nose things that gets out the snot. I don't really know why I keep it there it's just sometimes you have spots in your house where you've always kept something and so you just keep it there but I do like to keep these things on hand in case I ever have a sick baby that I'm worried about. I have that there and I also keep my face routine that I'm currently using in there. Now I have a lot of other stuff like face washes and makeup in the bathroom and a few other items

to make serums and moisturizers, but the ones that I'm using right now in the summer I typically will keep in my nightstand because it used to be right by the bed and I would just apply it. I do also keep baby wraps and I keep more than I should because I have three woven wraps and two structured carriers and it's just one of those things that I just I want them all and so I'm keeping them. I've used them for each baby. Now I always have a favorite. This one's my favorite,

I'll use it the most. But if it's in the wash, I like this one, and then the other one I'm gonna show you in the other basket I just think is beautiful and I don't wanna get rid of it. I also do have a few baby blankets that I do use.

I have a couple swaddles and then a couple warmer ones but this has been in here for years just like this for each baby even between babies I just that in there. And then I also have a few more wraps here on Luke's side. Again this is my infrequently used one so technically as a real minimalist I should get rid of this but it was used with Victor so I know that in my most recent baby I used it. So that's good qualification I think for keeping it. And I still use this on occasion because it's good for back carry and it's just beautiful.

And then this one is not beautiful, but it's my favorite one for back carrying. Let's see, five baby wraps, which means that I am not a minimalist with that. If I had to get rid of some, like if there wasn't space, and we really needed this basket for something, and so they're just in the way because I could use this basket for something else, which I don't, because it would just be sitting here empty.

If that was the case, I would probably get rid of that wool one, and don't make me part with it anymore. I have all of my hair accessories in this basket and I've been keeping hair accessories in a basket under my bed for years. I did that in my last home tour too, but now that this bed that we got it's hard to get it under. It can fit, but I want to get in and out of

this a lot. So I just leave this here. When I sort of redid this bathroom, when I say redid, I'm using that word very lightly because simply just added some curtains and put some stuff on the shelves. I shared a whole video about it and I kind of explained what went in, all the little apothecary jars,

and then how we keep some things that aren't pretty behind the curtains. Another example of times where I'll keep extra things because they're beautiful, but if it ever loses function to where I feel like it's hard to do the things we want to do every day, then I will change it. But this is working really well for us. It's fairly minimal. I don't have a ton of extra stuff stored. I have some supplies to refill my homemade serums and a few extras of some things things but for the most

part keep the space minimal and clean. We break the towels down fairly regularly to wash them but we don't need more than two towels in here. This bathroom functions pretty well for us even though it's small it works. Thank you so much for going along with me on this very rambly chatty house tour and I do hope that I helped to communicate to you that simplifying your home doesn't have to be about perfection but it can be manageable.

No matter how many people you have and how small of a space, it can be doable No matter how many people you have and how small of a space, it can be doable and my aim is to help you get there.