Minimalist Tips for Building a Clutter-Free Home 🏡

when it comes to creating a beautiful minimalist home I find that most people struggle with how to combine storage and utilitarian Solutions together with Aesthetics and a minimalist design instead we're limited to outdated Storage Solutions and impractical layouts and I've yet to lived in a house that makes sense but if you are renovating or building your own home you can fix these problems and create a home that is more user friendly and that is more nice and beautiful to be in and with a minimalist perspective your home can be more eco-friendly long lasting adaptive and just more Timeless and classic in style so that's what we'll be talking about today which is how to use a minimalist perspective when designing or creating your future home the first thing to consider is of course the size of your house I know this might be an obvious solution but we just build houses that are way too big for our needs the average house size in Sweden where I grew up is 84 square meter compare that to the United States where the average house size is 230 square meter almost three times the size a bigger house does not only mean more costs but also more work it needs more cleaning more appliances more furniture not to mention that most big houses I've been in they waste so much space in empty dark scary corridors and storage rooms and other rooms and functions that are just never being used if you're renovating or if you're building your own home I suggest going down the Scandinavian route instead where you make room for a beautiful open space areas but keep any room any bedroom bathroom slightly smaller focus on communal areas which will also give your home a warmer and more usable feel compared to having huge bedrooms but not a lot of leisure space the second thing where I think people spend way too much resources and would benefit from a minimalist perspective is bathrooms I grew up in Sweden on a farm in a fairly big Farmhouse it was definitely bigger than 82 square meters we had a family of five and we survived with just one bathroom yes I however since then I've stayed in many different houses and I also know a lot of my friends especially over in the United States have a ridiculous amount of bathrooms the resources that goes into bathrooms are pretty insane if you think about it not only do you need a lot of electricity you need water so you need Plumbing you need tiles you need fans so there is such an unnecessary use of resources if you're building several bathrooms and you're not going to use them not to mention who is cleaning your bathroom think about minimalism when you decorate and design your bathroom why do you need more than one sink it was like people started building houses and the businesses were like oh people have so much money let's tell them that they need two sinks which means every family will buy two to four sinks instead of just one which is so much more money and so much more resources you're spending and I just can't help but think that these people who design and build these houses and renovate them are not the people who clean the bathrooms in their homes because then them why would you have two things if we instead adopt a minimalist mindset and style to our bathrooms in smaller areas and just use one sink instead of two sinks we actually free up more space and I at least think space always feels more luxurious than what I tend to cram into there for me a minimalist and well-built home is a home that is nice and easy to use that looks aesthetically pleasing and that is comfortable to be in and the more things we put in there for me the more cluttered and less homely it feels the next point is longevity because I think the most important aspect of minimalist design is to create longevity for your items and for your home if we create a fantastic base a minimalist home that is practical yet beautiful and high quality it'll be very easy to adapt your style or even to sell your home if you would like to take for example the bathtub everyone in my grandparents generation was told that to have a beautiful and luxurious home you needed a bathtub so all my grandparents have bathtubs in their homes so my example here is that times have changed bathtubs are no longer considered luxurious but often they're nuisance they are difficult to clean they collect dust and they use so much more water especially in a time when we're interested in conserving water if we try instead to adopt a minimalist mindset into the design and creation of the base of our homes we won't need to change and adapt for new Styles especially when these ideas are being sold to us as conveniences but they're actually just more work and more money this way we can build and create homes for generations to come instead of homes that are quickly outdated after we've used them number five is built-in storage of course when it comes to minimalist design we need to talk about storage because one of the most or key aspect of minimalism is the lack of clutter right but for me when it comes to built-in storage it really comes down to function if the storage is too hard to access or too hard to reach or too hard to use it will actually add more clutter in your life rather than save you from it I often NC homes where storage is great beautiful built-in super super aesthetic but it is so hard to reach you need to lift something or you need to move something and this just creates that small obstacle but an obstacle big enough for you to not want to put things away and instead just leave them out because it's more convenient I also often think that Storage Solutions make us buy more stuff for me the best home is a home that has Ample Storage but where the storage units aren't crammed full of stuff that's why again I think a smaller house with a smaller footprint is so much better because it sort of forces us to not fill the house with stuff I think we can learn a few things from the tiny house movement and create Less storage solutions and only create storage solutions that we actually need for things that we will actually use another point I think is really important is being realistic I think one of the main culprits especially for first-time homeowners or first-time phone bill home builders is that they Design This Home for someone one that they want to be someone they are yet to become my favorite examples of these are outdoor hot tubs that never get used outdoor kitchens huge indoor kitchens TV rooms bathtubs what all these buildings or designs have in common is that they sound great and they often look great at least the first few years but they require so so much maintenance I think most of us will cook outside in that expensive outdoor kitchen once or twice before we realize that's actually just more work and you might as well chop it and cook it inside right and I also feel like they don't make you happier right because you live in your dream house and I've seen it so many times and you walk around through your beautiful garden and every time you have to walk through for example that hot tub that's just getting dirtier and dirtier for every time you walk past and it's such an effort to clean it especially when you don't want to use it because then you're going to have to clean it again so something I've learned is that I never want to buy things that will make me feel as though I'm not doing enough anything that will make me feel that I'm not cleaning enough I'm not exercising enough or whatever it may be I don't want those things in my home and personally I often think these big clunky expensive items add a sense of clutter to your home every time I see a garden with a hot tub in it it instantly feels more cluttered than if it's just a simple garden with a beautiful flower bed the next point and I've already said it a little bit but that is smaller kitchens opening a drawer and just being bombarded with old appliances that you don't really use and you can't really get rid of that easily it just doesn't feel great right and I'm all about our homes making us feel great about ourselves rather than the opposite I definitely grew up in a household like this we had 10 oven pans for I don't know what reason there was no good explanation the house I'm staying in right now I've counted them because it drives me crazy they have six lists and at least 10 Wooden Spoons you don't need these many things and I think it's much better to use things up until they break and it also makes for a lot less cluttered space so if we can have these thought patterns or this minimalist concept or this minimalist perspective in mind when we design and build our homes I think they will be so much more user friendly and beautiful and what makes me angry is that it's so clearly a marketing Ploy for us to buy things we don't need and over and over again people sort of fall or get pressured into this way of living and the worst part is it doesn't even make them happier it makes them unhappier so I really wish we can break the cycle of consumerism and look at our houses to be perfect for who we are and not for some fantasy of who we don't even want to be so I suggest limit yourself to a smaller kitchen and enjoy using it and not having to clean it as often the other thing I find really important about a minimalist house design is natural materials this might not be jam General minimalism as such but it's definitely my perspective of minimalism is that it also comes with this idea of longevity and being eco-friendly natural materials not only last so much longer but they also look so much better for example if I buy my grandparents old house it'd be so much easier to renovate that house than it would be buying a modern you know cookie cutter house because the materials are not even you know they're not moldable you can't change or repaint the kitchen cabinets because they're not made of wood they're made of plastic or MDF or they have weird vinyls or wrappers or finishes on them same goes with the floor you can't re-sand it you can't redo it you have to rip it up and put a new floor in and for me that doesn't really sit well with my ideas of minimalist design and also building and creating homes to last for Generations natural materials look so much better because we can build the most beautiful base and then we'll put items in it and that's the true I think benefit of minimalist design create a shell that is super comfortable sustainable long lasting high quality and comfortable to be it then fill that home with things that make you happy that express your style or things that you feel that you need and want in your home this way if you want to move on or if you want to give your house to your children or your grandchildren there is so much more opportunity to do so and the last point that I think is really important when we're building and creating new homes is this idea of flow from a minimalist perspective flow is so much more easily created in a small space if we don't put too many things in the house and obviously the same thing goes for built-in things like built-in Storage Solutions kitchen islands Extra Space Storage rooms extra garage whatever beat think about how you move in a home and how you want it to feel spacious even though it's not necessary fairly huge and even if it is huge maybe you're renovating an old house you want the flow to be there right you want to be able to take off your shoes when you get in from the door you want to hang up your jacket and you want to be able to for example reach a light switch straight when you come in in case you come in in the dark something we don't have a lot in Sweden I think because our houses are fairly small but I've seen so much here in New Zealand are the dreaded corridors the corridors here are cold they are dark you often have to walk to the other side of the corridor to turn on a light switch and so many things like this that just really is the opposite of this idea of flow the idea of flow is that the home is usable truly usable you don't really have to reach where you don't have to go out of your way to do anything but the home is designed for practical living and in a sense I think practicality and minimalism has so much in common and I don't want us to separate these two because I think in the modern minimalist movement it can be easy to think that if it's too practical it might be too ugly or too cluttered to be minimalist but I definitely think that practicality combined with minimalism is true sustainability because we don't waste resources but we also don't also pretend that something is something it's not if you know what I mean because a minimalist home is really a home that will last for Generations it's a home that you don't need to renovate every five years it's a home where you don't really need to repaint everything to get a new feel it's a home that really has a great soul and the need can just adapt it and change it to however you see fit thinking of these things especially in living in other houses has really prompted all these new ideas for me had I not lived in this house for example and learned about the things I like and dislike about this house I wouldn't have been able to apply those things to my dream house I hope to have one day and I think that's the key Point here is that when you build or design or renovate a new home make sure that you have as much context and experience as possible we don't want to design and build homes that we're then just going to sell because we really just did make a mistake the last house we house set in was their dream home it was beautiful but it was just put on the wrong side of the property it was put on the dark shaded side of property which you wouldn't have noticed in summer but if you've been there in Winter you would definitely notice it because the horses got lots of sunshine all throughout the day with the house got none so things like this is really important for me having a long-term mindset and really knowing the land and knowing the house that is true minimalism because we're building one house instead of building one house selling it because it's not quite good enough so we're gonna make someone else renovated and then we'll build a new one correcting our mistakes I actually think we can learn from other people's mistakes and I think experiencing other homes is probably the best way of doing so I hope this video gave you some Inspirations and some tips if you are wanting to design or renovate or build your own home and please let me know in the comments if you've had similar thoughts and experiences and maybe you've even built a home yourself thank you so much for watching and I'll see y'all next week bye foreign [Music]

Channel: SagaJohanna

Views: 13,374

Keywords: minimalist, minimalism, vegan, ethical, selfhelp, Sweden, happiness, life improvement, love, sustainable, extreme minimalism, travel

Id: aki3VZBhpuI

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023