Radically Change How you Live

 

Basic Changes you can Start Today

• Think carefully about where you live and decide if it meets your needs
• De-clutter your house fully to start with then maintain a low clutter tolerance into the future. Give unwanted items to charity
• Recycle any materials that you cannot give away and make recycling part of your everyday routine
• Reuse items and materials in creative ways (save money
• Reduce the amount of noise in your home by turning of music, radio and television only when you need to use them
• Make no background noise the rule in your home
• Assess the available space outside your house and consider how it is used
• Insulate your house as well as you can (save money)
• Keep yourself warm rather than heating every room in the house (save money)
• Buy a scrubbing brush and use it
• Always investigate second-hand furniture before looking at buying new (save money)
• Learn to clean not as a chore, but as an important job of work you do for home and family

Some Changes you might like to consider for the Future

• Change your living room from a place where family members watch television to a place where a variety of activities can take place
• Use wood flooring and furniture as you come to replace your current items 
• Refresh your house by painting walls and using simple fabrics
• Consider changing the function of rooms
• Dig up your lawn and grow vegetables instead (save money)
• Consider the viability of electricity generation for your home using wind or solar power (save money)
• Consider learning basic carpentry, plumbing or needlework skills (save money)
• Consider becoming a one car family (save money)
• Consider sharing car journeys to work (save money)
• Consider using public transport to get to work (save money)

Some big radical changes you may want to move towards

• Sell up and move to the country
• Give up your car (save money)
• If you have the resources, land and skills then build your own house (save money - perhaps)

How do I learn new skills?

Ask neighbours, friends, family. In particular elderly people may have lots of skills they are willing to pass on to anyone interested. In your area you may find evening or weekend courses you can attend. YouTube can provide easy free access to experts! 

(C) Ray Lovegrove 2022

See Also;

Reject Technology?

A Simple Place

What you Own

Changes at Home 

Radically Change how you Dress

Your Simple Home

For most households the living room is the most important place in the house after the kitchen. As it is a place where the family gather try to keep it open and uncluttered, you may like to consider moving the television out of this room altogether to some less prominent room of the house. You might like to consider moving most of your furniture out of the living room altogether and replacing it with a long refectory like table with enough seating for all the family, it can be used for working, talking, hobbies, reading or even eating. If you can encourage your family to spend winter evenings around this table you will save energy use in other rooms. Even if all members of the family are engaged in different activities quietly, they are also spending the evening together in companionship.Bedrooms should be the simplest rooms in the house. If you can possibly manage it keep everything out of bedrooms except a bed, a small chair and table and furniture for storing clothing. If your bedroom is full of suitcases and storage items, of cardboard boxes, excess clothing and clutter, then see what can be disposed of or sent elsewhere. Bedrooms do not need televisions or computers or any form of amusement other than a small pile of bedside books and a light to read them by. Keep your bedroom sacrosanct for sleep and closeness with your partner.

 
Energy in the home

The simple home must also be a green home, make sure that your home is up to standard on insulation and that you do not waste energy. If you are able, strongly consider moving away from fossil fuel to wood to provide winter space heating and hot water. Get in the habit of keeping in that warm air that you have paid for by closing all internal doors, especially at night (this is a good fire precaution as well). When it gets dark in the colder months, make sure that all curtains are drawn to conserve heat. If you get cold sitting down in the evenings then cover your legs with a blanket rather than turning up the heating. Bedrooms should be on the cool side, but if your bedroom is bordering on Arctic conditions try using a hot water bottle or electric blanket both cheaper that heating the room. The most important way of keeping warm in your home is dressing properly, it will also save you money!

As for choice of fuel most of us live with what we have, if you have chance to put in your own heating avoid fossil fuels and go for wood burning. Some areas don not allow the burning of wood for domestic heating, so check with your local authority first. A modern wood burning stove will heat the room, heat your water and run a central heating system. Wood ashes are compostable, and wood, as a renewable resource is in plentiful supply. Wood should be well seasoned (aged and dried) otherwise will not be a clean fuel and will cause problems. Find yourself a fire wood dealer who convinces you fully that they are operating ethically and that the wood they supply is from a managed source and felled areas are being replanted.

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” 

- Edith Sitwell 

Appliances 


Your home is place to live in peace it should not look, or sound like a high-tech control center for space missions. As an exercise wander around your house one night before going to bed, look at those red glowing lights, and the white ones not forgetting the green flashing ones, what are they for? You don’t have to be anti-technology to be simple, but you do need to question your need for every appliance. My thoughts are that a cooker/range, washing machine, iron and a refrigerator are pretty important, and essential for most people; after that it very much depends on your family unit. Dishwashers may seem extravagant, but if you have four or more people in your family, then they may save you energy and water, you need to do some calculations. Microwave ovens likewise may prove energy saving and certainly time saving for processing food. Vacuum cleaners may, or may not be essential depending on your floorcovering, if you decide to do without one it is possible, in most places to hire them for a day’s spring-cleaning once or twice a year as necessary. As for clothes dryers they are particularly expensive to run and totally unnecessary if you have an outside space for drying (I used to dry all clothing naturally living on the very rainy Welsh Borders, but now I live in Sweden I do use a dryer in the depth of winter). The important thing is to consider carefully your need for any appliance, if the calculations show that it will help you, or if you have a disability and it will make life easier, and then go ahead. The purchase of appliances needs your attention to issues such as energy consumption, noise and complexity, my experience is that the fewer flashing lights and buttons the more reliable the appliance. You may of course choose to do without almost any appliance, especially if you live alone when the local launderette or laundry will solve your clothes washing problems. When it comes to replacing electrical appliances always consider weather downgrading, in size or power, is a viable option, families tend to get smaller as children ‘leave the nest’ so appliances should get smaller too.

Storage

The Shakers have lessons for us here too, everything must have a place, and if it does not then it cannot be put away. It sounds simple, but many of us have things in our homes for which we have no real place. If we leave things sitting where they are, in the hall or beside the sofa, then after a few days we fail to notice them and to us they become invisible, but to others they look like mess! Try at all costs to avoid storing things in ugly containers; a pile of toys may look a mess, but a plastic box of toys also looks pretty awful! Invest in simple baskets and wooden chests, new or second hand. These will be more expensive that the ubiquitous plastic box, but will have years of use and can change function when you want them to. Always run a basket for things that need mending, a basket for socks that need sorting and a basket for laundry pegs, once these items have a home they will stop piling up in odd corners of the house. Laundry bins are vital and, if you have the room keep one in or near the kitchen for used table linen, tea-towels, and those odd items of dirty laundry that seem to come home daily in school bags.

Unless you need items on a daily basis, store them away where they can be found, but not where you need immediate access to them. Very small items like, drawing pins, and buttons and tubes of glue can be happily sored in screw to jars that once contained peanut butter or the like, then they can be kept safely in a draw or on a shelf.

An appearance of tidiness is impossible to achieve if draws and cupboards are left open, the rule to teach children is to put ‘whatever’ in the draw or cupboard and close it! When leaving a room put dining chairs under tables, put things that go away, away and never go upstairs or downstairs without checking to see if some object or item needs to make the journey with you.

Technology may help with storage, an mp3 player can store thousands of CDs and only takes up a very small space, and if you have no more room for books a Kindle or other e-book reader can save you ever having to build a new bookcase! Likewise if you have large numbers of family photographs you might consider scanning them into your computer. This technology can induce simplicity and reduce clutter, so think carefully if you want to adopt it. If you are keeping files electronically always take care that your files are backed up on a ‘cloud’ to prevent loss. Many free ‘cloud’ storage systems are available so do some homework.

Lighting

Make the most use of natural lighting in your home as possible; above other things it’s free! Draw back curtains in daytime and keep window glass clean on both sides avoid blocking any window light with objects. In colder months draw all curtains around the house as darkness falls to help prevent heat loss. For electrical lighting use low energy bulbs in all areas except where you need the brighter light of a halogen bulb for activities like reading and needlework. Battery powered LED lamps offer some very good solutions to the problems of lights for dark cupboards and for getting around the house in the middle of the night without disturbing the whole family. For family meals, try candles or butane gas lamps for a more relaxed atmosphere. Get your family in the habit of turning off lighting when not needed. For outside lighting, avoid lamps that light up the neighbourhood for no good reason, security lights are particularly irritating, if you need lights outside carry a flashlight or get some solar powered lighting that costs next nothing to run.

Some have decided to do away with electrical lighting altogether and rely on other methods of lighting their homes; this is fine, but do consider that, just like mains electricity, oil and gas lamps burn fossil fuel. Perhaps a more environmentally aware solution to the problem is to keep the electric lights but use wind or solar power to generate your own electricity.


Cleaning

Some things have to be done and cleaning is one of them, like most things that contribute to a simple life it is better to look upon cleaning as something that is part of your life and not something that has to be got out of the way so that you can get on with your life. Simple décor will help keep cleaning jobs in proportion, wooden floors need sweeping and washing, painted walls need occasional washing and windows need regular cleaning on both sides of the glass. Cooking ranges and refrigerators need very regular attention as do wood burning stoves. Sinks and toilets baths and showers need to be kept spotless and dusting needs to be done. Some other jobs will crop up once a year ‘spring cleaning’ is traditional but, you may want to spread annual cleaning chores throughout the year to avoid spending all spring indoors! It is possible that you can clean your own chimney; you will need rods and brushes and the investment in them, and the storage of them could mean that this is one job that you prefer to use a professional for.


As for cleaning products, stick to very few; ordinary floor cleaner will clean most household surfaces and can even by diluted to refill spay ‘bench cleaner’ bottles. Wood is best cleaned with soap solution and then treated with ‘wood oil’ or polish. As for paintwork on doorframes and window ledges, soap solution and a scrubbing brush works fine. Use only ‘pump action, sprayers and avoid aerosols altogether. Old style ‘natural products’ like washing soda, vinegar, methylated spirit and beeswax polish are invaluable and every bit as good, if not better, than over-perfumed and expensive braded items. After some time of being scrubbed with washing soda or soap; painted surfaces develop a faded and slightly worn appearance, it looks just fine carry on!


Outside Space

The space that you have outside your house will be increasingly important as your life becomes more simple. It is surprising how many jobs can be done outside if you have the will, fresh air is a joy so don’t miss an opportunity to take advantage of it. Both growing food and the eating of food, in the summer months takes place here. Again if your present house is lacking in outside space you need to give some serious thought to moving house. As for eating outside a table big enough for all you family is ideal. Cooking outside need not involve expensive equipment a charcoal barbeque stove made of recycled bricks and old refrigerator shelves works fine.

Your Moving Space

Since the middle of the twentieth century the idea that has shaped our society is that people must be mobile, not only mobile for work, but mobile for leisure. The almost universal ownership of cars has defined us in terms of freedom of mobility, freedom to work away from home, and freedom to travel for leisure, but car ownership has also defined them in terms of social status. If you live in a city do question if you need any car, public transport can only get better if more people chose it. A salutary lesson is to sit down and calculate the real cost of motoring; cost of car (total cost divided by years of use less resale price), MOT, maintenance, insurance, ‘road tax’ fuel, carwash, parking etc. Take away from this figure the amount that a season ticket for transport to and from work, and other trips, will cost you and you will then have a figure of how much it costs you to drive! Giving up your car may seem like a giant step, but it can be a liberating step.


If you live outside large cities then you may find that public transport is just not good enough and that you need to have a car, rural readers will certainly be in this group. The question for you is how many cars your family needs, if only one of you is working away from home, then perhaps only one of you needs a car? Certainly, chose a car that is no bigger than your needs, what is more wasteful that a large ‘four-wheel drive’ vehicle delivering one person to work each day.


Think carefully about your transport needs and decide if a very small car will do, given that you can hire a larger car by the day if such a need arises. Consider also if you can ‘care share with others in your neighbourhood or your workplace, the savings can be considerable.

Many groups in North America, like the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, have chosen not to own or use cars, but they are free to use taxis, trains and boats when the need arises (aircraft are generally never used). A move to ‘horse and buggy’ can only be a pipedream to most of us, but we can consider the Amish principal of living very close to where we work to avoid the need for long, and expensive journeys.

[c] Ray Lovegrove 2016, 2022

See Also;

Reject Technology?

A Simple Place

What you Own

Radically Change how you Live

Radically Change how you Dress

Changes at Home

 

Assuming that your house is de-cluttered and that you have left those things that you really need you are probably at the ‘replacement only’ phase – that time when you don’t need to buy anything for the first time you only need to replace things when they are past repair. This, of course, will not be the case if you are expecting a first baby or you, or one of your family has developed a medical condition that needs specialist equipment, but for most of us we do have all that we need in terms of material goods. A simple lifestyle should not be about replacing things just because they are out of fashion, or because we would like a change them; things should need replacing only if they are no longer fit for purpose. All simple households, certainly mine, has ‘heritage items – those things that are regularly used and have active life still in them, but would not be your choice if you were buying them today. For these items consider simplifying them, furniture can have the paint stripped off back to the natural wood, or furniture can be given a fresh look by painting it. Chairs and sofas can be transformed with a throw or simple cushion covers. Very ornate furniture can be transformed into something more functional; we have a large pre-war German sideboard which makes a wonderful cupboard for produce storing!

When replacing any item, durability is important. I once several years ago stood waiting outside a huge DIY store; I watched large numbers of people coming out with trollies bursting with goods happily loading them into their cars. Turning around I could just see the entrance to the towns ‘dump’ which had similar people queuing up to discard unwanted goods. It stuck me then that some purchases from the DIY store probably only had five- or six-year active life before they would be taken to the dump and disposed of to landfill – this is why our planet is in trouble!


Replace items, when needed, with things that will last, things that can be recycled, things that can be handed on, things that will not be victims of fashion trends. This kind of replacement may cost you more money, but over a lifetime, it will save you more money, time, and inconvenience.

Wood

Where possible buy things of wood. For the price of some item made of MDF or plastic or plywood or some other substitute you can buy something made of real wood, it may be second hand, but it is still a better buy. Wooden items last longer, are more easily repaired, and decorated, they generally look better and are less environmentally damaging to manufacture. Eventually at the end of a long and useful life wood can be burnt for energy – no wood need ever go to landfill. Choose wood for flooring and kitchen worktops and cupboards when yours need to be replaced and choose wood that was grown close to you, native hardwoods and not tropical woods that have been harvested from rain forests at considerable environmental cost! You should never need to buy wood that comes from another continent unless you live in the Antarctic! Wear and tear on wooden floors and worktops can be made good by sanding down every decade or so, a laminate floor is useless when wear and tear have taken their toll. You can buy reused timber for flooring and furniture, and it looks aged, faded and wonderful. If you have any carpentry skills yourself, then use them to make and repair your own furniture where you can.

The Shakers developed furniture making skills and the products of their labours has outlived the Shakers themselves. The furniture always manages to capture a simple form, but with inbuilt practicality and durability. Few of us can aspire to own real Shaker furniture, and few of us have the carpentry skills to make anything quite so simple or so beautiful, but we can follow the Shakers in their aim to have houses with useful, long lasting, well designed and well-made items of furniture.

Paint

To keep your house looking clean and simple paint it, forget complicated ideas of wallpaper or other textured surfaces, paint is the simple solution. Use only three or four colours throughout of paint throughout and you can save money by buying larger pots and always have some spare to ‘touch up’ where necessary. If you live in an old property with uneven and irregular walls, then don’t worry too much about that, if the surface isn’t perfect, it will look all the better for painting. Light paint shades help to make rooms look bigger, look brighter and contrast with dark furniture well. Avoid fashion colours that will make your home look dated very quickly and distract from the atmosphere of simple quiet space that you want to create. Always try to buy paint, which is minimal or low in volatile organic compounds, it is far more pleasant to use and will cause less harm to the environment.

Fabrics

A simply home should be easy to clean and, for this reason carpets are not as acceptable as a wooden floor with rugs, you can easily sweep a floor and wash it when it needs it, carpets on the other hand need to be vacuumed cleaned and occasionally shampooed. In any case, nothing looks more simple than a wooden floor. For windows simple curtains with wooden poles are best. Avoid strongly patterned curtains which will ruin any simplicity they you have established in the room otherwise. Chose light curtains for summer, but heavier curtains will hold in the warmth better. Washable curtains will save dry cleaning bills. Old curtains can be turned into any number of things with some simple sewing machine work, cushion covers, bedspreads, tablecloths and throws, you may need to think about dyeing the fabric.

(C) Ray Lovegrove 2016, 2022

See Also;

Reject Technology?

A Simple Place

What you Own

Radically Change how you Live

Radically Change how you Dress

What you Own

Removing clutter

An important aspect of simplicity inside your house has to be lack of clutter. To de-clutter a house may take a long time, but is worth the effort and, once you have opened up some space you will reap the benefits. Many people get attached to objects, but many others are reluctant to get rid of things because they paid good money for them in the first place, this is a mindset that you have to get away from, if you paid a lot of money for something that now has to go then that is it? Avoid selling things, it causes more problems than it solves, the easy way to get rid of unwanted things is to give them to charity, small items can be donated to charity shops or community jumble sales and bigger items of furniture and electrical goods can often be removed from your house and redistributed to needy families. Above all, don’t throw things away if they can be recycled or reused by others, waste is never a simple solution to any problem, it just moves the problem elsewhere.

What to get rid of

Two years is a long time, if you have things that you have not used for two years, then chances are you can do without them. All those things that ‘might come in handy one day’ probably won’t, get rid of them. If you have more than the necessary number of items in your house, three televisions, two toasters, fifteen egg cups etc. then reduce the number to reflect your needs. If you have things in your house that were given to you as gifts and you don’t need or like them, then give them away. If you have collections of things that were once a prospective hobby decide if this was a passing fad, if it was then give them away. If you ‘attract’ items like ball-point pens, coat hangers, notebooks or keys that no longer fit any lock, then give it all away. If your children have grown out of equipment, toys and games give them away, don’t do this behind your children’s back, and involve them fully in the de-cluttering process. If you are friendly with a family with children just a bit younger than yours, then why not pass clothing and other items to them.

Recycling

For anybody truly wishing to lead a simple life, given our knowledge of finite world resources and pollution, you have a duty to recycle whatever you can. Don’t throw anything away that can possibly be recycled. Your local authority will have the means to collect together for recycling, paper, glass, plastic and metal they will also make safe and recycle used batteries and broken light bulbs. Most authorities also do a splendid job on taking electrical equipment and stripping out the recyclable materials. Charities collect any number of objects and materials including clothing, shoes, curtains, books, CDs, DVDs and spectacles, some also take used postage stamps and ‘brick-a-brack'. (You may consider CDs and DVDs redundant technology, but many still collect them.)

Don’t assume that what you give away has to be in good condition, charity shops generally ‘sell on’ unusable clothing to make industrial cleaning cloths or even blankets. Make sure that your house has recycling bins on each floor and make sure that everyone in the family uses them, sorting the recycling gives useful lessons to younger members of the family.

Reusing

Get in the habit of reusing objects and materials in useful ways, used jars and bottles can be used for bottling (called canning in North America) your produce, containers can be used for storage and waste wood can be used for burning in wood-burning stoves (if you don’t have one give your wood to someone who has). Unwanted CDs and DVDs, especially those given away as promotional material, can be used to help scare birds away from your growing crops. Worn jeans can be turned into shorts in seconds by using a pair of scissors and the removed legs can be stuffed and made into draft excluders for the gaps under closed doors. Knitters will be able to unpick unwanted garments and remake them into something more appropriate. The Amish use old shirts, dresses and petticoats to make those astounding quilts, if you can use a sewing machine, or can sew well by hand, you can make good use of much unwanted clothing.

(C) Ray Lovegrove 2016 , 2022

 See Also;

Reject Technology?

A Simple Place

Radically Change how you Live

Radically Change how you Dress