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.
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.
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;
Radically Change how you Dress
