Show us your space!! « Back to Group Discussions

[Rainey Daye]

There are plenty of pictures on Pinterest and around the web of inspiring minimalist spaces, but how does that work in real life with small children possibly in the picture? 

I think a much better source of inspiration is to actually see the spaces that we ourselves live in as we work toward or maintain our minimalism.

So show us your spaces!!

[LVNTEXAS]

I will after Christmas/New Year's. : )

[Paigekitten]

Gotta track down the camera cord.  Plus I don't wanna be first!

[ziursrm]

I'll start then. I'm just getting into this, so it certainly won't meet many minimalists standards, but I'm working with the "what is enough for my family" concept. So it's more of a continual paring down room by room until we find the right balance. These pictures are the before and after photos of the cleaning out of the room my 4yo and 2yo share. I eliminated 1 large bag of trash, 2 boxes for donation and 1 box of baby toys that I will save for the baby that's due any day now. My 4yo even helped decide on several items he was ready to part with, which I think was a major learning moment for him.

[Danidama]

ziursrm, that is awesome! What a beautiful room. And the drumset kicks butt. Have fun and relax with your new soon-to-be-here babe. :D

[Rainey Daye]

So, this is only one corner of our home office (my desk)...but I'm so happy to have it clean and organized and ready for use. Our office was not in good shape for a while cause it was our catch-all room...so the rest of the house looked clean, neat, and minimal...but we hid everything in the office!! Now we've got the office clear and usable and it's one of the most minimalist rooms in the house. We even plan on minimizing it even more when we get rid of an old stereo, move a turntable to a shelf, and clear off and rid ourselves of a bookshelf. We will then move a small futon couch into the space vacated by the bookshelf and the office will be perfect as a workspace as well as a second area for congregating in when people are over!! I will be back later to post a picture of the rest of the office once my husband deals with the small stack of papers on his desk and I vacuum again!! 

Oh yeah, and somehow I got this pic with the cord to the shredder plugged in under my desk, but it isn't there usually...I just had it out to shred a big pile of papers DH was done going through. It normally resides in a corner of the room by DH's desk!!

[Paigekitten]

So I took a bunch of pictures for this thread and then when I went to upload them I couldn't find the cord to the computer.  I think I need to sit my husband down and clean out our desk.   Being minimalist can be hard when you live with other people.

[Rainey Daye]

I've just decided that I'm gonna go get DH an inbox for those papers he is in the process of dealing with...one that can fit on a shelf inside the desk cabinet!! Then I'll move the old stereo out, shred the last of the to-be-shredded pile, and vacuum. Then not only can I show off my space, but it will STAY clear!! I don't want his lack of finishing stuff to keep our space from staying clear!!

Then I'll come back to post pics of the rest of the office and of my son's "nursery". Can you still call it a nursery if he is 2 1/2, is not in a crib anymore, and wants to do everything "myseff"?

[ziursrm]

Rainey Daye, the office looks nice. I just cleaned and cleared my office as well (although much less minimal right now than yours!) and it is so refreshing to have a neat place to work. I can already feel my productivity going by not having to swim through the clutter.

[Rainey Daye]

Here's the rest of our home office...

We will be selling/moving elsewhere the bookshelf and the kiddie table and chair and putting a small armless leather futon there instead eventually and then it will be REALLY nice!!

Plus, I know it's kinda funny to post pics of closets...but our hall closet is so nice and pretty!! 

[ziursrm]

I think I like the hall closet best since it gives me hope. It's too easy to let them be catch alls and hiding grounds for stuff we should really be getting rid off. 

[mrsmischief]

Everybody's spaces are so inspiring! 

[Rainey Daye]

Ha...I totally should have taken a pic of the closet BEFORE the clean out!! The whole bottom half of the closet was filled with stuff...but I took something like 40 books to our local library and passed a few pairs of shoes and a purse and some baby stuff (bottles, bowls, feeding spoons, etc.) and yet more books on to my sisters cause I was tired of trying to Craigslist/Freecycle stuff and it sitting and cluttering my closet up for months meanwhile!! It's all well and good to try to get some money out of the stuff you are getting rid of...but not at the expense of still having to live around it till it sells...and sometimes it even takes a while to Freecycle stuff (what with no-shows)!! I wanted my closet back and functional!!
 

Originally Posted by ziursrm 

I think I like the hall closet best since it gives me hope. It's too easy to let them be catch alls and hiding grounds for stuff we should really be getting rid off. 

[Rainey Daye]

Some pics from this last weekend once we got the master bedroom and nursery reorganized a bit...

In the master bedroom, not only did we sort through what we had, but we rearranged the furniture, which makes the room feel so much bigger (I can even hoop in there now)!! The two bookshelves on either side of the dresser contain our keep and keep-for-now books and cd's, as well as Bug's books for now and to grow into (like the Childcraft that were mine as a child). The other two bookshelves are only temporarily staying until we get the contents of the left one stored elsewhere and the contents of the right one posted to Amazon and/or PaperBackSwap or sold at Half Price Books. 

The nursery has been arranged like it is since November, but I finally got plastic drawers in the bottom of the closet to organize his playclothes, underwear, and toys that we are keeping into.

[SomethingAnonymous]

Thanks for sharing the pictures :) It looks great. I wish we had room for a train table, my son would love it.

I can't decide if posting pictures will ruin my anonymity or not. Does this group show up on google?

[BloomingAnemone]

Great spaces!  

I love it when you can see the back wall and baseboard of a closet. And when you don't have to hold stuff in with one arm as you're closing the door!

[Mommel]

Rainey Daye, you keep mentioning this Pinterest site and then one of the bloggers I follow linked to her Pinterest page, so I finally "requested an invite" and got... waitlisted? What is THAT? Some weird marketing scheme to make the site feel exclusive or special? Pfffbbttt!

[SomethingAnonymous]

lol I have no idea.. I had to wait a couple weeks to br "accepted" or whatever.  I think someone cloned the site and put it at pinspire.com - it's exactly the same except there is no wait as far as I can tell.  Rainey Daye- would you be willing to share your pinterest user name? I have done a million searches for minimalist spaces on there and can't find much. Do you have a lot of great pictures on there?

[Rainey Daye]

If anyone wants an invite from me, just message me your email addy and I'll send you an invite. There's a bit of a hierarchy in that it takes longer to get on Pinterest if you request directly from Pinterest, but you can get on there a lot faster if you get an invite from someone already on there.

Not sure how long Pinspire is gonna last, since they totally ripped off their site from Pinterest...but we'll see. I'm not interested in being on yet another site though and I've been on Pinterest for a year now..so I'll stick with it, Facebook, Mothering, and one other forum (plus a few blogs) as the extent of my online life!! 

My boards can be found at http://www.pinterest.com/RaineyDaye/ 

They aren't very minimalist though!! I figure that's fine though...better to collect pictures online than junk in my house, right?

[SomethingAnonymous]

I don't know why but that doesn't work for me