Do you feel like your home is too small? Are you trying to keep up with the Jones’s instead of just keeping up with your stuff? Good things really do come in small packages. But you also don’t want to feel like a small fish in a big pond. Watch this video for tips on how not to sweat the small stuff and to be thankful for small mercies.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdsqfoot.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today I’m coming to you from my brand new house. I’ve been waiting for this house to be built for eight months. And I’ve been in a lot of transition, in a temporary apartment, and here I am. In fact, I’m sorry about the echo that you hear on the sound, because I don’t even have my furniture in here yet. The movers are coming tomorrow to bring all my stuff over, and right now, we’re just painting. You can see I’ve got the same color that I had in my office before that you might have seen in some of my other videos. So, I’m excited, I’m making it feel like a home, and it’s going to be all put together soon.
So, I wanted to address the size of this home, because I have downsized a dramatic amount to be here. The house that I’m in here now is about the same square footage that the average home was in the United States in 1973. It’s about 1,600 square feet. Now, I came from a house that was 4,500 square feet with a family of four and a dog and an acre and a half, and now, you know, this is much smaller. So I’ve had to sell a lot of things and obviously, donate a lot of things. But in the meantime, I was in a 700 square foot apartment waiting for this construction, and I wanted to address a comment that I got here on the You Tube Channel that I really took to heart. Somebody kind of picked on me a little bit because I had made a comment about how small my apartment was and saying that it was 700 square feet in a previous video. And you know what? At first I thought, “Oh, no, that is a small place,” but you know what? It’s true. People around the world live in much smaller space than we do, and we really need to have perspective on that.
So as I said, the average home in 1973 was 1,660 square feet. Now the average home in the United States is 2,392 square feet. That’s a big difference. In the meantime, 1 out of 11 of us have a storage unit. So, we have bigger space, and we have more stuff. In fact, we have so much stuff we have to get an annex for all of our belongings beyond the massive amount of square footage we have.
So, let’s look at how many square feet are average in all the other countries around the world that we might compare ourselves to. So Australia, 2,217. Denmark, 1,475. France, 1,216. Spain, 1,044. Ireland, 947. In the U.K. it’s 818, and in China the average square footage is 646 square feet, which is smaller than the apartment I had over the summer waiting for my house to be built. That gave me a lot of perspective and gave me pause, and I stand corrected. I’m really glad that this person commented and pointed that out, because it’s consistent with what I always say about being grateful for having more than enough.
So, consider that as you clean out your closets or do your other projects, do you really need all this stuff? What could you really donate? Do you need to have a storage unit? We have so much abundance here in the United States, and we really need to re-consider what we think enough means. In the meantime, I’m going to be moving my stuff in here tomorrow. The movers are bringing all this furniture, and I’m so excited to get it all put together. I’m going to be showing you my brand new closet really soon that I’m very excited about. And I’ve got some cool things that I’m putting in for the garage and the kitchen and my utility closet that I have – I don’t have a utility room anymore. So, there’s a lot of fun stuff to come in the weeks ahead.
In the meantime, if you ever need help with a move, I have moved so many times, including this one, with myself and my clients, I wrote a book about it. It’s called “The Improve Your Move Workbook,” and it’s 90-something pages of just checklists and all kinds of really chunky great information for you if you’re moving. So check that out at https://www.clutterdiet.com/movingbook.
In the meantime, may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to downsize or tips to simplify a move.
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