Living in 150 square feet takes skill and practicality

Living in 150 square feet takes skill and practicality, sometimes. Most of the time, I need to keep my belongings down to a minimum for having only a few spaces to stash clothes, art supplies, food and toiletries. Yet living minimally for most of my adult life has made me master this in my own way. I don’t need much to be happy. It’s amazing to me that two dogs, my husband and me fit in this small space with all the things we like to do.

When we moved out of the 1,000 square-foot cabin we lived in for three years, I wasn’t sure how we were going to do it. I had a whole pantry filled with jars of bulk items, an entire room for crafts and making music, the basement was a garage for my husband’s trades business, the living room was filled with books and crystals. Surely, I was in trouble. Surprisingly, I pared down to the essentials and fit everything in the camper with room to spare. We do have a small storage unit back in the Midwest, but here in Arizona we are able to keep everything in the camper and the back of the truck.

Most of the things I own fit in this tiny camper, although I feel like a tiny mouse stashing things here and there, cabinets and compartments often looking like a rat’s nest. I do my best to organize, I really do, but it is so hard with the daily shuffle and constantly moving things in and out of their places. For some reason, pulling out the seat cushions to grab something from under them feels like opening a trap door to a scary attic, so if we need to use something more than once a day, it will come out and stay out or get shoved into the overhead cabinet above my husband’s seat.

I am a creature comfort person and spend most of my alone time (and working hours) here in my camper. Books, yarn, paints, paper, beading supplies, guitars, ukulele, clarinet, violin, yoga mats, cooking supplies, tech, cameras, and print making stuff find their way woven into the storage compartments inside. Outside, tools, snowboards, skates, shoes, and paper products Tetris their way in the long outer compartment we have. In the summer, it gets filled with garden seeds & supplies, tools, and extra food and books and we put our winter sports in storage.

Since we started out our adult lives living tiny out of our car, we learned quickly how to live with less and to live the art of “let it flow.” If we got sick of our wardrobe, we would donate what we had and buy a few new shirts to take it’s place. The art of minimalism includes lots of thrift stores and thrift shopping, adjusting our lifestyle to the season, and letting go of the sentimentality of material items. The beauty of living in the digital age is the ability to take infinite amounts of pictures, create thousands of stories and essays, and to stash them online on a cloud, external hard drive, or creative platform.

So much abundance exists in living this tiny life. There is never a dull moment. Although making casseroles, food prepping, and having friends over is harder, we find other ways of doing these things outside of our home. It is nice to be able to live somewhere interesting that we can spend much of our time outdoors instead of at home. We spend time with our friends out in the world doing extreme sports or going out for some food we could never make at home. The experience of life is more available to us when we live tiny, as we’re more willing to go out and make memories in the world.

Our bout with minimalism causes us to buy much less too. On a weekly basis, we buy our groceries, but even that involves us shopping more often because of our limited space. We see our grocery store friends once or twice a week and it’s like a reunion every time. We spend more time talking to them and catching up than it takes to shop! We aren’t able to buy clothes or trinkets or other things that may be useless to us because there is no room for anything in the camper that isn’t practical or usable in some way. If it doesn’t get used every month, it goes down into the outside compartment, and if it never gets used there then we don’t need it.

Does having less create appreciation for what we do have? I would say absolutely! When we lived in that cabin, I had so much stuff that wouldn’t get used. Craft supplies sat in an old dresser, unloved. I stashed away hobbies that would never bring me joy out of guilt for getting rid of them. My husband had to refine his business a bit to be able to fit everything in the back of the truck, which helped him niche down. I found that I was much less productive with art and self-care in that big cabin, but now that I am living in such a small space, I feel much more focused and able to engage in the things that matter most to me — painting, writing, cooking almost every meal, walking my dogs, personal care, and of course going out into the world to roller skate, snowboard, hike, and travel.

Tiny living isn’t for everyone, but after experimenting with moving 15 times in the last ten years, I’ve found it is for me. Do you think you could live in 150 square feet? What are your thoughts on minimalism?

Much love,

Ashley