I love art. I love looking at art. I love making art. I love trying new forms of art. Its like therapy for me. Not cheaper by any means, but very, very good for my soul!
At the House of Wales, I had transformed the downstairs living room into an art studio. I had ripped up the carpet and had a cool concrete floor that always felt eclectic to me. I had a painters table, a high top workstation, three book shelves full of ‘stuff’ and two cabinets with paper and die cutting machines.
On a cool, rainy day I could spend 4 hours down there barely stopping for a glass of water. It was my safe, creative, totally mine, space. And I really, really loved it.
When we started looking at downsizing, we only looked at three-bedroom places. One office for MP and one for me and my art. We knew from being at the Baby House, I was going to have to have space to do my craft if it was going to be our home. Pulling everything in and out of tidy bins each time I wanted to work, wasn’t acceptable.
Then, we walked into the two-bedroom condo on the fourth floor and we both knew it was where we were going to live. At first, thinking about it was just fun. Then, we went back to see it again and started asking the tough questions…
- MP has to have an office, so where does my stuff go?
- Could we share the space?
- Is it big enough for two completely different uses?
These may not seem like tough questions, but MP and I do some thing very differently. Like…when he works his office is spotless. Every pen (he only uses one at a time) is at a perfect perpendicular to the desk. He has one pad of paper out with notes neatly scribed on their designated lines. His desk has no scraps of paper or sticky notes or stray paperclips. Just clean, organized work space. It’s one of the things that makes him so great at what he does.
Then there is me when I ‘work’. It brings me great pleasure to be so deeply involved in something that all the scraps of paper end up on the floor or tubes of paint lay open on the table. Who has time to worry about those things when I have a project that is coming together! When I get halfway through a project and it isn’t coming out quite right, I set it aside and wait for inspiration to come. At the HofW that meant half painted canvases along the walls and cut out dies scattered here and there so they could be added unexpectedly to a project that was then perfect.
As you can see, the idea of sharing a workspace was…well…worrisome. So, we talked about it. What would sharing look like. He mostly uses his office during the week and I mostly use my studio on the weekends. So, we compromised. He would share his office chair, and I would make sure the top of my workspace was cleaned off before I went to work on Mondays. That way, I had the whole weekend to leave stuff out and he had a tidy workspace Monday-Friday.
The other part of moving was I had to take a whole art studio’s worth of supplies and space and narrow it down to a closet and a workstation. I was more than a little concerned about how to make this work. While I may not be a tidy crafter, I am a LEAN one and I don’t want to have to open a box and rummage every time I need a pair of scissors. That makes the process ugly to me. So, I found a few new ways to store things. I have open shelving in the closet that makes things easy to access. MP has been gracious about allowing me to have the entire closet in the spare room (I think he may have one small box on a top shelf). I have a rolling cart that comes out and stays out all weekend with the things I use most on it. I have organized all my paper by color and put it in hanging folders. I looked at each thing as I packed and decided whether to keep it. Most of my supplies came with me. A few oddities got donated or given to friends.
Its not a whole studio with a cement floor anymore, but it is a wonderful and bright place to work. Sometime MP joins me on the weekends and plays his drums or writes to soft music and we both work on our projects in the same space. I like those times a lot. Something about the independence of working on our own things but being together at the same time, makes those days incredibly intimate. I always laugh a little when we meet on the patio at the end of one of those days with a cocktail and one of us asked the other…”How was your day”?
Its really important to know what the ‘needs’ in your life are and what the things are that are just nice. I NEED a place to practice art. It brings me a peace and calm like few other things can. I need to have a creative outlet and I need to know the space is mine. I was willing to exchange things that were less important to me for a place to be creative and practice art.
If nothing else, I hope this shows you that everyone can do this their own way. There are no rules. There are some people that might think I am crazy for using so much of our limited space on art. Maybe your thing is cooking (that’s my second by the way) or a musical instrument. You can live minimally and still have the things you love most. That’s the point! You have more time and space for those things if you weed out all the clutter of the things that are just filler.
What have you made space for in your life that brings you the most joy? I would suggest you always find a way to keep those things regardless of the size of your home. They make you who you are and who others love.
I’m off to paint or cut paper or make cards. Until next time…
~rache
Middle Age Minimalism 