Downsizing – the tiny maximalist

Books, Books, Too Many Books!

If anyone had said this to me for most of the past 20 years, I would’ve said:

There is no such thing as too many books!
Sally of the past

While I’d love to keep believing this (and I do believe there’s no such thing as too many books in the world in general), one can indeed have too many books in one’s house…more specifically, in one’s tiny house.

[Side note: I’m not ever gonna be one to say, “Just covert all your books to e-books! No big deal.” I personally hate (or perhaps just have never gotten accustomed to) reading on an e-reader. And, more importantly, I have always believed there’s some vital aesthetic and psychological aspects of reading actual books that can’t be experienced through an e-reader. All that being said, we are getting rid of some of the books for which we own digital copies. There is, after all, only so much space.]

I currently have about 8 or 9 full-size bookcases full of books in my house, plus a few smaller shelves-full and the big piles on mine and Jason’s nightstands. And that’s a dramatic reduction from the 15 or 16 I had not that long ago. Each of the last 3 or 4 times I’ve moved, I’ve had over 50 cases of books! Like, the bankers box size! Just ask a core group of 5 or 6 amazing friends who have helped move those boxes 4 or 5 times. Just ask me, who’s packed and unpacked those same books that same number of times.

When I moved to the lower 48 from Alaska many years ago, in the still-early days of my book hoarding, I shipped 14 Rubbermaid tubs full of books from Wasilla to memphis. (And, let me tell you, even at the Media Rate 15 years ago, that was not a cheap shipment.) I’ve shipped boxes of books to Greece. I’ve shipped boxes of books back from Greece. The truth is, some of my books have been more places than lots of people I know.

For so many years, I’ve maintained this weird contradiction as someone who moves a lot and someone who has lots of heavy books. I guess I’m finally tired of it. I know my husband is.

How do I choose what stays and what goes? Well, it’s obviously a very personal decision, as personal as the reason we are keeping each book on our shelves. Like lots of my downsizing, the culling of books has become a very philosophical process.

First, what are the reasons we hold onto books?

We really love this book and want to read it every couple years.
We read this book once in college and wrote a paper on it, and it has lots of underlining and writing in the margins that might be important if we ever want to read (and understand) it again.
We were given this book by someone special or procured it someplace special.
We want to share it with our children/grandchildren when they are of appropriate age.
My child needs to read books, and these are the books I hope she’ll like.
My child needs to read books…to take tests on (specifically Accelerated Reader or AR tests?) in school, and these all fit those criteria.
These are books I really want to read as soon as I have time. (When that will be, exactly, I don’t know.)
These are books I desperately want to want to read sometime, but they just never sound appealing.
These are books I’ve never read, never really even wanted to read, but feel guilty about the fact that I never read or wanted to read them.
Owning these books makes me feel smart.
Owning these books makes me look smart.
Owning these books is embarrassing to me, but I still love reading them…and so hide them back in the bedroom.
This book is just…beautiful.
These books I bought for information on a very specific area (cookbooks, country or area-specific travel books, craft books, self-help books), and I use them a lot.
Those same sort of books that I bought hoping I’d use but never got around to using or reading.
And many more….

I’ve tried, mostly successfully, to get rid of the books I’ve had around just because I read them in college and think they look fancy and academic. I’ve also gotten rid of books that I want to want to read and know I never actually will. I get rid of the books my daughter reads for tests as soon as she’s done with them…when she lets me. Also, I’ve been trying to get rid of those travel/cooking/craft books that I can’t honestly say I’ll ever have time for.

Some “definite keeps”…that really need to be sorted through one more time.

Books, like anything, can become a collection. We like the look and feel of them around in our houses. (I even used to own a book about “Decorating With Books.”) We like what they represent. We like the smell and feel of them. We like the memories they elicit. I see certain books on my shelves and remember exactly how I felt when I read them the first time or who I was with or what my professor was teaching that day. Will I have that feeling if I get rid of that particular copy and someday check out a different copy from the library? I don’t know. But I know that I won’t have room for 50 cases of books in my school bus tiny house. And, I know that holding on “just in case” is kinda the reason I got into this “too much stuff” situation to begin with.

A pile of “maybes” from my recent book cull

I am keeping a lot of books. To read. To read to and with my daughter. To learn about places I’ve never been and places I’ve lived for years. Some will move into the tiny house with us. Some will stay boxed in a storage unit until I need/want to switch them out for some others in the tiny house. The rest? I’ve taken lots to used bookstores over the last 4 or 5 years, just to get a little credit to, you guessed it, buy more books. (But, you end up with 1-4 books you want now in exchange for the 60 or 70 books you weren’t that into anymore.) Some have gone to thrift stores and hopefully new homes.

I went to a memorial for a dear professor of mine recently where his family had laid out all his books in a big pile on a table, for each of us to take one or two to remember him by. I found one on a subject that was very interesting to me, and I loved reading his notes in the margins and seeing what he had underlined. I also found a book I had given to him after graduation, hand-written dedication from me and all. I grabbed that one, too. The whole thing definitely left an impression, maybe because books are such a personal thing, meant to be shared. I’m thinking we’re gonna have some big party here in the month before we move into the bus. I’m thinking books as favors.

Downsizing at Christmas

Gifts, decoration, events, food–there just seems to be so much much at Christmas time. Like so many parents, this is the hardest time of year for me to show restraint, to say no to my kid. To buy less, do less, eat less. But, what’s Christmas like when you plan to move into a bus in 6 months? Well, we’re definitely not doing less. But we are trying to have and buy less.

Don’t worry. We’ll have a few more gifts than this. Still, it’ll be a lot less than last year.

I have always been a gift-giver. It’s what they call my “love language,” or, one of the main ways I show my love. For most of my adult life, I’ve had a “gift closet” where I accumulated gifts for people throughout the whole year. Whenever I saw something that someone I loved would like, I’d buy it and put it away for the next gift-giving time. This usually resulted in lots of gifts for my friends and family members. I was a maximalist in gift-giving, just like I was in most other areas of my life.

When I had a child, my gift-giving really went into high gear. All the things I thought she should have (wooden blocks, plastic dinosaurs, dolls, duplos, a play kitchen) combined with all the things I never got to have and all the things she actually asked for to make for, well, too many gifts under the tree. I’d hear about how giving books at Christmas was a good tradition. So, I’d add a few books under the tree. I’d see an adorable ornament featuring some character she liked, so ornament-giving also became a yearly tradition. Just to be fair, I also had most of these same traditions with my husband, giving him a few books and a Darth Vader ornament in addition to whatever else I’d gotten him. (I’d then be hurt when I only had a couple gifts from him…but that’s a story for another time.) All the while, I was wondering how I could ever teach my child to be happy with what she had. And, I’d try to portray our Christmas’s as modest, low key affairs. Yeah, there was some difficult rationalization and justification going on in my head.

As I’ve become less focused on (and more fed up with) stuff, some of my gift-giving has waned, or become more manageable. It’s always a shock when I get to a week before Christmas and realize, “Oh. I never got a gift for so-and-so.” (Just as a side note, I’ve also experienced less expectation of gifts myself as my own gift giving has “downsized.”)

This year, as we anticipate having almost no room very soon, it’s hard to know what to give to my immediate family–useful things like travel clothes, small things like nice ballpoint pens, and things you use up like candy and fancy lotion.

Another idea that’s all over these days is the “experiences instead of stuff” gift. I like this a lot. I like it less just because it’s so trendy right now. But, that being said, this year we planned a family gift/trip on Dec 23rd as a big part of our Christmas presents. We stayed a night at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville (in one of the balcony rooms that look out on the conservatory that we’d always wanted to stay in!) and took ourselves the next afternoon, today actually, to see the Nutcracker at the Ryman Theater. It was a blast. Truly.

On the balcony of our hotel room at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville at Christmas time — our “family Christmas gift.”

Would my daughter have been understanding if our great family time in Nashville meant no gifts under the tree? Probably not. It’s a process. And we’ll probably always have a few gifts there under the tree. They might be small things, though. Of course, some pretty great things come in very small packages!

Can a maximalist go tiny? I sure hope so…

I have accepted my maximalism. I don’t apologize for it. I’ve often gloried in it as I hung a whole wall of frame-to-frame pictures or sorted my hundreds (thousands?) of buttons into color categories and put them in jars or opened my drawer to choose from my many different colored and patterned shirts.

But, what happens when a maximalist decides (for many reasons that we will go into later) to “go tiny”? Will I inevitably become a minimalist? How hard will it be to get rid of some of my stuff, and how much of it will have to go? Will it be donated? Will it earn money? How will my family cope?

I’m going to be living the answers to these questions over the next 6 months. It’s gonna get ugly. It’s going to be a lot of hard work. I’m already completely overwhelmed. But, man, I’m pretty darn excited.

What in the world is a maximalist?

Do you love rich, colorful pattens? Do you like to “collect” things? Do you, in fact, have a collection or collections? Do you mix eras and styles and textures in your decor? Do you always err on the side of too much rather than too little? If so, you might be a maximalist like me.

A maximalist is the opposite of a minimalist. Those of us with maximalist tendencies are drawn to excess and even redundancy. (One might be so bold as to call my 12 teapots a little redundant. Especially since my husband is the only one around here who drinks tea.)

Maximalists don’t have to be clutter freaks or hoarders. We just like the feel of more around us. Bare walls make us nervous. Our refrigerators usually stay at maximum capacity. If we travel, we like to visit a new place every couple of days and fit in as much as we can. If we are crafty sorts of people, our craft closets/fabric drawers are so full of beautiful prints and stripes and solids that it’s sometimes hard to close them. When we find a half-price sale on our favorite shirts, we think, “Great! I can buy twice as many!” (And not, like my husband thinks, “Oh, good, I only have to pay half as much.”)

If any of this describes you, then welcome to my tribe! I love your style, friend.

A few of my favorite collections: