What Sarah asked about zoning for belongings

 A few days ago I wrote a post called Retrenching, and in the comments to it a conversation developed about managing belongings, where Marie Kondo was mentioned (otherwise known as KonMari). I remarked that I like her principle of zoning — each person in the household having a zone allocated for which they are responsible, so it quickly becomes clear who should be keeping what tidy, and you don't get areas developing that are nobody's responsibility. In that conversation Sarah made the good point that it can be tricky know what to do about the communal areas. She said this:

I haven't quite figured out how to delineate spaces for family members. There are, of course, bedrooms; but my three daughters share one with one closet, one dresser, and one funny kitchen-like cabinet mounted near the ceiling (!). Their items kinda just stew together. As for communal spaces, there's the bathrooms, living room, kitchen, dining area, and garage. The garage is the easiest space to divide as there are a lot of shelves, but that, too, is tricky, because a lot of the items are communal (gardening and repair tools, etc.). How do you organize zones in your home?

I started to reply, but quickly realised my comment would be ludicrously long, as home organisation hasn't been exactly standard in my case, though it has been successful: so that's what this post is about.

The key point for me is that I was blessed to encounter St Francis of Assisi and his emphasis on holy poverty, back in 1972 when I was only fifteen. My family was not rich, and my mother was an absolute star at home décor and household management. She never wanted a job outside the home, so she in effect made a career out of climbing the property ladder during the property boom years of that time. Our homes got grander and grander, and she began to accumulate rental houses as well, steadily progressing, moving house and reinvesting. But in terms of disposable income, we still lived on a shoestring and had very few possessions. By the time I was old enough at fifteen to get paid work on the weekends and evenings and school holidays, I had already discovered St Francis and holy poverty, the power and beauty of what we nowadays call minimalism.

Thus the places where I lived had to be in tip-top condition to be bought and sold in rapid succession (a bit like military families moving in and out of accommodation), and there was no money to accumulate personal belongings, and the insane proliferation of mass-produced objects hadn't happened yet, and even if it had I wouldn't have wanted loads of things because of St Francis.

Much (not all) of the work I did as a girl and young woman was with monks or nuns. In the year between school and university, I lived a few months in a twelve-foot caravan when I was working with some monks in Devon, then in a shared room in the nurses' home with some nursing nuns in Hertfordshire. When I went to university (in York) I quickly became involved with the Roman Catholic chaplaincy and from there part of a live-in student faith community where half a dozen of us moved out of our university rooms into a four-bedroom rented Victorian row house of medium proportions where we all lived together. Space was tight and we used the stairs as the seating for our chapel where we sang the Office, the half-landing being the space for the cantor and reader.

I married when I was twenty and still at university, and lived with my husband for a while in another twelve-foot caravan at the edge of a field of cabbages on a farm, then in the downstairs (no bathroom) of a disused rectory. 

Then, our university courses complete, we moved to Hertfordshire and lived in a barn for a while, then borrowed money to buy a little two-bedroomed Victorian row house down in Hastings, where our first four children were born.

Then we upgraded to a three-bedroomed Victorian row house where our fifth child was born. There we usually had other people living with us — prisoners on weekends out of prison as their release time drew near, a prisoner with nowhere else to go after his release, a boy who needed somewhere to go after release from hospital following a failed suicide attempt, a young man leaving home — that sort of thing.

Meanwhile we were good friends with a Bruderhof community a few miles inland — the Bruderhof are like the Hutterites (in fact they were Hutterites at that time, though they aren't now) — and they all live in allocated family accommodation a bit like military families, and they hold all things in common, so a sort of family life version of monastic holy poverty. Their ways of doing things influenced me a lot.

Like my mother, I was home-based (though I worked various casual jobs at various times), working as a writer and later as a church pastor.

Eventually we moved into church accommodation that went with the churches I pastored, and when my first husband left (in somewhat disastrous circumstances that cause us to lose our home as well) I was left with five still not fledged kids and no family home or income. I made a living working in a shop and as a palliative care assistant and crafting ceremonies and writing, and we re-started our home scattered in a string of tiny apartments near each other. Then I went back into pastoral ministry, and married Bernard and moved into his tiny cottage in the woods, then he died a year or so later and I moved out so his son could have his home; back into a two-roomed apartment shared with one of my daughters. Then I married Tony and moved away from Hastings to Aylesbury. This necessitated leaving my work as a pastor (of six churches at that time), so I earned my living by taking in lodgers, and different family members also lived with us at different times.

Then we moved back to Hastings because I hated being away from my family, and bought yet another Victorian row house (a bigger one, four bedrooms) for Tony and me and three of my daughters.

This last year is the first time ever that I have lived in a normal home (a small three-bedroomed 1930s house), just me and my husband (for size — that's a Smart Car). So I've moved house about ten times since I was a mother, and several times as a young adult before that.

But I have always been what I call the house angel — the person responsible for running the home, allocating the accommodation and organising the domestic space. Except for the year I was married to Bernard. His cottage was pretty much a shrine to his previous wife (I met him when I took her funeral seven years before I married him), and he could allocate me only two drawers and half a cupboard for my personal possessions. During the illness of which he died, one of my daughters came to live with us, moving into a caravan in the garden. The morning he died we moved out to vacate the house for his son, and my Nissan Micra was all we needed to move all the possessions of both of us back into my two-roomed apartment in Hastings.

So my life has been characterised by many moves and ingeniously shared space; all made possible — in fact easy — by owning almost nothing, and habits acquired from monks and nuns and Bruderhof members and St Francis (he lived in a donkey shed until the donkey moved back in). 

Therefore allocation of space has been crucial in my role as house angel, or we'd have lived in a dirty muddle.

This blog post is getting rather long; I'll try to be brief in explaining what we did.

It was important to me that we had no debts and no external storage — no stuff stored in relatives' garages or homes (we ourselves never had a garage), nothing in the attic and sheds (apart from overflow people, usually me) except camping gear and Christmas decorations in the attics and relevant tools in the sheds, no rented storage. What couldn't be neatly and sanely accommodated in our bedrooms and cupboards was sold or given away.

Toys and musical instruments (we had a lot of those) and art/craft materials were kept in boxes, and books on shelves, and I ensured or oversaw that they were all put away at the end of the day. I taught my kids at home for a couple of years when they were young, which imposed further necessity for imaginative management of the space.

In the 3-bed Victorian row house we lived in for most of my daughters' childhood, we built a shed in the garden for an extra bedroom, some of the time my husband and I slept in the attic (a regular attic, no windows, no floorboards, accessed by a stepladder), and we subdivided the large bedroom to make two. We also re-divided the two reception rooms that the previous inhabitants had knocked through into one (as was fashionable at the time) to create accommodation for ex-prisoners or prisoners on leave.

So we did building work to divide the house into zones for privacy, and each person was responsible for ordering their space, and the common areas were small, or sometimes non-existent. For instance, in the two-roomed apartment I shared with various different ones of my daughters, she would have the bed in one room, which had a tiny ensuite bathroom (shared by both of us), while I slept on the floor in the living room, where the kitchen was in a sort of alcove off the living space. And in Bernard's cottage, the only space that wasn't his was my two drawers and half a cupboard.

Therefore nobody could have very much, and everything they did have was neatly stored in boxes and kept in their own rooms. It was my job to strategise how to use the space so everything looked homely and harmonious, there was enough shelving and seating and somewhere for everyone to sleep, enough crockery and cutlery and cooking things, but absolutely nothing in excess because there was nowhere to put it.

At the point our twins came to the stage of coming out of nappies (US diapers), I thought "this is going to be a nightmare" and we changed our carpets for vinyl flooring, including on the stairs. So when we did that, I wrote the names of my five children on the lowest five of the stairs, one on each stair. As the day (or days) went by, anything a child had left out downstairs I put on her stair to be taken up to her bedroom. The rule was that when the stair was problematically cluttered you had to take your stuff up (or before that, ideally).

Saturday was pocket money day, and no one could have her pocket money until her room was tidy.

At Christmas time at our chapel they asked every year for good used toys to give to children with none, so we did an annual cull then.

I regularly reviewed clothes and toys, though never moving anything on without permission. Musical instruments — and we had a piano, guitars, recorders and flutes, a harp, a sitar at one point, music stands and boxes of sheet music, a tuba, a euphonium, a trombone, a bugle, various minor percussion instruments, a violin, a viola and a mandolin — were all stored as neatly as I could manage, either under the bed of the person who played it, or adjacent to the piano or whatever I could come up with. Music stands and scores were kept in stacking boxes beside the piano.

We had no kitchen gadgets (coffee maker, ice-cream maker, mixer, blender, bread-maker, nothing like that), and there was no room for a freezer or tumble-drier or dishwasher because we kept our piano in the kitchen.

I firmly believed that leadership is done by inspiration and example. Our kids knew their parents slept on a mattress on the living room floor or in the attic or the box room, or wherever was the smallest and lowliest available place; they were grateful to have a proper bed and their own place to play and keep their belongings. They never grumbled or asked for anything, and they knew all about the Little Poor Man of Assisi, and about Jesus who couch-surfed his way through Galilee and was born at the Tower of the Flock at Migdal Eder, because there wasn't room in the kataluma at Joseph's relatives' place.

In the house we live in now, I have a room of my own, and items of furniture — a bed and two chests of drawers. I still have almost nothing of my own, and regularly cull what I do have. In my bedroom we keep the prepper pantry and the freezer and the (artificial) Christmas tree, because I have two built-in wardrobes and don't need one of them. I own various pictures and decorative half-moon wall shelves dotted round the house to make it pretty — including this calligraphy.

I try not to accumulate stuff. Having a whole house for just the two of us gives the luxury of more thinking time — for instance I have two folding tables in the garden shed that are only occasionally needed (eg to make an improvised kitchen in the living room if work is needed on the actual kitchen). They are very sturdy and very useful, but most of the time we don't use them at all. In former times I would have given them away, but here there is space to keep them in case someone else in the family needs them. But I wouldn't hesitate to give them away if I meet someone who could do with them. Similarly, we have one or two more chairs than we need, and I'll pass those along when I meet someone who needs them — and I do; the Lord sends people my way who don't have much and need help.

In the house where we lived (shared with my family) before we came here, the communal spaces had only communal things — telly, sofa, chairs, table etc. Our personal things, even towel, shampoo, toothbrush etc, were kept in our own rooms, except my husband who had his own shower room, which he cleaned and managed and everything in it was his. Same here: the sheds are his, and he has a study, and it's up to him to monitor and clean them. He also has stuff still in the shed that was his workshop at our old house, but that's under gradual negotiation between him and my daughters, because what they want to keep and want him to take has been in consideration. But I am always on the case and very frank about telling people that they should respect and consider others in the way they use and allocate space. It's a precious resource, and part of the way we love one another. And, as Toilette Lippe said, "Problems arise when things accumulate".

So that's it, really — the spaces I have managed and the ways I have managed them. I've found that by living in a smaller space than you think you need, and by owning almost nothing, the problem doesn't exactly solve itself but it stays manageable. I brought one other thing to the mix — I am determined, fairly ruthless, and very hard to argue with.

Dang — Clarence the cat is hungry — I'll come back and check this for typos etc later.