ORGANISED REAL LIFE
When minimalist mum of two, Casey Jones, 37, prepared to welcome her baby boy into the world, she didn’t know that her life was about to change forever...
Swapping out my work trousers for worn-out jeans, I set to work painting my room.
We were decorating our bedroom for our baby boy, who we were due to welcome into the world in March 2022.
Only, I wanted it to be a clutterfree space.
Scouring Facebook Marketplace for cots and baby carriers, I picked out the bare essentials.
We wanted the baby to have a calm space to move into, and didn’t see the need to fill it with lots of random stuff.
I had been practising minimalism since 2017, when, needing to pay off some debt, my partner, Jason, and I downsized.
We were about to move from a five bed to a two bed in Ontario, Canada, and had mountains of stuff to get rid of. How did we manage to accumulate all this stuff? I thought.
Now that it was all in front of me, it was hard to believe it had room to go anywhere.
‘Jamie! Adelyn! Come and help clear your rooms,’ I called to my kids, now nine and 10.
Their room was filled with piles of toys they had never touched, old drawings they’d never looked at twice and clothes they had grown out of.
Adelyn and Jamie saw the fun in the decluttering, but Jason was a tough nut to crack.
He was a bit of a hoarder and hated getting rid of things.
But gradually, he began to fill up his own bin bags, and in the autumn, we moved house.
Moving into our new home felt like a blank canvas and hanging up my favourite pictures of the four of us on the wall, I felt a sense of calm.
‘Wow, cleaning has taken me half the time!’ I said to Jason, 37.
‘I do feel calmer,’ he said in agreement.
It meant we had more time for Jamie and Adelyn, too.
Before, I spent so much time doing housework and tidying up after them, we barely had any time together. I was amazed at how much good came from getting rid of things. Looking up ‘decluttering’ on Google, I kept coming across the same term – minimalism.
A minimalist person pursues a lifestyle that focuses less on material possessions and more on what they value, I read. It sounded amazing. Only, in 2021, everything changed, and my research was pushed to the sidelines.
Despite thinking I was done with having kids, the universe had other plans, and I fell pregnant in May.
‘We’re going to need more space,’ I said to Jason one evening, looking around our small house. ‘I don’t want the kids to have to share.’ So, four months later, we moved into our new four-bedroom home.
And the next few months, I spent my spare time prepping for my baby boy�
