Chaos and clutter

 

The work area in my tiny kitchen.
That's where i cook, including hotplate and toaster oven. No stove.

The chaos in the cottage is subsiding—Jacob assembled the compost tumbler, and it sits proudly in the driveway, the computer cords arrived and I have my remote keyboard back, Sophie has a new supply of dog food. The only thing still not in proper order is my TCU email account—it won’t talk to my phone, and when I tried to re-install it, TCU told me there was no such account. Sigh. It will take a rather long call to the Help Desk, and I had other things on my mind this morning. So I put it off. I do still get that email on my computer, but I cannot send pictures from my phone.

Today I devoted myself to de-cluttering the cottage—sorting out what had accumulated on the coffee table, putting away laundry, putting Christmas cards into a package to save though I will probably never look at them again. Just generally clearing the surfaces. When I first moved into the cottage, Jacob was about ten, and I remember telling him clearly that in small spaces it was more important than ever to keep things neat and not to accumulate things you don’t need. About six months later, Colin was here, and he was puzzled about why the cottage looked so different to him. Finally, he said, “You’ve got more stuff. It’s more lived in.” There’s a fine line between “lived in” and cluttered. And I am, alas, like anyone else—I accumulate stuff that I don’t really need. Like the springform pan I just bought, or the sushi dishes I got in a White Elephant exchange which I finally put on the shelf with wine glasses this morning. Good thing I don’t have glass-fronted cabinets. Life in the cottage is a constant challenge of finding places for new things and deciding what I can part with. In that, I am goaded by Jordan who constantly asks, “Do you use this?”

My cottage is about six hundred square feet, spacious compared to some tiny homes. Since I moved in, I have become fascinated with the layout of tiny houses, and I follow every link to pictures of interiors. For some reason I don’t understand, I am drawn to those articles that tell you what John Q. Smith and his wife Susie did to convert a school bus into a livable home. I don’t find most of them livable. The interior invariably looks cluttered to me, and I look in vain for someplace comfortable to sit with company. Utilitarian is good up to a point, but I also want my creature comforts—and a certain order and tidiness is part of that. Many of those conversions—and other tiny houses—have sleeping lofts with ladders or steep stairs without railings—that would never have done for me, even in my salad days. Aside from the fact that I was never surefooted on stairs, I’d be afraid I’d sleepwalk in the night and take a tumble.

Sometimes I think it’s a competition among designers of tiny houses to see who can build the tiniest that is still functional. One lack I’ve noticed, not just in the bus conversions, is that there is no desk in almost all of these designs. Now I know not everyone spends as much desk time as I do in a day but still, don’t people have to have a spot where they can pay bills and keep records, send some emails, etc.? Somehow that says something about the tiny house approach to life that is significant, but I’m not sure how.

My cottage is about as tiny as I want to get—a living/office area, postage stamp kitchen, bedroom with a walk-in closet and a bathroom that, considering everything, is plenty spacious. It's just right for me, and I don't need more--except maybe more kitchen. I don’t think I can imagine getting any smaller. Were I to add space, it would be to enlarge the kitchen. I have said if I thought I was going to be cooking for another twenty years, I would invest in a top-notch kitchen designer to give me a kitchen, given the space, designed for efficiency and wheelchair cooking. Not a gamble I’m willing to take.

Long story short, I love my cottage and will continue to try to keep it as neat and uncluttered as possible. But bus conversions and the like are for the young at heart and adventuresome in spirit, neither of which describes me. That said, I know a novelist who, retired from her day job, lives and writes in a van conversion with her cat and travels all over the country, parking for a few days at a time in campsites to catch up on her writing. She loves it! My horoscope says such fiddle-footedness is not for me. I am a homebody rooted in place.