Ordinary Home: Decluttering our home without decluttering family culture
When minimalism becomes sterilization + our bathroom renovation
This is the “Ordinary Home” series: posts that invite you into our ordinary home, celebrating the simple joys of intentional homemaking.
But first, a couple homemaking updates I thought you guys would enjoy: a confession and an exciting renovation!
The confession
I looked around my home this week and saw this hanging on my wall, next to my bookshelves. It was a Christmas gift from my dear husband:
Yes, it’s a misattributed Plato quote (see previous post for my rant on this exact phenomenon).
I have tried many times to source these popular words, but I’ve never succeeded. The closest I have found is a paraphrase of Cicero from an 1886 essay by Sir John Lubbock:
"Cicero described a room without books as a body without a soul.
Dear readers, if you have a source for this quote, let me know!
Until then, in my horror, I have taken down the quotation and replaced it with something quite apropos beside my bookshelves: a framed checklist of the “100 Classics to Read in your Lifetime.” I’ve checked off 15 so far.
And as for that beautiful frame, I’ve replaced the quote with an image of Master M.S.’s The Visitation (1506), which hangs by our front door, where the visitors come, of course.
Much, much better. Can you decorate with too much sacred art? If my home starts to resemble a monastery, I can deal with that.
The renovation
In my second homemaking update, we have completely remodeled our downstairs guest bathroom, after a panic of discovering mold, wall damage, and realizing we really, really needed the exhaust fan to vent outside.
The fan was originally designed to vent into the laundry room next to it. Where the humid air then wafted through the louvre door and into the basement. Did I mention this house was quirky?
Instead of simply remediating the mold, we decided to tear everything out and design the bathroom again from scratch (thank God for the blessing of a savings that allowed us to take on the project, with a little help).
It was such a satisfying process, since the bathroom was an original 1970 pink and gold and wood abomination (apologies to any readers with an affinity for pink).
This is where we started:
We removed the shower doors after moving in, but it didn’t help much. These pictures were taken before the mold and wall damage.
After finding the mold, we hired a contractor and demo’d everything, including the walls.
After breathing a sigh of relief, I had fun shopping for tile and designing a whole new bathroom!
Substack informed me that including the progress photos made this post too long for email. So just imagine the 2-3 week process for yourself. The walls went back in, the shower floor was raised, ancient termite damage was fixed, and tile was laid.
And finally, here we are now:
Complete with the fixtures, vanity, and shower curtain I chose. And I am so happy with how it turned out.
We also had a new exhaust fan installed. This one vents outside. And it only took 53 years to make that upgrade. Did you know you can buy exhaust fans with bluetooth speakers? That was out of our budget.
And what’s that image above the towels? Oh…just more sacred art.
To any connoisseur upset at how I've cropped this image of Benvenuto Tisi’s The Annunciation, I hear you. (Click here to se the full image, which is in the public domain. I particularly enjoy the cat lounging by the fireplace.) But I had to work with the size of the image and the frame that I had. One day I’ll invest in high quality prints for our home.
And now, for the actual topic of today’s post:
Decluttering
Cleaning up and prettifying our bathroom started me on yet another whole-house declutter. Or maybe it was the ick-factor of the mold that made me want to purge everything and deep clean.
When we were first married, we lived in a 750 sq ft, one bedroom apartment. I can’t believe all our stuff fit neatly into that tiny space. That was five and a half years ago.
At this point, I’m probably three-plus years into more intentional, minimalistic homemaking. During those three years, we have had two babies and moved three times. Packing up a whole house three times over, moving states, and integrating the mountain of stuff that comes with having any number of children could motivate anyone to cut down on their worldly goods.
I’ve probably decluttered our whole house —every room, drawer, cabinet, closet, car, and bookshelf— two or three times over.
The first whole-house declutter took a long time, probably a year of dedicated work (thank you, military separations). The second one probably happened over a couple weeks. And now I can honestly go through and declutter our whole house in 2 dedicated days.
The mold panic taught me that.
Family culture: precious or purge-able?
When you’ve decluttered as a steady habit for years, something starts to happen. Yes, your home begins to look more open, breathable, and organized (not to mention so much easier to clean). But it could also become…sterilized.
Let me be more specific: it can start to look not like your home, but like it could be anybody’s home.
Honestly, I’ll always love an open, minimalistic look. See renovated bathroom photo above. So that’s not what I’m talking about when I say “sterile.”
But I don’t want to declutter our family culture.
I want people to come into our home and know it’s the Maza home, because they see evidence of our (well-organized) family culture in every room. They look at our home and get a teeny-tiny window into our soul.
The Pinterest boards of decluttered and beautiful homes usually have no culture, and that’s probably intentional, since they’re for a general audience. You probably won’t see anything that tells you much about the inhabitants, beyond some organized toys implying a few children live there.
Look, an aesthetic kitchen. They must eat.
I’ve sometimes wondered if the trend of decluttering has created more homes that see family culture as purge-able and have replaced it with generic, aesthetic decorating.
Where there could be a family photo, there’s a modern abstract painting.
Where there could be a cultivated home library (read my post on creating a home library), you can buy faux book decor to give the appearance of pretty, fake volumes on your shelves. Pottery Barn and Etsy will even sell you books based on the colors of their spines, to coordinate with the rest of your home. But do you even know what the titles are? Would you have ever bought those books otherwise? Read them?
(As an aside, I think storage boxes made to look like fake books are adorable, functional, and fun.)
Where there could be a beautiful religious statue, there’s an aesthetic-but-generic vase or abstract art piece.
Or maybe you like a certain color, but because neutrals are trendy, you’ve decorated in all neutral colors. And I say this as someone who LOVES neutrals. My husband makes fun of me: “your favorite color is beige. Your favorite shade of every other color is the beige of that color.”
Truly, warm neutrals will give you a glimpse of my authentic homemaking style: classy, Catholic, simple, rustic, vintage, homey.
But what about yours?
Stock photo homes
Like most things, there’s a healthy balance. This isn’t a post criticizing decluttering, or anyone’s love for abstract art, but one commentary on how our homes are left at the end of it all. Am I striving to live in a hotel or home?
Do I want my house to look like a stock photo?
If anything, the more I declutter, the more intentional my decor has become. Almost all of it now reflects our family culture, with almost no generic decor to be found, besides greenery and flowers. I love good touches of greenery in every room.
In fact, I’ve developed a rule-of-thumb for buying any type of decor:
Is it family-related, functional, religious, literary, or greenery?
This is my personal rule for decorating. Anything else gets decluttered.
In other words, wooden slats with cute phrases from Hobby Lobby are nowhere to be found in my home! Except one downstairs with the words “God Gave Me You,” because that was our first dance at our wedding (i.e. “family-related”).
Knick knacks of cute cats and tiny figures are non-existent. Abstract or generic paintings there are none. All books are real. Functional and cute organizational baskets abound.
But will I live and die by this rule for decor and decluttering? Yes and no.
This rule has helped immensely with deciding what to keep and what to get rid of in our home. And I feel like our decor has become only more special and intentional and reflective of our family as I’ve followed it. It’s made our home better, and my decisions as a homemaker easier.
So I’ll keep it as a general rule for now, and adjust as the years go on.
The ultimate purpose of minimizing
Although I have a lot to say on the practical side of decluttering, I’ve simply been thinking (maybe more importantly) about the end goal of all those donations to thrift shops:
How does decluttering help reflect our unique family culture?
If I’ve decluttered the extras in our home, what should be left is what most reflects us a family. Our home somehow becomes more and more our home and less and less a stock photo. All the daily essentials included. I don’t think toilet paper is reflective of our family culture, but you bet we keep that on hand!
And of course, stuff can only go so far in reflecting yourself or your family. Your presence has to do the rest. I think of people who live with almost nothing —much less cute antique decor they’ve spent years acquiring— and yet their presence alone speaks volumes about their soul.
I think that’s called being a saint.
I can’t help but want to be a saint with a lovingly organized and handmade home, while the Lord still blesses me with the means to have that responsibility as my primary “job.” The job that becomes the backdrop to my more-important vocations as mother and wife.
So what does our decluttered-but-very-Maza home look like? This is our little main living space, after the kids have gone to bed. That means I could clean without another four rounds of toys being dumped all over the floor.
Don’t confuse “decluttered” with “never messy” (as I look around at the chaos beyond my laptop).
I’ll end here, under 2000 words. Which is what I call “self control.”
God bless America, and happy 4th of July!
You make a really interesting point about something being "in style" vs. actually reflecting the people who are in the home. A really good decluttering / purchasing rule to live by.
I'll get back to you if I ever figure out who decided the soul of the home was the library - lol. None of us are perfect.