
I deviated form my usual pattern of buying books secondhand or visiting the library to buy a new book this month because the chances of it coming up secondhand in the UK was too remote. In the US yes, but the UK? No. Naturally within minutes of it being delivered it turned up secondhand on Amazon. Sheesh.
By the way, am I the only person who likes buying new books because of how they smell? That heady whiff of ink and glue gets me every time.
So...I've lately become a little obsessed with the idea of a smaller house. Perhaps it's the heady romantic notion that it might not need cleaning as often as this one that does it for me, or maybe the idea of a much smaller mortgage that we can pay off faster and retire sooner. I've been scouring the net for resources on small living and found this: Little House on a Small Planet by Shay Solomon.
I knew I was on to a winner when I read the first paragraph of the introduction:
Many of us know someone who has suffered the consequences of an inflated mortgage, an overwhelming construction project, or a house simply too large to keep clean. Will our dream home always be a celebration of excess, and a drain on our lives?
How much space does it take to be happy? Working in construction, I watched people's dream houses balloon into unmanageable giants. I saw the effect on homeowners, the psychological, social and financial toll, and I looked for new options that could lead them to a simpler, happier life."
The book is geared for the US market, so much of it refers to the phenomenon of those huge spacious homes that are common over there. I can certainly vouch for that, having lived in America for a year in a 'small' two-bed condo that took up the same space as a good-sized three-bed bungalow in England. Yet despite the cultural differences of this book, I can see many similarities. Much like American culture, English culture is starting to believe that bigger is better and that a bigger home is a sign of success.
However, I'm one of those irritating flies in the ointment that sees a different story (I just wish I'd seen it sooner though!). Bigger house = bigger mortgage = higher bills to run and maintain (plus sometimes extra hired help to do the latter) = more money needing to be earnt = working longer to pay for it all and being tied to the stress of a daily treadmill with no escape.
The book explores the lives and homes of many people who have already realised this concept is disconnected thinking and tells their story, with a view to helping you rethink what you have and what you actually need to make you happy.

Tiny home; RowdyKittens photostream on Flickr
We bought our house - a three/four bed semi-detached - because I think we were surprised by how much we could get for our money compared to what we had 20 minutes away down the motorway. That is not a good basis for buying a property and I believe now that was a mistake.
Including bathrooms we have nine rooms and a large-ish lobby. We routinely use four of them, day in day out. We occasionally visit - and by occasionally I mean once every week to two weeks - another four of them. The last we don't go in more than once a month. In fact, I'd go so far as to say three of the rooms are used as store rooms - my hobby room (not been in for five months although Martin pops in to check the hedgehogs while they are hibernating), Martin's hobby room (he pops in now and then to bring his hobby downstairs in front of the fire) and the back room, which has turned into a complete dumping ground. So that's around half the house. So I'd say half of our mortgage is a wasteful drain on our resources.
How much wealthier and happier could we be in a house about half the current size? Pretty happy and pretty wealthy I reckon. And a smaller house footprint is more ecologically friendly, cheaper to maintain and easier to clean. The prospect of having that mortgage paid off so all you have to is find the bill money every month starts to look like a achievable reality.

Small house in Lochcarron, highlands: www.geograph.org.uk
By the way, the book contains an interesting exercise which I am in the middle of doing at the moment and you might want to have a go at:
- Create a list of activities that you do at home and things you need to do in your house. Be detailed. Stow the list away when you're done.
- Keep a log of where you go in your house and what you do when there over a period of one to two weeks. Ideally log the time you spend in each place. In large rooms be specific about which part of the room you use.
- Look at the sapces you don't use. Imgaine what would happen if they magically disappeared.
- Make another list of activities and needs without looking at the first list. Ideally, make a list every few weeks.
- Pull out your first list and then compare it to later versions. Are you surprised?
If you do this exercise, I'd be interested to hear about any thoughts or conclusions you've drawn about where and how you live. In fact, let me know and I'll do a post about you!