Living Down Jones

When The Mister and I decided to buy our first home a couple of years ago, we made the decision to downsize our lives. At first, this came out of necessity. We were deciding to buy during a very robust real estate market so our dollar wasn’t stretching very far and we quickly surmised we could not afford the same amount of space as the big, vintage apartment we were renting. The task of paring down our lives seems daunting initially. Then, somewhere along the way, it became a fun challenge, something we embraced as a lifestyle. And so I said we were Down Jonesing our lives.

That’s how we moved from a 1600 square foot, 2+ bedroom rental on the first floor of a 2-flat to an 850 square foot, 1+ bedroom condo on the third floor of a 12-unit building. Essentially, we cut our living space in half. And this was a living space that had been pretty well filled with furniture and décor. Like I said, it was a vintage building so we had decided to decorate with vintage furniture. Picture lots of heavy, dark, and clunky furniture.

We rose to the challenge, though, and I think we did so because we were ready for it. By this time, The Mister and I had been through 8 years of rentals together. Eight years of moving from apartment to apartment to a house in a suburb and then back to apartment after apartment. When we decided it was time to buy, we were more than excited to shed all of the extra stuff we had collected over the years and start fresh. It was almost liberating.

So we found ourselves purging years of collected stuff. We owned things that were in boxes that we had moved from place to place without ever opening! Now, what good are those things? If they are so unimportant that we didn’t miss them sitting around in basement storage, why keep them? We also did little things like transfer all of our CDs to digital then donated the discs.

Collectively we donated, sold, and discarded half the contents of our home. And then we continued to shed stuff when we moved into the new condo and realized there was still too much. Along the way, as I’ve said, we really got into the spirit of it. It has become a challenge for me to see how compact and practical I can make our 850 square feet of space.

We are now two years into ownership of our little piece of Chicago, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. And that’s why I am starting Living Down Jones, a guide to simple, efficient living – to share what I have learned and will continue to learn along the way.