A Simple House Can be a Beautiful Home - Part I

By Nathaniel Rhine

A simple house, a simple home, is a beautiful home on so many levels. In this paper I will very briefly, help you to understand and appreciate the importance of a simple home.

A simple house is less stressful to live in. Clutter is a form of visual distraction, and everything in our vision pulls at our attention. The less clutter, the less visual stress we have. A simple house / home is calming. When I mention clutter, you may very well be thinking about books, magazines and toys, all over the place. Well, yes and no. The clutter that I am referring to is not necessarily the items in the house, but the house itself.

Clutter may mean too many bedrooms in a house. For an example there may be a family consisting of four people, the mother and father and two children, one male and one female. Ideally, this family would like to have a house with three bedrooms; a bedroom for the parents, (I would like to refrain from using the word “master bedroom”, for slavery has been abolished decades ago, therefore, as freed people, I rather not refer to an old term.) and two separate bedrooms for each of the two children. That is wonderful; however, because we live in a world where we believe more is better, we tend to want more bedrooms in our homes than what is needed.

It would be more appropriate to have three bedrooms in a house for the needs of that particular family, not the family’s wants. There is a great difference between needs and wants.

A simple home is more appealing. Think about photos of homes that are cluttered and photos of simple homes. The ones with almost nothing in them accept some beautiful furniture, some nice artwork, and a very few splashes of color are the ones that appeals to most of us. You can make your home more appealing by “de-cluttering” it.

One way of “de-cluttering” a home would be to get rid of some of the furniture. Ask yourself, how many living room sets do you need to have in one living room? Naturally we would say that the answer is one, but in actual fact, some households have at least two living room sets in one living room. Maybe it is because they think the more furniture the better. Or maybe, they love one living room set so much that they can not get rid of it. So they would buy a new one because they like the design or the color of it, yet they would hang on to the old one. The possible solution to “de-clutter” that house would be to get rid of it of the old living room set or do not buy a new one.

Think about it, with two living room sets in the space of one living room, where could one possibly walk? There’s no space. With less furniture, in most cases, junk, one will find that their home could be more appealing.

A simple home is much easier to clean and to stay clean. It’s hard to clean a whole bunch of objects, or to sweep or vacuum around a bunch of furniture. The more things you have, the more you have to keep clean and the more difficult it is to clean. Think about how easy it is to clean an empty room compared to one with fifty objects in it.

Unfortunately, there are many homes that aren’t really homes. Rather they are more like museums, housing junk. Most homes are buildings which house and collect junk. Everything one buys or finds, it will come to the house and stay there forever. Even if that particular thing is no longer useful, one will treasure it. The fewer things in the house the easier it will be to clean it and to keep it clean.

How many of you have a shelf or a table which is covered with literally dozens if not more of picture frames? Many of you will answer yes. Now the next question is, for those of you who answered yes to my first question, how many of you enjoy dusting off that shelf or table that holds all those picture frames? And don’t tell me that your maid does it either. Not many of you enjoy moving every picture frame, wiping the table or shelf and then place the picture frames back, hopefully in the original arrangement prior to your moving them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you did not have to do that? It would also save valuable time.

I suggest that you place a few of the most meaningful photos in a wonderful frame and hang it on the wall in a strategic location. One, it will add live and character to the space and the wall, two, but most importantly, it will be much easier to keep your home clean. A few simple wipes over the picture frame(s) with a feather duster and you’re done.

Please make note that I said a few of the most meaningful photos. With only a few photo frames on the wall, one will be encouraged to view only those few photos. One would be able to appreciate more of those few photos rather than competing with dozens of photos.

Take for an example a museum of art. One would never go into a museum of standard and find dozens of paintings or photographs cluttered in one place. On the contrary, one would see many paintings or photographs on a wall, but they would be spaced far apart from each other in an organized manner. Why? So that the viewer could stop in front of each painting or photograph and “listen” to what is being spoken by that painting or photograph. The viewer / listeners want to absorb everything possible from the painting. Once he has been satisfied, he would then move on to the next painting. Our homes are no different. We want or family, friends and guests in our homes to absorb the content of our homes. That can not be achieved with clutter.