This post is long overdue: Frances actually sent it to me over a year ago but I just found in my Inbox recently. Here’s something neat to think about as you read this post: soon after writing this France and her family left it all behind and sailed and travelled for a year. Now they’ve relocated themselves to the Sunshine Coast area of British Columbia and are living in a camper while they renovate a house. 

downsizing to travel for a year

We are a Canadian family living in Surrey, BC, in a hustling and bustling community. We currently live in a little condo in a great neighbourhood where we can walk to just about anything we need. As a family, we love to travel, read, discover and create new things and try to stay out of trouble (which is easy because we have two very competent back-seat drivers, so no traffic foul goes unnoticed). Matt and I met when we were in our late teens, we were married in our early twenties and Piper joined our family first and then her brother Digory not too long after. We all love to spend time together, whether inside on Friday pizza/movie nights or else building Lego together or reading books (or writing them!). We’ve had people tell us that we are pretty easy going, granted they’ve never seen me try to get out the door for a 9AM appointment (it ain’t pretty).

We first heard about the idea of minimalism  in 2012, after waking up to the idea that our house was too old, our dreams too big and that we’d never be as happy as we could be. We’d lived in an old house for four years and had renovated it top to bottom only to realize that after the multiple loans we had taken out to get the job done, low and behold, the roof was now leaking and the hot water tank and furnace were doing weird things. Where does it end? Every spare moment, Matt was fixing or maintaining the old house and I was mostly single-parenting with a resentful spirit. It felt toxic and it was seeping into our skin and we were done with it.

Oddly enough, it was an extravagant vacation that saved us. We had made plans to visit the Caribbean to see our friend’s family sailboat there for a week in January of 2012. Luckily, the Canadian dollar was on par with the US and the vacation was almost affordable. Life was crazy, with an almost two year old and Matt had quit his job and nothing made sense. But we packed for warmer weather and left.

It was a treat and a dream and a game-changer. Somewhere along the line, the owners of the boat hinted at us that they could see us running some sort of chartering idea on a boat, that our personalities would be suited to it. My brain was blown to even imagine that real-live human beings could actually spend more time than one week a year in this paradise. People could actually make a living out here? Matt and I stared deep into each others eyes, and an idea was born: how can we get back to this place and truly live?

Once we were home, our minds opened up, Matt got a new job much better suited to his personality, and we started planning. How could we make our lives here easier so that we could get back there sooner? What things have to change to make this dream possible?

Enter a minimalist lifestyle! It just made sense, to live with a little less so that we could have so much more later. We started laying out a gameplan.

Our thoughts ran somewhat like this: the house is bleeding us dry, so let’s sell it and buy something smaller with little to no maintenance. Ok, then let’s sell a car and walk everywhere we can or share the remaining car. Sounds good. Then, let’s save our dollars by trying to live frugally, while still living well (we still went on holidays and ate out at restaurants, just not as often: we would drive to the Okanagan instead of flying to Disneyland, or we would share a meal at the burger place after filling up on the free fries that came with it. Smart? I think so). Right. So what do we get for all our hard work? We get the world. We get our dreams played out in our lifetime, in our twenties instead of in our sixties.

We told the world in the summer of 2016 that we had decided to sell all of our stuff and set sail for a year, starting in the fall. Our plan was to sell all the things (condo, car, beds, phones etc) and pick up a boat that fit our family and that we could comfortably cruise in for a year. Starting in the Caribbean, we could take it easy, a day at a time, seeing where the wind might take us, and eventually make it back home to the west coast of Canada.

For us, a boat was the best way to adventure that was available to us. We had driven across the country in our little Toyota Yaris and loved it but it was limiting. My husband and I both grew up sailing and have wanted to share that with our kids, but it has always been out of reach for us, as a hobby. We can barely afford to live in the Lower Mainland, much less entertain an extremely expensive hobby. We both felt that if we were ever to own a boat, we would live on it. There is a small living space for you! Minimalism at it’s finest.

We knew we had to find a boat that would work for us. The world is full of gorgeous sailboats, but there are only a few that fit our needs and fit into the budget. After six years of saving up our money to take a year off to travel, we had enough money to buy a decent boat! We wanted one that wasn’t too old (preferably built in the 2000’s), was able to be sailed by one person if need be, didn’t need to be overhauled but was ready for adventure out of the gate. We found this boat in the British Virgin Islands (BVI’s). Taking a leap, we bought the boat sight unseen. There: this adventure had to happen now!

As we pack our lives into 6-8 boxes, we’re realizing what really matters most: we have each other, our health and we have time on our side right now. There is no way to know what is coming in the future, but for now, we are just going for it. We can always make more money, but we can’t make more time.  

We will always have stuff, and it might always feel like too much stuff. We’re also putting our lives into perspective this way, and cutting out everything that won’t fit on a boat does give some clarity: what are the things you really love, and the things you thought you needed that turn out to be dead weight.

The most difficult part of living a minimalist lifestyle is saying goodbye to some things. We chose to say goodbye to our old house, our big truck and our huge sectional couch. Some things just didn’t make sense: our house wasn’t getting any younger and neither were we. We were missing some formative years in our little kids’ lives because we wanted this big fancy house and the white picket fence (I would have settled for nicely stained cedar panel fence. I’m not picky – but we really did need a new fence, too). The hardest part was coming up with a plan that we could get behind and that we could convince ourselves and our friends and family that we weren’t crazy. For most, especially at this point in life, you start out small, move to a bigger place, move to an ever bigger place and then move to your biggest place yet, only to get old and downsize and rewind the tape. We were doing things out of order.

There are moments, and if I’m honest, there are lots of moments that I just want a proper entry way, with a full closet for guests and a shoe rack for my kids and wider hallway and sitting room and a living room and a family room and a full sized basement and, and, and… all the things, all the spaces. But then I step back and think of the reality of what those spaces will actually mean to my family and me. It will mean seeing my husband less as he’ll need to work more for all those dollars; it would mean me seeing my kids less as I’d be constantly cleaning all those spaces (after I’ve forked over the money to design and furnish them); and in reality, no one would be all that much happier because as we stretch out, we are actually stretched thinner and thinner. I’ve liked being in small space: you get to know each other pretty well. You get all up in each other’s space and you learn boundaries and buttons really fast. You get creative trying to organize your stuff vs. my stuff vs. our stuff. At the end of the day, it’s all just stuff, and we don’t get to take it with us when we’re gone.

The most rewarding part of living with less stuff is knowing exactly where your things are all the time. I am constantly going through our drawers and dressers and closets, sorting and organizing, so I know where everything is. In general. I’m not perfect my any means, but I usually have a good handle on what is going on in the cupboards of our home. It’s also great to be keeping tabs on our things, especially in relation to how our kids see the world. I’ve enjoyed watching my kids process why we say “no” to certain toys. Sometimes their heart just aches (oh, I get it baby girl: I want that Barbie, too. I actually really do). I can see them start to use the creative part of their brain and say things like “well, I do have my Lego girls and I can change their outfits, too, and they are nice and small, even though they don’t have hair to brush”. Then they go to their friends house and play with their friends’ Barbies and she gets her braiding and brushing fix, and I still don’t have to chase after missing Barbie shoes. The kids might resent me for a time, but I am quite assured that they are still having a quality childhood, despite not having every toy their heart desires.

The challenges I can see of living in a small space as we all keep growing up, are perhaps what everyone is afraid of: personal space. As an introvert, I do really value my quiet time, and I would like to grant that to my husband and kids as well, if that’s what they need. But I don’t see this as an impossible thing. Mostly, we all run at a fairly similar pace in my family, so it often happens that there are just quite hours in the day when we are all “peopled out” and we seem to retreat into a corner with a book or a game or an art project. It doesn’t always work out that way, but my kids have never come screaming to me saying “Mom! I wish we had more space so I could feel more alone!”. Maybe that will come.

I’m not sure if I dread or am excited about those teenage years when they will want to disappear and not have parents around so they can talk about crushes and movie stars and what she said behind my back. What if my children are comfortable enough with me that what they share with their friends is the same information they want to share with me, their parent? What if we’ve lived so close and comfortable for so long that there isn’t the need to be sly and secretive? What if they want to share their fears and secrets with me? Perhaps after all these years of living so close we’ve formed a trust that we would have never had otherwise. Maybe these close quarters are a lost secret of happy families, and what we’ve really needed all these years, despite what all the parenting books might say, is just more of each other.

I do feel like there is a season for everything, and not every solution works in every season. Right now, a nice small cozy space is all I crave, to share with my cozy little family and just enough room for some cozy friends to come over. There might come a season when this changes, and we can always reassess when it comes. I have found that one of the biggest lessons of living in a small space is that we can always make something work. Always. Use what you have in front of you, change something you already own, ask around for something to borrow. We’re all in this same struggle together, trying to make our houses, big or small, into a home. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and it’s not as clean as those magazines, but the effort is always worth it.

You can read more about Frances and her family’s year long sailing and travel adventure, and more about their move to a small town, on her blog. She also has a wonderful Instagram account with beautiful photos and ‘real life’ captions. Thank you Frances!