Smaller can be BETTER

Think a great small purse. Bigger is not always better. I know, it is almost a death sentence for someone from Texas, living in Texas to say! This is actually where the idea of "flat living" came from for me. I was thinking about living in a smaller place... and I thought about how most of the world (besides the US) lives in much smaller homes and have much less space. And in the last 20 years big has gotten bigger and bigger. Working in home design I always was drawn to smaller, cleaner lines and smaller furniture... but most of the homes I would work in had such large (or "Great") rooms that you had to use furniture with large backs and arms just to fill the space.
Everything has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Closets (more room to store the stuff), garages (more room for the bigger car), bigger beds (King was not big enough), bigger kitchens, refrigerators (in Europe the average size of a fridge is apartment size here). I started thinking about living in a "flat"... OK it just made me feel stylish. In say Germany or France... a family our size and with our income would live in a small "flat" with no yard... kids play on the streets and go to parks. Ya know?

I had to challenge my notion of "success" (is success living paycheck to paycheck and living for a house and car?), of "standard of living" (what kind of a standard were we living? ), of "failure" (if it was failure to let go of a house that was a burden, then we had already failed... now what?), etc.

Most of these notions have come from living the lifestyle that is presented as the norm. But, we were being driven and challenged to live differently.

So we looked at smaller. And guess what, smaller can be BETTER.
When I started... it started with a simple "What if?" God kind of whispered it to me.
What if you lived in the Mason house behind Ecclesia? Our church had purchased a duplex behind the church building and the short term plans were to rent it out. We decided to sell our house with the idea we would live there for a year... tiny 3 bedroom with a new church playground in the back.

Then.. Ike hit. The hurricane wiped out a large chunk of Galveston and headed straight for Houston in a direct hit. Our home was not effected... and the buyers were lined up. BUT, the Mason house took some more damage to it's already beat up exterior and construction in the city ground to a hault.

Time for plan B.
Plan B was easy because we already were looking at schools. Plan B included taking Astrid out of private Montessori and putting her into Public Montessori. The hitch... the only way to get her in was to move into the neighborhood. But the cost of tuition being removed... made a small home in a very nice central neighborhood affordable. So plan B became an amazing neighborhood that I have always loved and thought I could never afford. Thinking smaller can sometimes mean thinking BIGGER!

So, now we are feeling like we have been given an amazing new start. We feel... like not only have we not sacrificed... but that God is amazing us with more then we could have hoped for.

Sometimes it is just about turning it upside down to look at it a different way!