Condos in Vancouver are getting smaller and smaller which brings to mind the question of living efficiently in a small space. If you’ve got a 500 sq ft. condo, you may find it difficult to find a place for all your things, particularly if you’ve moved from a larger rented property. So maybe you look around at all your things and think “how much of this stuff do I really need?”

..Which is probably a very good question.

What do you really need to live? A bowl, a spoon, and the clothes on your back.. Perhaps a bag of rice to eat, a pot to cook it in and a library card. Now that’s living lean! Living like this could make your 500 feet of floorspace absolutely palatial, and if you ever went bankrupt (god forbid!) you could fit all your stuff into a shopping cart.

But wait.. you’re going to need a cloth to clean your dish, and place to put it while you’re not using it.. maybe even a second dish for when you have a vistor, and you might as well get a couple of chairs to sit in.. Suddenly you find yourself at Ikea, pressed into a sweaty throng of unhappy shoppers trying to figure out if the billy shelf was supposed to be in aisle 7 or 8.

Oh, right.. and you’re going to need a car to get to ikea, and you’ll need a place to put the car while your not using it, cause it sure as hell isn’t fitting into your apartment. You’ll probably also need one of those little pine-tree air fresheners to clear out the smell of particle-board glue after you’ve driven those Ikea shelves home.

See how this happens? Modern life is a snowball of accumulation, once we have the stuff we need we find things we want and pretty soon you’re renting a storage locker in Burnaby to store your overflow.

Anybody else find this to be a problem? How are you dealing with the ‘stuff’ issue? Do you have too much? Not enough? or juuuuust right?