20 THINGS I'M NOT BUYING for our New Home | minimalism + saving money

I'm convinced that new home essentials lists are a scam. Just the other day, I happened upon an article titled 40 essential products for your first place of your own. And when I saw things on the list like toothpaste squeezer and sun catcher shaped like a castle, I almost choked on my tea. And it was all I could do not to fall into a deep, deep depression because I don't own those things. Hi there, friends, and welcome back to my channel. My name is Marissa, and this is A to Zen Life, where I share tips and ideas to help you simplify your way to a life you love. And a huge part of most people's simplification journey involves not buying crap you don't need because not only does it clutter up your home, but it also ends up costing money, like a lot of money. In fact, one survey from 2019 found that Americans spend $18,000 a year on non-essential items, which adds up to $1 million of waste over the course of their entire lifetime, which is why today I'm sharing a list of 20 things I'm not buying for our new home to save money and keep things simple. And while this is my own personal list, my hope is that you'll also walk away from this video with a few tips or ideas to simplify your home, your life, and hopefully save a little bit of money as well. Number one on this list is tons of furniture and home decor. Buying a home is one of the biggest financial decisions that most of us ever make in our lives, and it can be easy to get swept up in the excitement of having your own home. But the way that a lot of people shop for their home is they look around the homes of their friends and their family members, or they go online and they Google something like things to buy for a new home, and then they get all of these checklists and just take those and go shopping with them without questioning, are these things really essential to me? And will they add enough value to my life for me to want to bring them into my home? One of the things that we value as a minimalist family is space, and that's one of the biggest reasons we don't want to fill up our home with a lot of furniture or home decor because we love the lightness and the airiness and the feeling of openness that we have by leaving empty space in our home. If we filled our living room up, then maybe my boys wouldn't have the space to do cartwheels or somersaults or leapfrog across the living room like they are now. So when you're shopping for furniture and home decor items for your new home, I would encourage you to go slow and be really intentional, buying a few things here and there and being okay with having empty space. The next thing we're not buying is repairs that we can DIY ourselves. One thing that we quickly realized is that if we hired out for all of the things that we need to do around our own home, that would quickly add up and cost us a lot of money in the long run. But then on the other hand, if we DIY those small repairs ourselves, that's going to end up keeping a lot more money in our pockets. One of the first things that my husband purchased for our new home was a tool kit, and we've already saved a ton of money doing some small repairs around our house ourselves. Everything from sealing some windows to repairing some shingles that were loose on the roof. We are quickly learning how to DIY things ourselves so that we don't always have to pay other people to do these things and save money. Number three on this list is faux plants. We've been living in a furnished rental for almost a year now, and we have had these faux plants in a few of the rooms. I am so sick of looking at faux plants, and despite the fact that I am a notorious black thumb who has quite a bad history of killing plants, now that I have a garden, as you can see in the background, I think it's time that I pull up my big girl pants and learn to take care of some real plants here. Let me show you the first plant that we've already gotten. We got this. I don't even know what kind of plant this is. I guess I have to learn the names of the plants too. If you know what kind of plant this is, please comment in the comment section below and let me know. And I really, really love it. I think it's a succulent, so it actually doesn't need that much water. It's been hanging out on our sun porch up until now, just chilling. I've also had some bad experiences with buying fake plants in the past, like there was one bamboo plant that I purchased when we were living in Germany, and it looked great on the website, but then when I got it and saw it in person, it didn't look close to as good. So I ended up decluttering that. So now that we have this space and a beautiful sunroom and a garden, I'm looking forward to trying my hand at taking care of some real plants to breathe some life and color into this house. Number four on this list is bedroom dressers. This is my bedroom behind us, and we are going to put a king-size bed in here. We already have the frame downstairs in our current rental, and then we have the mattresses in the lower level of this house. But we are not going to buy dressers because we don't really need dressers since we have a walk-in closet that already has a ton of built-in storage. Because we're a minimalist family, we don't really have that much clothing anymore, so we don't really need to own bedroom dressers since we already have so much storage built into our closet. So that's one way that we can eliminate excess furniture by using the things we already own. The fifth thing that I'm not buying is cheap hangers because I am so done with those cheap plastic hangers where your clothes are always slipping off onto the floor, or they're cracking, or they're not quite smooth, and they're putting holes in the shoulders of your shirts. A long time ago, I switched to velvet hangers for the clothes in my wardrobe, and I have never looked back. I love that they're low profile and they take up very little space, so you give your clothes a lot of breathing room in your closet. And also, the velvet means that your clothes aren't slipping off of the hangers onto the floor. And then for things like our winter coats that hang in the entryway, I use wood hangers for that really natural, organic look, and also because they're sturdy enough to hold them without breaking. Like I said, we have been living in a furnished rental that came with its own hangers, and so that does mean that I'll need to be buying hangers for our home, but I'm definitely going to invest in quality hangers and not those cheap plastic ones. We're also not going to buy any nightstands to put in our bedroom. So here on the floor, you can kind of see where the owners had their bed previous to us, but we decided that we're not going to put nightstands on either side. We actually haven't had nightstands for many, many years and have never missed them. In our previous bedroom, there was kind of this ledge around our bed that we could set our phones or our glasses on when we were sleeping, and we purchased another bed that kind of has that same kind of ledge, which has completely eliminated the need for us to have nightstands next to our bed. Number seven on this list is kind of a weird one, and that is tissue boxes and tissue box accessories. And I don't know how many of you watching this video grew up like this, but in my family, my grandparents and my aunts and my parents, they always had boxes of tissues around their house. And then not only boxes of tissues, they also had these like covers to put on top of the tissue boxes. Since I grew up and became an adult myself, I have never owned or used tissue boxes in my own home. If I need to blow my nose, I always use toilet paper. Does that make me nasty? I mean, even if we have guests over and they asked if I had tissues, I would direct them to the bathroom. So that's just something that I found that I don't need to have in my home. And that's cut down on visual clutter in all of the rooms, really. Next up, we have kitchenware for special occasions. I know that growing up, a lot of my family members had china cabinets that were specifically for holding all of this fine china that was never, ever used. And those things just ended up collecting dust and taking up space for years. Now, my philosophy around special occasions is that being alive is enough of a special occasion to wear the things you want to wear, drink the good wine, eat the good chocolates, you know, put on the expensive perfume that you were gifted and that you've been saving for a special occasion. Because every single day is a special occasion. I didn't want to put my mom's wedding ring into a lockbox. I wear it every single day because it's a reminder of her. And I appreciate those special things in my life more when I actually use them. Along with special occasion items, I'm also not going to buy any disposable kitchen items, such as disposable plates or utensils or cups or anything like that. Even when we host, I would rather have enough place settings so that everyone can use their own reusable plate and cup and utensil. And if that means a little bit more wash up for me at the end of the day, I'm totally fine with that. Because while I'm not perfect or zero waste or anything like that, along my minimalism journey, I have made it a priority to try to reduce environmental waste, especially things like plastic and paper waste. So that's another thing that I'm not going to be stocking our kitchen with. That actually leads me nicely to number 10 on this list, which is plastic cookware. I've been seeing more and more articles coming out about just how many microplastics are in our food and in our bodies even because we've consumed so many of them over the course of many, many years. And because of the potential negative side effects of that, I've tried to reduce or eliminate the amount of plastics that I use in my kitchen as much as possible. I cut out plastic cutting boards. I will say that rice cookers always seem to come with like plastic spatulas for you to stir and scoop out the rice. I don't know if there's any non-plastic alternatives, but that's what my rice cookers have always come with. So leave me a suggestion if you know a better way. But when it comes to things like spatulas or spoons or even meal containers, I try to go for natural materials. Number 11 on this list is all the glasses. And by this, I mean all the different kinds of glasses that people think that they need to drink the different kinds of drinks. I mean, you have champagne glasses, wine glasses, shot glasses, you have tall glasses, short glasses, glasses with curves. I have been seeing so many of these glasses trending on social media and they always look so incredible, especially when people are making things like matcha lattes or iced coffees and they're pouring it into their cute little glasses. But what I realized is that I don't need to own all of the different kinds of glasses. And it's better to just focus on having a few different kinds that are really, really practical and some that maybe are pretty, but also practical. Next up on this list, we have woven blankets. And I always see these woven blankets like draped over the end of the bed or off the back of the couch. And I think that they look so good in pictures. But what my experience has been in real life is that these woven and other things tend to get caught and pulled, especially if you have kids or you'll have these little fuzzy bits coming off and the lint collecting. And then it just ends up, you know, kind of giving this feeling of visual mess. And you always feel guilty that you weren't able to take care of that blanket and treat it like it should have been treated. So if you live in a home where you don't have small children or pets with little scratchy nails that are going to pull out the weaves, maybe you can get away with woven blankets. But for us, we have to choose blankets that are a little bit more practical. And that's why we will not be buying woven blankets. Number 13 is excessive pillows. And that includes pillows on the bed and things like throw pillows in your living room. In my experience as a mom, again, a lot of those pillows just end up taking up a ton of space. And then when your kids are roughhousing, they get pushed onto the floor or thrown around the room. And they just end up creating this visual mess. You can make your kids clean up over and over again or eliminate it altogether. When it comes to our beds, we just keep one pillow for each of our heads on the bed. And when it comes to our couch, we have had one pillow on each end. Number 14 is specialty appliances. And that's because we already own almost all of the appliances that I consider essential. Like we have a microwave. We have an induction cooktop. We have ovens. We have a rice cooker already. And I have already decluttered things like a slow cooker and an instant pot because I found that I wasn't using those specialty items. Maybe I would consider an air fryer in the future. Still haven't decided. But as of right now, I'm not going to be adding any more specialty or single-use appliances in our kitchen. Another thing I'm not buying for my home is a clock or any timers. And that's because when I need to know the time, I can either look at my phone or I can look at the clock that's on the microwave. And I don't need a wall clock that's ticking and driving me insane with the noise in my home when I have that. And then as far as timers, I found that in practice, if I ever need to use a timer when I'm cooking or making something, all I do is I set a timer on my phone. And then that timer goes off and it's easy peasy lemon squeezy. Number 16 on this list is floor lamps. And this is something that I've said before. I'm not a huge fan of having lamps on the floors. I don't like having the lights in my eyes. And one of the things that we really appreciate about this home is just how good the natural lighting is in it. But then, of course, at night when things get dark, we're going to need to have some light. And that's why we plan on installing recessed ceiling lights into the ceilings of all of the rooms. And so that's one repair that we're going to be making in this house. But I currently don't plan on getting anything like floor lamps or table lamps or anything like that. The next item on this list is maybe one of the most controversial things on my channel ever. And that is a rug for every single room of my home. And I used to get a lot of complaints in my past videos that my minimalist home has too much echoes. And I totally get it. When you have high ceilings and hard floors and there's a lot of sound bouncing around, it can echo. I don't notice it as much in person, but then my microphone tends to pick up more extra noise. But I figured out how to edit my videos so that it's not such a problem for my viewers. I think there are certain rooms where it does make sense to have a rug. Like, we will probably put a rug in this living room in front of the fireplace when we have our couches and chairs or whatever we have in here. And that will kind of give it a cozy feel. But when it comes to spaces like the dining room, for example, I don't want to have a rug underneath the dining room table because I found that it's just really, really hard to keep that rug clean and looking good. Number 18 is candles. And I have just never been a candle person. I never was someone that enjoyed lighting candles or having the scent of candles filling up the home. In fact, sometimes it used to give me headaches when I tried to get into candles back in the day when a lot of my friends or family members were using candles and they would gift me candles and then I would feel guilty for not using them, especially because lately I've read a lot of articles and heard doctors talking about how candles can put things like parabens and toxins into the air that are then unhealthy when you breathe them in. So instead of having candles, I just try to keep my home clean so that its natural smell is already pleasant and then creating ambiance in other ways. Number 19 on this list is holiday decor. And this is something that my family used to go all out for in the past. And we had so much holiday decor, it pretty much took up an entire portion of our garage, like literally Santa's whole sleigh and reindeer covered in lights. And that was just the Christmas stuff. While we do still enjoy holidays and celebrate them as a minimalist family, having a lot of holiday decor items and decorating for the holidays is not something that I'm personally really passionate about. And so what we do in our family is we find other ways to enjoy the holidays, like cooking certain meals together or reading holiday themed books, for example. I'm not saying that I'm not going to buy any holiday decor, but definitely decor is not high on the priority list for holidays. And using Halloween as an example, because that's my absolute favorite holiday, I would rather be the house that gives out full size candy bars versus having an 18 foot skeleton in my front yard. And finally, number 20 on this list of things I'm not buying for my home is everything all brand new. Like I said, we've been living in a furnished rental for the past year, and that means that we own almost nothing of our own, whether that's furniture or kitchen items or things like cleaning supplies. So that means that we have to get all of this stuff now that we're moving into this home, but that doesn't mean that I have to buy everything new. And I've already started checking out thrift stores and secondhand stores, which is not only good for saving more money, but also being more sustainable. And if you are interested in this topic, you can go and check out this video where I share all of my best tips for thrift shopping like a minimalist, or I'll see you next week. Until then, take care. Bye-bye.