The next chapter of Organized Simplicity is about savouring the little things. It is about using all the fantastic organisational tools set out (i.e. the home management notebook and all that entails) and reaping the rewards through enjoying simple pleasures with your family. Tsh suggests some things to do with your time that will help you live the life you want and set out in your family purpose statement. These things include crafting (well, that’s fine with me!), cooking from scratch, and entertaining and socialising.

I was surprised by the third item on the list – the first two seem pretty obvious if you are trying to live a simpler life. The type of crafting she is talking about is making things from things you already have or can acquire cheaply and using creativity to transform them into something pretty or useful, involving the kids if they are old enough. Cooking from scratch is about eating better quality food for less and this is something I am working on all the time – although my latest bout of illness has brought out all the worst kinds of eating: convenience, take-aways, etc. I can’t wait to get back into home cooking and meal planning so that we can start eating more healthily and more heartily. However, I hadn’t really thought about how entertaining could form part of simple living. For some reason, I put entertaining and socialising into the ‘luxury’ category.

However, one of the advantages of having a de-cluttered and simple home is that it is easy to get ready for guests – no need for a full day scrub down when friends are coming. More impromptu evenings can occur when you aren’t worried about your house looking perfect and being well-organised means that the store cupboard is well-stocked meaning a quick supper can be knocked up easily enough. I have been so focused on getting organised, I hadn’t really thought about why I wanted to live this way. Of course, I put some thought into the type of family I wanted us to be but I hadn’t thought of the day-to-day benefits of living simply and living in an organised way. In our family purpose statement, I had stated that one of the things I wanted was to make ‘our home a place of warmth and simplicity’. I had been thinking of this from the perspective of our immediate family but of course, I would want our friends and extended families to benefit from our warm and simple home too.