Meet the family behind The ADHD Minimalist
If you read the story about this blog on the ‘Inspiration for my blog’ page, then you know that I am doing a bit of an experiment. My goal is to minimize the possessions we own by 50% to see if having less stuff in our environment will help my children (who have been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, and dyslexia) feel calmer and function better.
My son showed me that having less stuff in his room helped his ADHD. I figured if it helped in his room, what would happen if we got our whole house + guest house + storage room under control?
I will be writing about our experiment with minimalism and family life with diagnoses.
Hopefully, sharing what has helped us on our journey will give your family a head start.
A little bit about us
I am originally from the USA. I met my husband, David, working with a missions organization in Sweden, Finland, Cambodia, and Thailand. It was love at first sight. We were married a year later and moved to Sweden.
The first two years of marriage were a steep learning curve for me as I got immersed in a new culture and language. After two years, I started to feel at home. I have the Swedish NHL players to thank for making my dual citizenship possible. We travel back to the States reasonably often, but it’s our house in Sweden that has become home.
We both work part-time at a Hotel David’s family owns. In the USA, it would probably be called a retreat center because it’s not your typical hotel. It specializes in groups from communities and churches in Sweden, Norway, and finland. These groups buy packaged deals on different kinds of retreats, weeks of confirmation camps, or skiing for youth. I spend part of my time at home with the kids while David also works part-time at his own business.
We have three kids, Lage 13 likes video games, playing the synthesizer, swimming, karate, and snowboarding, Maria 10 does Judo, scouts, climbing, playing on the switch, swimming and skiing, and Frida 5 likes drawing, making things with the glue gun, Legos, Barbies, swimming, and skiing. David and I enjoy outdoor activities with the kids as well as board games, swimming, and reading chapter books with them before bed.
Our Swedish Farm
When we are not busy with the kids or work, David and I like to work on our farm built at the end of the 1700s. It’s most fun when the kids want to help. It’s not a working farm. We are slowly fixing the old buildings and saving them from collapsing.
We currently live in what was the hay barn. It was already converted into a house before we bought the property. Right now, we are working on finishing what was once the stable. It was already falling down when we started work on it a couple of years ago.
Our goal is to start work on the farmhouse in the next couple of years. This Log cabin may be the oldest building on the farm. It also has the most square footage, but no water or insulation.
The generations before wallpapered directly on the logs inside the farmhouse. Great-grandma or grandpa must have rocked by the fire putting on logs when it got low. If the fire went out, you wouldn’t stay warm for long.
How we realized we had too much stuff
Roughly two and a half years ago (Before Lage started minimizing his room). We realized how much work it is to get rid of extra junk!
After deciding we would renovate the stable, we took three days off work, rolled up our sleeves, and thought that we were going to start fixing things. We took one look around that morning and realized we needed to sort through the entire stable to separate the trash from the treasure before any work could be done!
The stable was built over a hill. From the front, it looks like a one-story building, but in the back, it’s two stories. The bottom level had a dirt floor, and there was not quite enough room to stand up straight. Upstairs the floor was comprised of old doors.
Entering the stable was like stepping onto a big wooden ship; the floor sloped upwards.
The entire building was bursting at the seams with ‘could be good to have items‘ that David’s parents left when we bought the house. These ‘treasures’ were hidden under junk and trash. We had our recycling station in the building, which had overflowed!
We set up a tent to house the windows, doors, and other building supplies we found, hoping we could use them during our renovation projects. The rest we drove to the dump.
After clearing the main floor I went around back to start cleaning under the stable, and my heart sank. It was full of broken junk from 200 years of living. An ancient half disintegrated baby buggy, old plows and millstones, broken pottery, and old tiles. The list goes on and on. We saved things that could be sculptures in the garden, like the plow, and got rid of the rest.
The whole process took three days, and we drove three overflowing trailers to the dump! When our vacation was up, we hadn’t even started fixing the stable!
All our cleaning revealed the building was in worse shape than we thought. One corner of the log structure had fallen off the foundation stone and lay on the ground.
This whole experience gave me a bit of a shock, but it helped me realize how wonderful it is to have a space entirely void of stuff. You can see the potential of the house in a whole new way.
My ten-year-old inspired me to try minimalism.
Six months later, Lage started throwing items out of his room, declaring, ‘I don’t want this junk anymore!’ I looked at the mound of clothes, toys, books, and electronics on the hallway floor, and my first thought was, ‘I must convince him to keep the best things!’ I picked a new sweatshirt off the floor and tried talking him into keeping it.
His response made me reevaluate the role of possessions in our home.
He helped me understand that he felt and functioned better without a lot of extra stuff in his room to distract him. Then I remembered the stable and how good it felt to get rid of all that junk. For the first time, I didn’t require him to keep something just because I thought it was nice.
I let him get rid of his stuff.
I would like to see if minimizing our possessions will minimize the effects of ADHD, ADD, and Dyslexia on my children.
This year my goal is to get through my house, guest house, and all our storage spaces and get rid of at least 50% of our stuff.
If you have a similar problem, I would love for you to come on this minimizing journey with me. Please send me an email. I’d love to hear from you at Annie@theadhdminimalis.com. Hopefully, we can help each other meet our goals and find some positive change to make our homes a better place.
