about
A home with less in it
I'm Mara Linden — mom of two (6 and 3), living in a deliberately ordinary three-bedroom house that contains, at last count, a lot less than it used to. Before kids, I was a retail buyer for a big-box chain. My job was deciding which products earned shelf space, planning the endcaps that catch you at the aisle's end, and forecasting exactly how many of a thing families would take home. I was good at it. Which is how I know, from the inside, how a household ends up with ninety toys — and how few of them a store's own buyers actually believe in.
This site is what happened when I turned the buyer's eye around and pointed it at my own house. Not minimalism as an aesthetic — no sixteen matching beige bins, no empty-countertop photography as a lifestyle goal — and not minimalism as a sermon either. Just counts and rules: how many toys a kid actually needs, how many clothes fit in a drawer that closes, the one-in-one-out rule that caps the total, and a buying method that treats every purchase like the last open slot in the plan. Keep what earns its place. The shelf decides, not you.
What you won't find here: judgment of the maximalist house (some of my favorite people own three hundred toys and are doing fine), eco-guilt, or frugality as a moral position. I'm warm about kids and unsentimental about objects — that's the whole editorial stance. And because owning less makes each remaining purchase more important, not less, when a category is genuinely worth buying I'll name the one product I'd put in the plan, the way a buyer with one open-to-buy slot left would. One excellent pick instead of a fifteen-item roundup.
Start with minimalism with kids — the realistic starting point — and take what's useful. The goal was never an empty house. It's a home where the childhood is bigger than the stuff.
A note on affiliate links: some posts contain affiliate links — if you buy through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Recommendations here are one canonical pick per category, chosen like a buyer, never a paid slot.