Welcome to Creative Simple Living with SchneiderPeeps!
Simple living means many things to many different people, for some it means living a minimalist lifestyle in possessions and commitments, for some it means self-sufficiency and doing all.the.things. For others simple living is somewhere in between. Regardless of what your definition of simple living is, I want to help you achieve it!
Creative simple living starts at home
For me, simple living at it’s core means not having to rush around because I’m overcommitted and disorganized. It also means growing a garden and preserving a portion of our food so that our family has a minimal level of food security. Sure, we still have to buy groceries but we could survive if we couldn’t go to the grocery store for several months. That brings a lot of peace of mind.
I also don’t think that simple living means you have to be working all the time. There should certainly be time for creative endeavors such as sewing and other crafts or learning about herbs and how to use them.
Most of the things you’ll find here are things that were common knowledge just a generation or two ago. Things that our grandmothers did but are not hard or super time consuming – making jam or jelly, sewing a new button on a shirt, growing a few tomatoes. These things have a place in our modern day life.
How to start
So, how do you start living a more simple life if you were never taught these skills?
One thing at a time.
Decide what’s most important to you and take baby steps to achieve it. Want to grow food? Start with a small garden bed, add edibles to your flower garden, or grow a few edibles in 5 gallon buckets. There’s no need to till up your entire yard until you know what your family needs and what you want to grow. You may decide that all your family really needs to grow is a few tomato plants. And that’s awesome.
In fact, you may decide that you don’t want to grow any food and instead want to support local farmers by purchasing from them. That’s awesome too.
The point is, only you can decide what your simple life looks like…and we’re here to help you achieve it.
Angi, the author
I started SchneiderPeeps (now Creative Simple Living) in 2010 to share the simple and creative things we were doing to live a more sustainable, intentional life.
I’ve been a freelance writer for over a decade and have authored several books. The Ultimate Guide to Preserving Vegetables (June 2020) is your go-to guide for canning, fermenting, dehydrating, and freezing vegetables with 100 recipes.
Pressure Canning for Beginners and Beyond (August 2021) takes the fear out of pressure canning with step by step instructions and over 90 recipes.
photo credit: JSchneider Shots
Angi, the person
I didn’t grow up living a simple lifestyle, in fact the only person I knew who did the things I do now was my paternal grandmother….Granny. You’ll find her influence in many of my articles and in both my books. But I knew as a young mother that I wanted my kids to grow up being a doer and not a consumer.
When Carl and I got married I could make spaghetti for dinner and scrambled eggs for breakfast. He could pan fry fish. So when I say I really didn’t know how to cook when we got married…I’m not exaggerating.
We spent the first 10 years of our marriage with Carl working on his undergraduate and graduate degrees….we also had 4 of our 6 children during that time. Needless to say, our budget was tight, so we had to get creative.
Over the years we’ve learned to cook, grow and preserve food, sew, woodwork, and do basic home and auto repairs. It happened little by little and now we can share those skills with others.
We’re glad you found your way here and hope this site helps you on your simple living journey.
If you need to contact me, you can email me at [email protected].