A CLUTTER FREE MINIMALIST SMART HOME

Quite a few videos ago for you guys, I mentioned that I had decluttered my curtains. Now my curtains have been a huge topic of debate on all my minimalist home tours. Now although this video is also going to be about smart homes, that is definitely most relatable to the curtains and I'm going to show you why and finally show you what I have in place for those of you who didn't catch it on my YouTube shorts. So for a long while I wanted the typical minimalist home of these long sheer linen curtains and they just weren't ideal for our living room. They work fine in our bedroom but in our living room that is a whole different subject because our living room which is just around the corner here that I'm about to show you is completely overlooked by a hotel with around 300 rooms or something thereabouts and we do need the privacy that the sheer curtains would have been ideal for but because we have a projector that you could almost see lurking in the background we need in the summer months to be able to block out the sunlight because even though our projector does work in sunlight it's definitely improved by a darker room and in the UK in the summer it can be daylight up till 10 p.m. Now in an ideal world I wanted some beautiful wooden or bamboo blinds that were also black out. I didn't even know if they existed and I definitely didn't want to pay a lot of money to have them professionally fitted to our window which is a very unusual bare window shape in our 200 year old property so I made do and I just got some white blackout curtains that were secondhand off of Vinted which is an online secondhand shopping site. They cost me about £10 and as you know I swapped things around and I decluttered a pair of them because I got two pairs one for the living room and one for the bedroom because in the bedroom I layer them behind the linen one to also have some blackout facilities when we need it but I never quite liked the ones in the living room because unlike in the bedroom they finished at a very unusual height. I'm not the best at sewing believe it or not but to have curtains professionally taken up also cost quite a bit of money and it wasn't something I was prepared to do. Now how is this all relevant to smart homes because something really great happened guys. After having all these heated debates with everybody in the comments about curtains and things and everybody saying whether they liked curtains as a minimalist or they didn't like curtains they thought they looked too heavy and cluttered, some people saying they wanted them to just reach the floor, some people saying they only wanted sheer, some people saying they wanted them to just reach the bottom of the window, something great happened. I don't know whether Google picked up on it or something but something got me in touch with a blinds company called Smart Wings. They contacted me and they basically said I hear you would like some sustainable blinds and boy am I so excited. I got to choose whether they were bamboo, wooden, linen, which I ended up going with a woven linen and bamboo hessian material. They are solar powered, they can be smart controlled by your voice through Alexa, through a smart link or you can simply use a remote control. Either way they've been made perfectly to fit my blinds and I believe that they have made a huge difference to how minimal my living room now looks. Let's go have a look guys. So do not mind my laptop out as I've currently been editing a prior video but let's show you all the look. Now I just absolutely love how these blinds sort of even hide themselves in the top layer. The solar panels are actually hidden behind that from a distance and it's only when you get right up underneath it that you can actually see the solar panels. So let me show you all. They have like this lovely little valance effect at the front that the blinds actually hide behind and I will show you them all working in a second but they are made to fit and if you see up close and there are different colours also that you can choose but I just went with the natural hessian linen and jute woven wood blind with a cream linen cotton hem and they're just all natural fibres and really fit in with our hammock and our tatami cushions and even our sofa. So let me come back around the room whilst I show you them in action but I'm really loving that the solar panels mean that we don't have to use electric and I love that they just don't hang down sort of taking up this sort of extra space. I really believe that these smart blinds are a brilliant addition to any minimalist home and if you remember guys I have currently had a little bit of a move around in here and that cupboard is just there while I consider whether I am decluttering it. Now let me show you the blinds in action. So it's really funny now for myself to think about having blinds because I never thought I was a blinds person. I used to think I really loved this long luxurious effect of the curtains now I do but sometimes it's not always appropriate for the home that we live in and I think this is a case where that is true. I think in maybe very very small homes curtains can really steal that last bit of space that you have like you usually if you've got curtains now I would have these huge things hanging down the sides which really draws your eye to them and sort of takes away this feeling of space in a room. Now I'll stop blabbing and I'll show you them in action. Smart Wings did provide these little multi-channel remote controls but you can also set up the blinds and pair them with your Alexa or other smart devices but let's just do this. I just love it. Now it is obviously going to get dark guys as this goes down but even then if we change channels and we put the other one down we can get them all to go down at the same time and pair them all but it's good to know that you can separate them for instance if you've got the sun streaming in at one side you can just put one down but also what was really good for me with these blinds is that they also are completely blackout back. I ordered them measured to fit perfectly which means I do get the tiniest bit of light creeping around the edges but you could order them a tiny little bit bigger if you wanted so that they completely cover over the edges but because of how our window is box framed in it makes it a little bit more difficult to do that but normally you can order it wider and it will hang over the edges. Smart Wings actually talks about all the different ways that you can have them inside the window frame or on the outer of the window frame for all these different effects. They're a very very helpful company and they've helped me so far and there's lots of descriptive instructions in learning how to install them even though they are made to measure. Now I have to keep just a little bit of light coming in so that obviously you can all still see a little bit but also let me just put this down. The subject of this video is also what I wanted to talk about to do with smart homes as minimalists because I am torn because like I mentioned in a video a few weeks ago about how I am leading two different lives, I'll link that video down below, because I do have quite a busy life but I still want to be productive but still enjoy the slow moments of life and embrace slow living and take things steady so that I can enjoy my life. It's a balance with the productivity and the slow living so sometimes I am essentialist, sometimes I live a slower pace of life but I feel that advanced technology helps with that. It can sometimes even make our homes physically more minimal because for instance along with these now smart blinds that we have we also have the smart hoover the robot hoover that I've shown you all before I'll show you all again let me move you. Our smart robot hoover you know again is activated by your voice as so can the blinds be and even though you know it doesn't take that much time I suppose to put the blinds down it is just easier however it does take quite a bit of time to do the hoovering and I love just being able to set our hoover off and it goes and does that for like an hour or two hours whilst I'm getting on with something else. So smart homes and minimalism is something that I think works well together it saves time where we want time to be saved so we can focus on more intentional things but also sometimes smart items for our home are better designed not as bulky for instance our hoover is slim and sleek much smaller than the sort of long Dyson style shark hoover that we had prior to this small hoover and because we live in such a small home it really took up a lot of space there was nowhere to put it was often jutting out or ugly behind the sofa in a really bright colour I might add whereas this isn't and again to do with the blinds the blinds I love the fact that the design has been thought out and it's got this valance over the top that hides the ugly mechanisms of what the tops of blinds normally look like with the metal or plastic in a tube there's none of that it's the top is actually made out of wood and metal and there is barely any in fact if any plastic on them all and that's something that I absolutely love. I will link in the description the smart wings website if any of you want to go check that out but they are absolutely beautifully made blinds now I would also love to know in the comments what you guys think about smart technology in minimalist homes do you prefer to completely live a back to basics lifestyle with no sort of smart technology or do you sort of feel torn like myself that it can add to our minimalist home and add value in a way of being sometimes sleeker type designs which makes the minimalist interior of your home look more minimalist and more clutter free or would you prefer to leave it and be completely back to basics or I know there are some people that I know that even have light bulbs that turn off and on by voice activation as well so we could go to either extreme with this I'm somewhere in the middle if it adds to the design style and making the home minimal I'm all about it hope you all enjoyed this video and finally getting to see what I have had in place of the curtains see you all later bye