I still find myself amazed that we are thriving in less than 400 square feet. Once you figure it out, it's a charming space to spend a couple years. Despite the apartment's obvious challenges, I've figured out how to make it a welcoming place for our friends. Small space living may appear daunting for others, but I've enjoyed the challenge that comes with it. The small space has presented me with challenges, but also with creative solutions as well. No matter where we live, the lessons I have learned from this place will travel with me.
One of the major design challenges in a small space is allocating the space for dining, sleeping, entertaining, and building around that. When you live in a small space a lot of places need to do double duty. We had to make our space flexible. We didn't want beds laying around, so we had to make sure things could be hidden away. We chose to not have a television. Instead we decided a dining room was more important for our family life.
The living room is just big enough for a comfortable sofa and a miniature library. As much as I used to love to entertain, we have had to be realistic with how many people we can invite into our home. We aren't able to have twenty people over in our small space, but rather we keep the guest list small and invite several people over instead. Our ceilings are very tall which gives off the illusion of more space.
I find that you need to be really neat and fastidious to make sure everything looks really nice all the time. I allow certain areas in our space to get messy, which are limited to underneath our bed that lifts up and in my children's closet. The challenge is to have everyone in our family of four simultaneously abide by the rule that we need our environment neat and picked up at all times. Understandably, our two children like to spread out their toys, and would like to have the opportunity to display their creations. However, in small space living, that's not possible at this stage in our life. My husband and I joke that our life goals is to give our kids beds in the near future. It might be a joke in our family, but I often find myself telling myself that most of the world does not even have a soft pillow to lay their heads down on at night. There are more people living in truly small spaces and they truly have real life problems that just involve daily survival. With that in mind, it puts our small space living into perspective.
I find that you need to be really neat and fastidious to make sure everything looks really nice all the time. I allow certain areas in our space to get messy, which are limited to underneath our bed that lifts up and in my children's closet. The challenge is to have everyone in our family of four simultaneously abide by the rule that we need our environment neat and picked up at all times. Understandably, our two children like to spread out their toys, and would like to have the opportunity to display their creations. However, in small space living, that's not possible at this stage in our life. My husband and I joke that our life goals is to give our kids beds in the near future. It might be a joke in our family, but I often find myself telling myself that most of the world does not even have a soft pillow to lay their heads down on at night. There are more people living in truly small spaces and they truly have real life problems that just involve daily survival. With that in mind, it puts our small space living into perspective.
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