Help me not hate my house

[Househater]

I hate to moan because I know we are lucky to even have our own home but honestly our house is so small that it’s hard to love it. It’s me, DH and two DDs living here. We have plans to move to a bigger house out of the area but this would be when DD2 is starting secondary school in 7 years time so we’re stuck here until then.

We’ve got a largeish living room (17x12) and a small galley kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. I can live with the upstairs but doing all of our “living” in one room is awful! There is no space in the kitchen to put a table so we have to have a third of the living room taken up with a table and the room is such an awkward shape that it’s difficult to move furniture around to make it look better.

Has anyone got any suggestions of maximising our living space and just how to make it look nicer?

Agree with putting the dining table next to the window - then how about putting a row of ikea kallax (waist high, four or eight cubes across) or similar running parallel for storage and to make a kind of space divider between living and dining areas. You could put vases or other interesting things on the top too Or put the long sofa with its back to the dining table as a divider instead. If the latter you might then need a new sofa opp the tv - and the rounded sofa may need to go if it takes up too much footprint for benefit (sorry). Also definite yes on wall mounting the tv and space underneath for books- we have an ikea roll out toy chest - and creating upstairs space for chilling out.

Go on rightmove and look at sold prices for your street to have a nose at the pictures and see what neighbours have done to theirs, it might give you an idea for different layouts and storage solutions.

We have a similar set up. We have a window seat in front of the window, with a table set up using the window seat as a bench. A couple small stools for seats on the other side, but as they are stools, they tuck under the table. You could do something similar perhaps with a table that folds up and rolls/moves away so that you can use the window seat as extra "living room" seating.

We also have a couple Kallax along the walls, a 2x4 one is on the side and is used as a tv stand, with video game gear and such in the Kallax squares under the tv.

I don't mind us watching television during meals if we are doing it together.

I have a coffee table that doubles up as a bench for eating at the table.

I also have a folding table.

Other than that, my main advice is to declutter! I need to do this myself!