Tips on living in small spaces

[Wenjie]

Please share any wisdom or tips

We are in a 67.633 sq meter space schooling and working from home with four kids.

I know it would make the biggest difference to declutter and tidy, but also the layout is awkward. The sitting room can feel like a thoroughfare. Also, our kitchen is a galley one, so there's no way in space for a table.

My main problem is toys. I feel like I'm always getting rid of things, but they are like refugees that find a way to the floor no matter my efforts. We're also getting rid of our sofa because we don't need guest room for entertainment., But my boxes of Christmas decorations have been hiding under them and need a new home.

I live in the suburbs below San Francisco, where most families live in houses, but suspected there would be people on here familiar with making small homes work for a family, so it would be great to know how others manage.

I just saw Ikea's new catalog and am coveting the pages where a family of four manages to fit in a one bedroom. But where is their stuff? And how do they prevent their parents from buying those kids more toys?

[ifitpleasesandsparkles]

I grew up in a two room tenement flat with a bathroom. My parents slept in the living room in a fold out sofa bed. The only other room was the kitchen. I slept in a bed next to the fridge. I've grown up to surround myself with very little. I like things minimal and having too much stuff around feels stressful to me. We simply didn't have much when I was growing up because there was nowhere to put it.

Now I am pregnant and my partner and I will eventually buy a house but for the moment we are happy to make do with our two bedroom flat. Our flat is in the roof so that cuts available space down even more as the rooms slope.

My tips would be:

• Declutter and minimise! Take this more seriously than anything else you do. Before you look for ingenious storage solutions, start getting rid of things! Search online and on YouTube for information about minimalism. It's a bit of a minefield as it's currently trendy. But if you can find some sites and channels you relate to, they could really help.

• rethink the way you use rooms. Just because the flat is set up a certain way doesn't mean it needs to stay that way. We are currently renovating our flat and giving ourselves a whole extra room by clever use of space.

• don't cram every nook and cranny with storage, it starts to feel oppressive. If you declutter and minimise properly you shouldn't need to have under bed boxes (god I hate these) or high shelving. The less storage you have, the more light and airy the space feels. And the less you have to dust!!

• we don't have room in our kitchen for a table so my partner is making a wooden table top that will fold up onto the wall when not needed. We have wooden folding chairs that will also hang on hooks on the wall.

• we've managed so far during our clothes on clothes horses, but with baby on the way the next purchase is a tumble dryer. They're essential for small spaces in my opinion.

• instead of a tv we have a huge pull down projector that sits in our bay window.

• our couch is a sofa bed so that we have room for guests or so that one of us can escape if the other is ill and disturbing their sleep.

• we've done away with the bath and we just have a shower room where the toilet and wash basin is. This means we can have a smaller "bathroom" and the old bathroom can be repurposed as an office space.

[Wenjie]

@catrinvennastin My Homeowners Association is really strict about what can be put on my outdoor space. I went to ikea to look at furniture, but their outdoor stock is seasonal, which I didn't know. They were also out of stock for trofast and Kallax products. There was probably a dozen things I wanted to get, so I didn't check first before traveling there. I was really disappointed. The supply chain must be really interrupted right now, either from tarrifs or the pandemic, or both. I can order everything, but it won't arrive until April. Maybe that's best and gives me a chance to declutter. This week I'm going to work on the bathroom and one other area, probably outdoors. My mother is visiting in March, so I can have a face to face talk with her about gifts.

[Wenjie]

@ifitpleasesandsparkles Thank you so much! This was a great wealth of tips you gave me. It really helps getting advice from someone who's so experienced with living in a small space.