Category Archives: Personal

All Cooped Up

By Claire Posted in Personal, Small-House Living Tagged ,

Have you noticed that it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re in self-isolation? Even though I have a calendar right on the fridge, and my computer and tablet and phone also make the date very evident, I’m having trouble remembering what day it is. In fact, that’s why there was no post last week: I forgot!

Now it’s Monday again and I continue to try to keep my bearings in a world where everything has changed. It seems silly because others are having a much harder time than I am. Some are working from home while keeping track of their kids and making sure they do their schoolwork, which is now online. Others are trying to survive without their weekly pay; worse, still others have the virus. I feel sorry for everyone right now.

Meanwhile I just keep busy in my little house. I’ve wondered if I would feel more cramped isolating in a small house, but then I see celebrity posts online where they’re complaining about feeling cooped up in their mansions, and I realize that it doesn’t matter how small or big your house is; it’s that inability to go out when you want to, the loss of knowing that you can go places even when you don’t need to, that makes you feel cooped up.

Let’s all hope that the stay-at-home policy is lifted in every state very soon.

Arranging Furniture in a Small Living Room

By Claire Posted in downsizing, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , ,

After we moved here, we spent hours trying to arrange our huge furniture in our little living room. No matter what we tried, nothing looked right. In the end we only kept a loveseat, two recliners, two end tables and a wooden chair that we put near the front door. In the years since, we moved them around a few times but never found just the right set-up.

Now we’re starting over. We’re planning to buy a small-scale sofa, a smaller recliner (the two we have are huge!) and an occasional chair or two (one of us wants one chair and the other wants two). Of course, we’re also spending time figuring out where everything should go.

One of the few books that survived the Great Purge when we moved here is a book from the 1990s called Use What You Have Decorating by Lauri Ward. I used that book on our large house and loved it. I’m so glad I saved it because it’s still useful: since she recommends arranging your furniture into groupings (as opposed to spreading it apart and pushing it up against the walls as many people do), it works well for this small house as well as our former large one.

Of course, the photos in the book look pretty dated now, but the principles are still good. I highly recommend this book for anyone who feels like their furniture is just not in the right spots.

Small Scale TV Stand: Found!

By Claire Posted in Clutter, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , ,

We’ve made a little progress on the living room, I’m happy to say.

Since our small house has a small living room, our goal is to replace our current furniture, which came from our much-larger house, with furniture that is more appropriately scaled to a 12’ X 16’ room.

Until now, the television sat on a sofa table that took up almost the entire length of the wall. After much searching online, I found two tv stands that qualified for my desire for something that was somewhat taller and not as wide in hopes that proper scale with space around it would help give the room a more open feel.

I also wanted a tv stand that would hold our many DVDs without revealing them. (In a small room, the last thing you need is lots of miscellaneous stuff stored where you can see it.)

Ironically, we ended up having to choose between two polar opposites: a lovely oak Stickley media center and a nice-looking tv stand from Wayfair, which was not made of oak. But it was also narrower than the sofa table; meanwhile, the Stickley stand was almost the same width as the sofa table had been, but I chose to overlook that because the piece was so pretty.

We drove nearly an hour to see the Stickley piece, where we learned of its $2400 price tag. I would have been willing to pay that amount, except that as it turned out, the piece didn’t have a dedicated spot for a DVD player. Putting it on top of the stand would add to the look of clutter that I didn’t want. Putting it inside the stand meant we’d have to open the doors to play DVDs, but those doors would open into a traffic pattern.

Then the Wayfair stand went on sale for the ridiculously low price of $218, and we decided we had to give it a try. It arrived in a few days, having survived the shipping process with no dings or scratches, and it went together beautifully. We collected DVDs from the three areas in the house where we’d been storing them, and they all fit inside….and you can’t see them. Just what I wanted.

All the stand needs now is something to fill that empty spot under the DVD player. We had a boom box on the lower shelf of the sofa table, and we miss it. So we’re waiting on this system with Bluetooth, CD player and FM radio to arrive, and it will go in that spot. Can’t wait!

The Furniture Hunt Continues

By Claire Posted in downsizing, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , ,

I’m back on the hunt for new, smaller-scale furniture for our living room. So far, it hasn’t been easy.

One problem is that there are still so many huge overstuffed pieces of furniture for sale out there. That’s not for anyone with a small house.

Of the sofas that aren’t huge and overstuffed, many are quite long. Again, that won’t work in our 12’ X 16’ living room. Although I’ve noticed while looking inside local homes for sale on Realtor.com (a habit I can’t seem to break) that many people with homes like ours buy a large overstuffed sectional, fill the room with it, hang a huge television on the facing wall and put a floor lamp near the sectional and call it a day. That’s not for us.

I’ve discovered that websites like Wayfair.com and Overstock.com offer filters so that you can weed out the wrong sizes and styles while wading through literally thousands of sofas and sectionals. That’s very convenient; the problem is that we haven’t seen a sofa we really like, and I suspect that, while affordable, the quality isn’t there and most won’t last very long.

But we’re getting closer. We just visited a higher-end furniture store with sturdier furniture. It’s not inexpensive, but we’re willing to pay for quality. Unfortunately, the colors and fabric available now aren’t very appealing to us. But we’ll keep looking.

We’re also looking for modest-sized chairs and a small stand for our television that will hide our DVDs and our DVD player. This appears to be another challenge: there are so many huge televisions out there that most stands are nearly as wide as the wall we want to put one on.

Redoing the living room is going to take longer than I thought.