In Secrets of Small-House Living, I share information about how to furnish a small house. Among other ideas, you should have furniture that is scaled for small rooms.
Since we lived in very large houses for many years, all of our furniture was appropriately sized (i.e. large) for those houses. When we got here, we had to give up a lot of furniture, but kept our very favorite pieces, which were still too large for our new, small home.
Being sentimental, and not
being made of money, we chose to keep what we had instead of buying new,
smaller furniture. For eight years, we’ve been living with our old furniture.
But I’m getting tired of feeling cramped, and we need more seating for
visitors, like our rapidly growing grandchildren. So I’m starting to look at
new furniture.
We still love what we have. I’m thinking maybe we could make
a rec room area in our basement and use it there. My husband isn’t so sure. I’m not even sure. The only thing I’ve
learned so far is that modern furniture is more streamlined than what we have, and
it’s become a lot easier to find sofas that are less than 75” wide, which is
good for a small living room.
With the holidays looming, I probably won’t do any more
furniture shopping until January. Stay tuned!
What do I mean by a “working kitchen”? You have a working
kitchen if you cook. So many people these days eat in restaurants or pick up
fast food even though they have a fully outfitted kitchen at home with all the
latest appliances to impress their friends and their Instagram followers.
That’s not a working kitchen. That’s a showplace that needs to be dusted
occasionally.
But those of us who cook on a daily basis have working
kitchens, and we have to work to keep them that way. We don’t leave the mail,
backpacks or briefcases on kitchen counters because we need that space to work
(and it’s not sanitary). We may or may not have the latest appliances, but we
use our appliances regularly, so we can’t have anything blocking them. If we
have knick-knacks or decorative pieces, they are up on shelves or on
windowsills, not where we do our actual food prep. We cooks are a busy, picky
bunch.
That said, as time passes, it’s very easy to allow clutter
to creep into our kitchens if we’re not paying attention:
Someone buys us a hand mixer for a gift but we already have one we love; now we have two.
A child makes a large decorative platter for us at a ceramics studio and we add it to the stack of platters in a cupboard.
An unsuccessful clothes-shopping trip is redeemed when we discover some cute, brightly colored spatulas and tongs in the clearance aisle. Not that we needed more, but they were irresistible.
Occurrences like these over several years can result in
overstuffed cupboards and drawers that slow us down and frustrate us when we’re
in the middle of making or baking something. Clearly, it’s time to declutter
our kitchen.
In my e-book Secrets of Small-House Living, I describe how my family moved from a very large house with a huge kitchen to a much smaller house with a tiny kitchen. It was quite an adjustment; I had to give up a lot of kitchen equipment that I just couldn’t fit into the few cabinets we have.
Five years later, I’ve decided that our kitchen is actually
quite efficient, despite its small size. Being u-shaped, it gives me everything
I need within a few steps. The challenge is making sure that its small storage
areas hold only what I need.
One person’s needed item is another person’s Goodwill
donation, so what I share here may not fit with how you outfit your kitchen.
But the principles are the same.
The Counters
An excerpt from my e-book:
But after my children left home, I had trouble cooking for fewer people. I thought I was going to have to retrain myself, so that I would stop doubling or tripling recipes. But since I’m blessed with a husband who actually likes eating the same thing two nights in a row, I finally realized that I could keep cooking in quantity, as long as I saved some for leftovers and froze the rest. (This meant more nights where I had a homemade, precooked dinner just waiting for us.) The same principle applied to baking: I could keep baking dozens of cookies as long as I froze most of them (left on the counter in a container, they would soon go stale, something that never happened when our children lived at home). So I felt like I’d found a solution to the question of cooking for an empty nest.
But when we downsized to our small house, my habit of cooking large became instantly constrained by our tiny kitchen. There was no place to set down my giant cookie sheets and casserole pans unless I kept the counters completely clear. …I didn’t want to give up my habit of cooking large, because it saves money and time (there’s the same amount of clean-up whether you make one dozen cookies or six dozen, after all.)
Keeping the counters clear is still the reigning principle
in my little kitchen, because I need every square inch of counter I can get.
Since we don’t have a dishwasher (there’s no room for one), we use part of the
counter next to the sink for a drying rack. The microwave eats up a little more
counter space. I must have what little is left so I can work. That’s why I
regularly purge the counters of anything that isn’t essential.
This past Christmas, my husband gave me a small aquarium and
some fish. The only place it could go is the far end of the kitchen counter. So
before he set it up, I got rid of everything in that area. I had to make
decisions about what needed to stay nearby, and what wasn’t essential. Several
items went into drawers. My overflowing recipe box and clear recipe card holder
had to be pared down; I filed many recipes that had stacked up there, and
rewrote some on index cards so they could go in the box instead of being
stacked on top. (These recipes were newspaper clippings or printouts from the
Internet.)
There were some spare spice containers that were used often
enough that I’d left them on the counter near the stove. I couldn’t fit them
into the overflowing spice shelf in one cabinet so I’d left them on the
counter. But they had to go, so I emptied out the entire spice shelf, pitched
old spice containers (and some empty ones), and then neatly organized the
remaining spices on a stacked shelf I found at the Goodwill for a few dollars.
It really looks nice now, and no more spices on the counter by the stove:
Next time we’ll consider decluttering the cabinets.
So it’s been seven years since we bought our small house after living in two large rental houses (and a five-bedroom two-story for many years before that). You live differently in a small house than in a large one, and it took me a while to figure that out. (I included what I learned in my eBook Secrets of Small-House Living, written a few years after we moved here.)
Now I’m used to living in a small house, but it has not become routine for me. I still love only having two bathroom sinks to clean instead of four. I greatly appreciate being able to plug the vacuum in the middle of the house and do all the vacuuming without once unplugging it, much less lugging it up and down steps as I did for many years.
Perhaps the thing I love best about my small house is that I don’t have to spend too much time or money on it, which frees up both things to be used for other pursuits. Every bit of time I don’t spend caring for a larger house can be spent reading, writing, gardening, or sewing. Every dollar I don’t spend on this house can be saved, or spent on travel. And we’re not talking about just a few bucks. The property taxes on this house are 1/3 of what we once paid on our large house. Now that’s quite a bit of savings!
There are downsides of living in a small house, but they’re quite minor. I’m aware that a couple of relatives are appalled by the fact that we gave up our lovely huge house for something that can best be described as modest. Oh, well, I gave up caring what they thought long ago.
Another negative is that sometimes I feel cooped up, especially now that it’s winter. But I’m solving that in two ways: I’ve turned a spare bedroom into a reading room, so that I have somewhere to sit and read besides the living room, and I’m making more of an effort to go for walks (all bundled up, of course) and meet friends for coffee now and then. These are things that I should have done long ago, because they are both quite enjoyable, and I find that afterwards, I return to my little house with a new sense of appreciation along the lines of “Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Home.”
