Do your small living spaces make you feel like you are living in the Temple of Doom? Are you downsizing to a tiny house and wondering how to organize it? Do you feel like you have to raid the lost arc each time you open the cupboards? In this video, I am sharing my downsizing experience so you can whip your small rooms into more organized and efficient spaces.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdsmall.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about living in small spaces, because I am living in one. I am temporarily living in a 700 square foot apartment while I’m waiting to build my new house. So, I wanted to share with you a few tips about living in a small space, and I want to share with you how inspired I am being in a small space.
So, if you’ve ever noticed when you travel and you’re in a hotel room with just your suitcase to worry about, how liberating that really is. It’s so nice to not have to worry about cleaning a large space yourself, and all you’ve got to worry about is all that stuff in your suitcase and nothing more. So, think about that concept and if you could translate that to your home.
I am living so comfortably in this 700 square foot space. I lack for nothing. I do have things in storage waiting for the new house, bigger pieces of furniture, things that are larger in scale, and of course my collection of books and things that are not absolutely necessary for me to have for the next three months or so. But it really is giving me a lot to think about, given that when I pull those things out of storage I’m not going to have been using them for three months. So, I am going to be very judicious about what I put into the new house when this is all said and done.
So, here are some tips for storing things in a small space. First, you want to use functional pieces of furniture for storage. So I’m showing you a picture right here of this trunk that I have, using it as a coffee table, but inside I have stored large kitchen appliances like my mixer and my griddle and my crock pot, and these things didn’t really have a place in the little kitchen that I have, but they fit perfectly here, and they also fit perfectly for their frequency of use. So, as little as I use them, they are easily accessible with just a little bit of trouble to pull the magazines off the top of the coffee table.
The next thing I want to talk about is using functional pieces for decoration. So, here’s a picture of some of my favorite serving bowls, and they’re beautiful bowls, so I have put them up on the ledge of my cabinet so that I can look at them and enjoy them. They serve as a decorative element in the space, but they’re also functional.
And the other thing I want to share with you about storage in small spaces is considering the purpose of the room. So, this apartment has a dining room, but it also has a bar that I’m actually sitting at right here for the kitchen. Now, I’m living by myself right now, so I don’t need to have a dining table – I’m not going to do a lot of entertaining in this space for the next three months – so I just need this bar to eat my dinners and breakfasts whenever I’m here. I don’t need a dining room, so that became my office. So, I would challenge you in your own space to think about re-purposing a room. Many people have a formal living or dining room that they’re not using, and they could use it for an office or a play room for kids. There are lots of ways to re-think your space to make it more efficient.
If you’d like more tips on things like this, we have our Free Tips that come out every Thursday. You can find out more at our Free Tips page and subscribe to our newsletter at clutterdiet.com/freetips.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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