time for change... "Living Small"!

A different project, in between seedling reports!

I have had so many people comment on the space we live in that I have been meaning to post on it for over a year now.  I have heard nice things like "I love your style", or "You make this place seem big!", to the disguised jabs of "Wow, I can't believe you can live here, it's nice..." and "This is nice, but I could never live in such a small house".  Well, our house is tiny, but when I am faced with situations that I am forced to deal with, I tend to accept and embrace them, after a mourning period, of course (hey, I'm only human!)!  I am now very proud of our tiny space, we've worked hard, and now I know that we are happy with less so someday that means we can have... a big barn!  :)  Of course, if someone offered me a big old broken down farmhouse, I'd jump at the chance, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon...


Every so often, I hear voices.  Usually the voices can be quieted by my bi-monthly rearrangement of furniture - this time it is not so.  I am hopelessly addicted to systematically destroying and rebuilding, some would call it remodeling, I call it a sickness!


We basically gutted the place we live in and redesigned the floorplan about 7 years ago.  This new floorplan works much better than the old small, dark, full of walls house that was.  We lived in a great new open space for quite awhile until the kids started getting older, and taller!  The space is starting to feel as if it needs more than just attention paid to furniture placement, I'm thinking we need a whole house freshening.  This time however, I'm doing it all with paint and I'm going to tap into my "outside the box" mind and push it to the limits.


900 sq feet be damned, we are going to live like it's 3000 - and I'm going to take you along for the ride LOL!  I already consider myself to be quite an organized person, but at the rate that I've been accumulating new hobbies (knitting, sewing, quilting, homebrewing to name a few) along with the fact that my kids are growing and their interests are changing (smaller toys, yay!) necessitates a thorough review of just what the heck is going on in here.


"Why not move into a bigger place?", you might ask!  For starters, we can't afford it!  We purchased a duplex and live in one side and rent the other side out.  This helps keep our cost of living lower than it would be if we did otherwise.  Another huge factor is that we are only here because of the military - we do not intend to even live in this state once hubby is out of the Navy, so why lose the farm in this housing market only to move somewhere else here that we know we'll have to sell in a few years?  Yep, the old adage holds true, "it's cheaper to keep her"!  And I'm sure I don't have to tell you that having an over half-acre backyard is very unique in the city/suburbs, we try to do a lot of living outdoors in the warm season, so we aren't as affected by the tiny house that part of the year.


Here's the plan:  I'm going to try like hell to repurpose every thing I have before buying anything new (with the exception of my new sewing table, which I already bought and will post on when that area is done), I'll do it with hubby's carpentry skills, maybe a bit of paint, fabric and imagination.  I'm going to keep track of what I do here on the blog in a once-weekly update and promise to be true about my budget, post costs and hang my head in public shame if I overspend.  I'm hoping this will ensure that I  stay off the plastic!  I know there are others out there who have very little space and could benefit from just updating what they have - I have been told I have a knack for this organizing/decorating thing but I'll be honest, it comes from necessity because we're a "lower middle class" military family on one income (but so thankful for that one income!), and I think necessity breeds all kinds of ideas and creativity.  This is what I love to do anyways, so here I go again!


Background on my style:  I'm in love with mid-century modernism, Scandinavian design (duh, I'm a MN girl!), Danish Modern... hence I am in love with IKEA (only their solid wood), you can't beat the price for design and simplicity.  Sure I love all things Dwell Magazine and would love to shop at DWR and such, but come on, I can't afford it!  I can easily switch gears to whatever design is appropriate, I love old farmhouses (I grew up in a late 1800's farmhouse) and would love to go Scandinavian farmhouse or shabby chic if that's what I had, would roll with the Craftsman or Victorian style if the house dictated, but this house?  Ugh!  This house was built in 1978, has zero architectural features and no discernable style other than crappy late 70's early 80's ranchiness (is that a word? - it is now!), and thus, I pretty much do whatever I want in here LOL.


A little time machine to take you back a few years:

First, I apologize for these horrible photos, I was so eager to get ahold of the sledgehammer back in 2004 that I didn't really take any "before" photos... you have to look behind the kids in most of them!

Ignore the bib, it was a joke!  Before the walls came down, everywhere you looked there was a wall in your face, only 900 sq feet but it had 3 bedrooms and a long dark hallway... too many walls!

This shot is our rental unit, it is exactly the same as ours was, lots of hallway... we left the original floorplan over there although we redid the kitchen.  It seems most people like to have the 3 bedrooms so it stayed as is, but was brightened up with lighter paint and light flooring instead of carpet, but you get the idea, it's the same as ours was...

There were TWO walls in our tiny kitchen!  One separating the kitchen from the living room, and another separating the eat-in area from the rest of the kitchen... you couldn't even pull a chair out and sit down.

This was the kitchen being gutted, walls down and redone - we have never hired anything out to save costs.  I designed and measured and put together all the cabinets and countertops and paint,  hubby did demo, install, plumbing and flooring, and any other strange requests that I had.

Below: egads! - We lived like this for close to 6 months!  No walls, you can see where 2 bedrooms plus a tiny living room were squeezed in this side of the house - where the crib is was a bedroom, and where you see the tan bed was another bedroom, the living room is at the front.  Finn was a baby here, we used to just push his crib wherever we weren't currently working :)

Now we're getting somewhere, but not quite...  to the left of this bed is where we cut a door to the backyard.  Before the only door was a sliding glass door in a back bedroom that was kind of strange for any normal traffic.  Even though this is still a bedroom, it's open to the living room via French doors now and thus "flows better" from the kitchen and living room to the backyard.

My kids' room has been redone 4 times - here's one of them...

(I still don't have it the way I want it!)

 Are you still with me?  Good!  Now is one last thing:  a video of the house in it's current "done" state.  The floorplan is as good as it's going to get at this point, which is great since we're broke LOL.  I basically like it the way it is but just need to freshen up and repurpose things and create more "multi-purpose" areas to allow all 4 of us and 2 dogs to keep on living here comfortably.


Now I'm going to go ahead and share my whole house with you on video instead of strategic photos :), in hopes that it will help others struggling with a small space!  I wanted to pick up of course before I shot this video today, and then I realized how stupid that would be since I'm starting to haul everything out of the rooms today and paint.  So here is my tiny house as it normally looks on any given day when company is not expected :)

 Next update will be on my paint choices and there will probably be some paint slapped on the wall and good repurposed items and by then!  I'm hoping to share this with others that love living small, and for those that are having to downsize, show you that it can be done!

I plan on my updates to not be so long and rambling, but wanted you to have a basic history of the tiny house!  My advice to any of you, take lots of before pics - I didn't and I really regret it when trying to describe how it was.


Just had another thought... hubby's at the squadron right now and probably reading this thinking he's gotta get home because "she's done lost her mind", again!