How many of you live in small homes?

Hi Debbie! I understand exactly! I’m also visually, and I’ve found some great blog posts on the topic before.

I don’t have any pictures of my own, but I will say that we are living in a two bedroom apartment right now with an open floor planned kitchen/living room. Luckily our bedrooms are spacious and my children’s bedroom doubles as their schoolroom and playroom. We have fairly large closets too that we use for storing stuff, but they stock up fast. I really hope we are moved into a bigger space in the next few years so we have more schooling space, but this works for now. I’m just not sure I can save curriculum like I want to here, We also use the library a lot because of a lack of book shelf space, luckily ours has many resources.

I don’t know if my house would be considered small, but for us it is. We’re a family of 9 in a 3 bedroom home. 3 kids in one bedroom, 3 kids in second bedroom, mom/dad/baby in 3rd bedroom. We do not have a finished basement or attic. The main floor is an open living area, then a dining room and a small kitchen. My suggestions are simple:

– sell what you aren’t using and reinvest the money in current year materials. Only keep those things you KNOW you want to reuse with another child.

– Go up. Use shelves that are tall. An example would be choosing a 5 shelf bookcase over a 3 shelf one. Adding cabinets over counters. Hanging pocket shoe organizers on the backs of doors for more storage (we have one in the bathroom to hold bathroom supplies, one in the closet to hold gloves, hats, flashlights, etc).

– pray for creative solutions. Underbed storage comes to mind.

– Get rid of clothes and appliances/dishes/cookware you don’t use at least weekly. You can survive with just a small number of outfits per child and that frees space for shelving in closets for more storage. 😉

I would also love some ideas!  We live in a 1600 square foot home! 

Well, we live in a small house. We have 8 in a 1300 sq. ft. 3 bedroom.  We do not have a separate bedroom.  Several years ago, I realized that I either needed to embrace the homeschool decorating theme or find a great way to hid my stuff.  I decided it was easier to embrace the theme.  We bought nice two nice hanging bookshelves which hang above our framed Bible history timeline above our couch.  These bookshelves hold books we aren’t using on a day-to-day basis.  We have a unit of nice cubicle type shelves with doors where the kids each keep a box that they pull out each day for school.  These hold their notebooks and such.  We have a nice wicker chest beside our couch.  This holds all of our music stuff and doubles as an end table.  We have one on the end of the other couch as well.  We have one tall bookshelf next to that which holds all of our regularly rotating books.  We set the bottom half of our china cabinet in front of our fireplace.  We store electronics in there and the tv sits on top.  Right above the tv is our mantle which holds our more delicate older books.  Above the dining table (which is where we do school stuff) I have a board where I write the kids’ assignments, a large bulletin board with a map, and then above that are four frames with clothespins in them where I can tack up anything from our SCM picture study portfolios, our veritas history cards, times tables, Bible verses, etc.  Everything that I have in a frame looks nice because I buy nice frames from Hobby Lobby when they are half price.  I took the glass out of some of them and put in laminated scrapbook paper, then attached clothespins to the front of that.  The bulletin board is in a very nice coordinating frame and I covered the bulletin board part with nice fabric.  Everything looks all right because it all matches and because it is all in nice frames.  Otherwise, I think it would be too cluttered to me and it would drive me crazy. 

I have a very large file cabinet in the garage where I keep things that we aren’t going to need for the next couple of years.  I also store kids school papers in there.  We lined both sides of our garage with shelves.  This is where we keep almost all of the kids toys stored in plastic bins.  They just go get the bin holding whatever they want to play with and bring it in the house, then put it back in the garage at the end of the day.  

Random stuff we have done… use under the bed storage boxes, use shoe hangers on the back of the door for your shoes, hang hooks over every door to hang bags and purses, take the door off of a closet and use for an office, nice large floor baskets are great for storage, replace closet doors with curtains as this enables you to have a little more space in the room, and hang shelves everywhere you can.

Our home is a little under 1000 square feet with no attic and a horrid basement. We keep our furniture very simple and choose hidden storage as much as possible to reduce a cluttered look. I also hate clutter and throw everything away.

We have three very small bedrooms and three children. We have slanted ceilings upstairs which prevents bunkbeds or high bookshelves. I made rain gutter bookshelves for my girls room as they do not stick out far from the wall and are mounted off the floor. Their beds are pushed completely together with one of those things that you put on a child’s bed to stop them from rolling out sticking up to divide the space 🙂

My son has crate style bookshelves in his room where he keeps books. I made them to fit against the slant by staggering them. My son has an Ikea bed with pull out drawers underneath. My daughters have shallow plastic bins with handles I got at Target under their beds to store all their toys but their dolls who go in a storage chest/padded window seat I also bought at target.

With school stuff I got tired of my dining room looking like a schoolroom. We are not a school. We are a home. I store all our current books and notebooks in a closed cupboard of my china cabinet. I keep one other cupboard with things we use less frequently. The three drawers in it keep our school/art supplies and paper.

My best advice is to purge. If you really had to you could give them a great education with pencils, paper, and some library books really. Keep it simple.

The only things I store are our Life of Fred books and our phonics readers. We use Math Mammoth and it is a digital file I just print out lessons as we need them so that is stored on our computer.

For books we keep a basket in the living room for our library books and then I utilize some wasted hallway space for our books. Things like our atlas, nature guides, science type reference books, and our growing collection of living books we deem worthy to give up space to. We actually keep a lot of these books in the children’s rooms. My husband and I have a rather large library of Christian study books and reference material.

Look up, around, and under…where is there unused space?

Tara

Have you thought about looking at the IKEA website just for ideas even if can’t afford to buy anything from them? Might prompt some good ideas : ) My house isn’t large but guess when you only have 2 little girls & me here it is pretty spacious so can’t complain about storage.  I did get some things from ikea that helped storage for school & art stuff…the cabinets lock so I can keep my 3yo out of the art supplies : )

Under-the-bed storage is the first thing that comes to mind, as well as lots of shelves wherever you can fit them.  I live in 1800 sq ft with 1 daughter and 1 dog now-a-days, but grew up with 5+ people and lots of dogs and cats in 3 bedrooms and no basement or attic. 😉