It seems like everyone wants more space. We keep buying up, adding on and spreading out in the hopes that a few (hundred) extra square feet will help our lives run more smoothly and make us feel better.
But all that moving and adding on is expensive. So if you can’t afford it, you can feel stuck, trying to make the best of a bad situation but mostly just feeling unhappy.
Well, have I got a solution for you! One that Alan and I tried recently with amazing results.
Our apartment is perfectly decent and at about 850 sq feet is plenty big enough for the two of us. But something about it wasn’t quite right. We had a combined living room/ dining room that’s long and narrow with a bay window way down at one narrow end. Not impossible, but awkward.
We like to entertain – potlucks for 30 as well as smaller, more intimate dinner parties. The living room also had to double as a guest room on occasion. Which is asking a lot from a room. I wanted it to be warm and welcoming. Graciously saying to our friends, “Come in! Be comfortable!” What it was actually saying was more like, “Meh. Whatevs.”
A couple months ago, after yet another round of rearranging the furniture and getting no further ahead, Alan said, “Here’s a thought. Why don’t we move our bedroom in here?” We don’t just sleep in our bedroom, it’s also where all the serious loafing happens. And the room that we had was cosy, but I kept bumping into the doorway and Alan kept stubbing his toe on a raised bit of flooring. Not cause for misery, certainly, but when the perfect solution was just down the hall…
It took a bit of work. A closet had to come out of the old bedroom and I needed to paint the ceiling in old living room. But a little before Christmas, we did the big rearrange and I can’t believe the difference it’s made!
The bedroom is amazing – spacious and airy. My desk is in here (Alan’s taken over the weird little space by the front door that in another life was a storage closet). Because it’s not trying to do three things at once, it no longer feels awkward. It’s just a really great spot for sleeping and loafing.
And now we have a separate dining room that makes our guests feel special (they’ve actually said so) and the smallest bedroom, the one in the front of the house, is our sitting room. It took a couple of tries to get the layout right, but now it’s working so well that I find myself spending more time in there than I ever did in the old setup.
Honestly? The place feels like we’ve added on half again as much, with no bank loans, no plaster dust, just a couple of solid evenings of work.
I think most of us, when we move into a place, set it up according to the room designations that are there. I know Alan and I do. Sometimes this works, but often, it doesn’t. And we feel so uncomfortable in our own houses that we can end up moving out or adding on when we could so much more easily and affordably ignore the designations and set the space up to suit ourselves. Because, just as there are no Stuff Police or Taste Police, the Room Designation Police have also given up and disbanded.
If you’re feeling cramped in the space you’re in, take another look around, throw out the rule book and see if you can’t find a better way to arrange things, a way that suits you and your lifestyle, rather than the builders and their lifestyles. Because, seriously? It is so worth the effort!
If you’d like to give it a try, but feel like you need some suggestions, I’m happy to share my ideas with you. Leave a comment, or email me at: barbDOTalanATgmailDOTcom
