Obstacle Course and Buzzfeed Small House Tips

Living in a small house means you have to keep limber and drink lots of milk, because you are constantly maneuvering around tight spaces and tripping hazards are everywhere. You can't just skip through your house singing "La La La" waving your arms all over the place, or you'll whack both your arms and slam into furniture and trip and fall and break your legs.

Every space has multiple uses, for example the bed isn't just a place to sleep, it's also the office and study space for any graduate students in the house.

The kitchen isn't just a place to cook or eat, it's also for laundry, and the kitchen floor is the baby car seat storage area as well as baby storage area.

Yeah I cook in here too, at the same time. 

It would probably be easier if laundry day looked like this instead: 

Can you find the baby? Hint: her favorite color is green and she loves snuggling in clean clothes!

As for small kitchen storage solutions, Buzzfeed, the Internet and Pintrest Conglomerator, has put together a handy list. We already do several of these (shelves within shelves, spice racks on doors, etc) and there are many, many handy tips on this post: Buzzfeed Lifehacks for Tiny Kitchen

Spice racks on the pantry sliding doors. Disorganized pantry.

I'm Stuffocating

It's the enemy of the small house: STUFF. SO MUCH STUFF! There is no room for extra stuff in a small house. "Oh, that's great," you say, "oh it must be so nice to live without all that extra junk." Oh no, we live with it. It comes out our ears, out our drawers, out the closets, it creeps across the floors...any flat surface gets covered in STUFF. How in the world can I lose so many things in 850 square feet?

Christmas season is upon us (quick Thanksgiving tip for holding a big family meal in a little house: don't. Go to someone else's house, maybe two different houses two days in a row, then you get to have Thanksgiving leftovers without storing the leftovers in the fridge!). We are also blessed to have some fantastic Jewish friends who let us in on their Hanukkah and Passover celebrations each year, so we get twice the holiday fun. We have some Hanukkah decorations (TJ particularly loves her Noah's Ark menorah). Where does all this go? Each year I've been "editing" down our Christmas decorations and putting up less. We're down to a 1.5 foot high fake Christmas tree. Which is surrounded by stuff.

I would like to pay someone to decorate for me. I know there are people that do that. And someone to edit all the stuff in my house. I know there are people that do that, too.

Want to de-clutter your house? There is plenty of advice on the internet. So much, actually,that you could spend those two hours you set aside to de-clutter your house cluttering up your mind with systems, tips, goals, charts...or reading this blog!

One of the experts on making yourself a more organized person is Flylady, but I have to say, just reading her "Getting Started" page makes me stress out and want to cry. She advocates getting fully dressed all the way down to your shoes, for heaven's sake! I don't think she has infants or toddlers. Somedays getting dressed before noon is an acheivement.

But she has one suggestion that we have implemented in our family in the last two weeks: 15 minutes of clean-up time. We try to eat dinner as a family together every night if possible, and immediately after dinner, we have 15 minutes of clean-up time. I put the focus on three things: cleaning up toys, clearing the table (not necessarily cleaning the kitchen), and sweeping the dining room--that last one is most important right now as we have a little one who shows us she's done with dinner by plopping her leftovers on the floor. We set the timer, we go. Sometimes I go a little longer than the timer. Hopefully it means good habits for our family and our kids. Time will tell!

For de-cluttering: if you have small kids, it doesn't matter how often you do this, you will never, ever get ahead. So just accept it. Accept the clutter, the clutter you have not necessarily made yourself (all my shoes get put on their rack, but they don't stay there, especially the fancy high-heeled ones). So many of the suggestions for de-cluttering do not involve frequent interruptions. If you get a few hours to focus on de-cluttering, lucky you! So here's my tip: de-clutter just one thing that is really bugging you at a time. It may only happen once a week. I majored in literature in college, so I have two big bookshelves full of books, books I liked but will probably never read again. Books I didn't like but being on my shelf makes me feel smart (I'm looking at you Tolstoy and Joyce) and will probably never read again. So tonight, to make room for all the Christmas books, I spent 10 minutes going through just two actual shelves. I filled one paper bag with books that might be worth selling at the used book store, and one paper bag just for donation. Then I put them in the trunk of the car. Where they will probably live for the next month.

Bathroom Time is Family Time!

In a small house, the notion of privacy is kind of a joke. Growing up, my family lived in an older house which also only had one bathroom. We had a kind of code: if one of the girls was going #1, any of the other girls could come in. Usually, #2 meant you get privacy, except for my poor little sister,  I remember brushing my teeth while she sat on the toilet reading a book. The other code was, if someone is in the shower, it's fair game to go in the bathroom, until they are ready to get out. Every morning before I school I would go downstairs and wait on the bottom step outside the bathroom until I heard my dad turn on the water and close the shower door. Yeah, no real privacy. I think it prepared me for motherhood. 

You can't have a magazine-based idea of what a bathroom is for in a small house. It's not your spa. It's a place with very specific functions. You get in, you get out. Hair and make-up is generally not done in the bathroom if you have lots of people who want to use it. 

Bathroom storage tips: go upward and behind the door. Over-the-toilet cabinets, shelves, etc. There's also this cool thing, which I don't think would fit in our house because of its age and wonky measurements, but it looks like an awesome idea! 

Cabidor Storage Rack

All of this said, if I could change one thing about living in a small house, it would be having two bathrooms. I don't mind the familial closeness one bathroom creates, but I have a tiny weak bladder, and I have been known to pee outside in the grass behind the garage because I just couldn't hold it any longer. Now with three people using the potty, accidents are always waiting to happen! I dream sometimes of a master bathroom, and on one of *those* days, I could close not one, but two doors between me and the kids. Sigh.

Cooking in a Small House/Kitchen--Saving Appliance Space

The apartment I had when I was single, before my husband came along, had a teeny tiny kitchen by West Coast standards (I'm sure by NYC standards it's spacious and could feed a family of eight). It was roughly four feet by five feet. Here's me making some pie (to impress said husband-to-be):

I made everything in that kitchen that a normal cook would make, including bread, soups, roasted chickens, etc. And I learned economy of stuff: each and every item in the kitchen had to have some use and be used on a regular basis. It was extremely easy to clean, too! And I liked the 3/4 size fridge, as I could easily see and access everything on top. Did I mention that I'm not very tall at 5'2"? 

So enter our house, with its huge kitchen of approximately 8x14 feet, which includes a full-size washer and dryer. We started without a dish washer, but thankfully my husband put one in. At first, I was disoriented by having to walk a few steps each way to retrieve items for cooking. In my old kitchen, all I had to do was reach out my arms. 

I value fresh, homemade meals and I'm cheap, so I cook most of our food. Before we had kids, I used to make things a little more interesting.  We haven't stooped to frozen chicken nuggets (yet), but simple and quick has become the name of the game. 

Every so often I tinker with the set-up, but here's the current "appliance bar" as I like to call it. These are the appliances that are used at least weekly if not more. Hauling them in and out of the cupboards is a pain, so they live on the counter top. 

Toaster oven, electric pressure cooker, stand mixer, food processor, griddle, and you can't see it but the stick blender is in there too: 

Space saving appliance tip #1: This, my friends, is the most AWESOME appliance ever!!! One day I happened upon a kitchen catalog that contained an electric pressure cooker that also works as a rice cooker AND a slow cooker!!! I have used stove-top pressure cookers before, especially for making beans, but my old one was of the dangerous vintage era so I had tossed it out. Plus, I burned stuff in it all the time. This has a timer. It cooks things, then stops cooking and just keeps them warm. It cooks brown rice in 20 minutes, start to finish. It cooks dry beans in 40 minutes. And if my kids cry and whine or bleed, I can leave it. I push some buttons, and leave it. It even has a saute function so I can brown meat or cook onions first before closing it up. I adore it. Sometimes, I've been known to hug and kiss it. It wasn't cheap, about $120, but I use it almost every day. Frozen chicken boobs, rock hard to cooked in 15 minutes, with no drying out. Mine is an Instant Pot, but there are several brands out there. 

This part of the counter-top bothers me. It's full of junk. I have one large glass pitcher I use for cooking utensils. They all have to fit in there (except the pizza cutter, which I could probably get rid of anyway). Vitamins/medicine are stacked up by the sink too, so we don't forget to take them. Messy messy messy! 

Small kitchen tip #2: don't get utensils with big fat handles, even if they are supposedly "ergonomic". Whisks kind of have to have fat handles, but all the black utensils below could be replaced by thinner-handled utensils. The bamboo ones are fine. If you have a drawer you keep utensils in, thinner handles will help with that as well.

Anyone have any good tips for storing the griddle? I thought about hanging it on a hook on the wall, but I having my short little t-rex arms, I wouldn't be able to reach it without climbing on the counter. Hm. 

Oh and back to the fact that my laundry room is also my kitchen (I just keep telling myself that I'm so continental...), the washer and dryer used to be bare on top, like this: 

Of course, being a flat surface, we just piled stuff up on both of them, even chopping veggies up there sometimes. After a few years, I finally asked my dad to come make a counter top to go over it. There was leftover Formica from the kitchen counters when the house was remodeled before we bought it, so luckily everything matches quite nicely. Here's the after:

Amazing, isn't it? It even makes the washer and dryer look like they match! Now, if only it was always that clean and clear. Yeah right. Here it is now: 

It's become the snack storage area, cookbook storage area, and stuff-that-needs-to-go-out-to-the-garage storage area. Blech. I've heard that the relative clutter of your fridge also equals the relative messiness of your house. I'm afraid that's true. Especially since it's the little one who puts all her art work on the fridge and plays with the magnets that is also messing up the rest of the house! 

A Brief History of Our Time in the House

The house was built in 1943, one of thousands in our neighborhood and the surrounding area that were built for the large numbers of people moving to Seattle to work for Boeing during the war. These houses really weren't meant to last as long as they have, but here we are! We haven't done anything structural to the house (yet), but we've made some changes and had a big landscaping project.

Here are the before pics:

Before, there was a grassy slope of a front lawn. The back yard has some huge pine trees, and we wanted a garden. This is the best spot, so we got to work terracing the front yard. We used recycled concrete chunks. It took a few months of scouring Craigslist and borrowing and renting trucks, but we finally had enough for the walls and to use as stepping stones.

Reminder: Call before you dig! We did, no worries.

The front area had a planter box on one side, and a triangular area on the other side. The first summer we grew tomatoes and collard greens in the triangle area. The second summer, we put in a matching planter box.

Living room.

Living room looking toward the front door: 

Yes, we do have a washer and dryer, thank goodness! But they're in the kitchen, right next to the fridge.

Bigger bedroom:

Doorway to the dining room and kitchen, living room closet, hallway to bedrooms and bathroom.

Dining room, kitchen to the right and back door.

Kitchen (was added-on in the 1960s)

 View out of the kitchen toward the living room doorway.

 Kitchen sink, awesome vintage cabinetry, and the dishwasher we put in ourselves!

Before we got married, I lived alone in the house. I used the little bedroom. Note the headshot of my then-fiance on the wall. Hee hee!

And the ever-important bathroom! Yes, that's how big it is.