Reducing Space/Reducing Costs - Living in a Small Space

 

Source

(You don't need a cute little tiny home like the one above to reduce your own living space)
 

We started 2013 by voluntarily cutting our home in half. No, not with a chain saw, but with a little hard labor on my husbands part and closing a few doors. We started out living in bedrooms in other peoples homes, we did that for years. Until we could finally afford to move into our own apartment. At only about 545 square feet, a very small one bedroom apartment. Then as my pay went up, we gradually move to bigger and bigger apartments until last year when we moved into a three bedroom, two bath home, a small one, but still too big of rental for us.

We rationalized it with the following thoughts:

1. We would have a bedroom and a office.
2. We would entertain in living room and dining room.
3. My step-daughter would see our spacious new digs and decide to spend so much time with us it would necessitate her having her own room!

In reality, we lived as we always had, my husband and I hiding out in the office together at the computers and the rest of the house largely unused. The rent wasn't much more than our two bedroom apartment. The problem was the utilities, we were paying probably three times the amount in utilities to heat and air condition and light all that space we weren't using.

We decided about 6 months in that we could get along with much less space. The problem is money. We can't afford to move again, the rents have gone up and a smaller place would actually be more than we are paying right now and we most definitely don't want roommates again. We certainly don't have the credit or funds to buy one of those cute tiny homes you see all over the net.

So we made our current space smaller. Last week my husband graciously moved around the whole house while I was at work. We moved the entertainment center to the kitchen to use as a pantry. It looks fantastic! We got rid of half the living room furniture and moved the office furniture into the living room, where we have a heater and an air conditioner in the same room. We then cleaned and closed off the third bedroom and the former office. Now we don't have to heat or light those rooms.

So there are always options to everything. Now we are starting our new year in half the amount of space, so far we love it. We anticipate saving tons on the heating since we were running two wall heaters all the time trying to heat the back office and now we're all together in one room with the heater right here. The two back rooms will be used as storage until we find a smaller place we can afford. All is well in our new makeshift tiny home.