Are you really using every space in your home?

On making your space work for you

As a child, I (like, I assume, most other people) occasionally had bizarre dreams. Once, as an eight year old, I vividly recall dreaming that a man in a suspended clown car was doing laundry in our home, except our home had a laundry room the size of my school gymnasium filled with dozens of tables of white laundry? As soon as my dream-self entered the room to question him, he took off in his clown car. So much for division of labor.

I hadn’t thought much of this dream for the better part of more than two decades. In fact, I thought I had mostly left bizarre dreams in my childhood. Earlier this year, though, I had a series of dreams that were an unsettling combination of real life and imaginary circumstances, all having to do with square footage and stuff. In one such dream, I opened a door and began wandering through undiscovered rooms, somehow conveniently located just off our fictitious living room: a cozy nook for books! a space for my work out bike! I felt enormous relief that everything had a proper home.

Then, in the most bizarre of turns, I emerged from the rooms to find piles upon piles of things that the previous owners had left, somehow undiscovered until now. I can’t tell you what happened next, because then my little one woke up, and therefore I woke up.

But my takeaway? EVEN IN MY SLEEP I’M BEING ACCOSTED BY THINGS.

There are, of course, lots of other directions I could take this: Sleep deprivation with an infant is making me crazy. The world is making me crazy. But never once did I consider that my family might actually need more space, for one very simple reason: Very rarely is the answer more.

Sure, we could afford to move to a larger home. But there are always tradeoffs: More space to clean is nothing but a constraint on our free time. More space to hide away isn’t conducive to quick moments of connection with my partner and kids.

As I was musing on this, our basement flooded. Thankfully, it wasn’t aggressive enough to pull out the paddle boats. Really, we’re talking just some moisture on the drywall and the flooring— but I’m still not too keen on inhaling moldy spores for decades, so several weeks ago we hired someone to tear out and replace the drywall. The news from our basement has gotten progressively worse the more drywall they’ve removed. Our contractor started beginning every sentence with “I don’t mean to upset you, but…” Somewhere around the “I don’t mean to upset you, but your house is leaning,” I realized this would not be a quick project by any means.

You might remember the basement from my house tour almost a year ago. This single room in our basement is 1/3 of the square footage of our entire house out of commission. And we’re fine.

Like, actually fine. I’m 100 percent not fine with the leaning-house, mold-in-my-sheetrock, water-gushing-in-through-my-cinder-block thing. But the loss of the space? We’re a little bit too okay with it. My workout bike is holed up in the garage, and a bin of Legos was brought upstairs to my closet. And we haven’t missed the space at all.

There’s a famous (well, famous-in-the-minimalism-world) study about how people spend most of their time clustered into only a few rooms of their house. We don’t spend much time in formal dining rooms, or, apparently, porches (speak for yourself).

The heat map of one family included in a UCLA study.

In our house— even with only 240 square foot a person— we fell victim to this exact situation. It’s not that the basement was never used. But if it was used so little that we barely miss it, we’re clearly not using it to its potential.

So now, we’re trying to envision the next life of our basement. I’m imagining bright, colorful, and child-centered, just because that’s the stage of life we’re in. Maybe a DIY Lego table? A low-slung sofa for lounging? I don’t have any concrete ideas yet, really. And if I did, they are buried under pounds of drywall dust regardless.

My sincere hope for you is that you aren’t also experiencing a monster of a repair project. But perhaps you can live vicariously through my experience (trust me, you don’t want to actually be living this one) and envision the loss of certain spaces in your home. What do you and your loved ones gain from your space? If a room doesn’t feel quite right, what could you change? Here are a few ideas, roughly in order from least time-consuming to aggressively renovating.

What can you tuck out of sight? Listen, I know some people love the open shelving thing. But sometimes, being able to shut the closet door on the 12,241 Legos is necessary for your sanity. Ditto for kitchen appliances— toasters, blenders, you name it.

What is something you can re-organize, to make it more accessible? Try a closet system so you aren’t precariously stacking boxes in your closet. Perhaps install a hook for your jacket and keys behind the door, so you don’t have to search before you leave the house. If you are constantly having to empty shelves to reach for things in the back, consider a lazy susan or corner shelf organizer.

How can you encourage the habits and routines you want? Maybe sleeping without your phone is as simple as re-locating the phone charger to another room. Perhaps a small table lamp would encourage early morning reading or journaling. If your goal is to drink more water (I know mine is!), would putting a coaster on the bedside table help?

Play with furniture layouts. How does the room feel when you open it up? What if you use the sofa to block half the room off? Should the desk go in the center, like a command station, or in the corner for a miniature work retreat? When in doubt, try less furniture, not more.

Think about the ‘pain points’ in your day, and use your space accordingly. If cooking dinner with little kids is hard, does it get any easier if you put an art mat on the kitchen counter? If it’s a constant battle to get kids’ shoes on, would it help to store socks by the front door too? If you’re looking to unwind after a long day in the office, do you have a cozy corner that helps you reset?

Change rugs, paint colors, light bulb hues, or window coverings to set the mood. I never would have thought of light bulb hues if it wasn’t for

Laura Fenton

’s recommendation in this post, but it’s brilliant. Window coverings are my hill to die on— we switched out cumbersome black out blinds for shades, so we actually open our blinds to let in the natural light every single day.

Envision different functions for rooms. There’s no rule that says that parents must sleep in the largest bedroom (what happens if you gave the bigger room to the kiddos?). The dinner police are not coming to arrest you because you swapped out the formal dining room for a play room, office, or extra bedroom. I’ve heard multiple stories of walk-in closets being converted into fantastical mini-libraries or LEGO building spaces. If your home is feeling extra cramped (or that walk-in closet is sitting unused), really lean in to what changes would help your home run more smoothly.

Pick furniture that better serves the space. In small homes where space is at a premium, you need every piece of furniture to pull its weight. Sometimes this is as small as moving furniture between rooms, but it might also involve looking for a new furniture item that better meets your needs. Do you need to swap the bed frame for one with storage underneath? (there’s no shortage of beds with drawers! there’s even a bed with a built-in desk!) What about a storage ottoman instead of a traditional coffee table?

Knock down a wall. (Or, in a few cases, put a wall up). The easiest way to create the appearance of more space in your home is to knock out a few walls. Please don’t go blindly sledge-hammering— you want to make sure you leave all your support beams intact, for example. But in many homes, you can remove walls between the main living areas to create a single large living space, if that’s your thing. In our home, we even found dead space behind a wall that allowed us to fit a second sink into our bathroom!

And, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say declutter. declutter. declutter. I very nearly dramatically announced, “we’re in the waning days of summer” (well, in the Northern hemisphere), never mind that we are literally only one day past the midpoint of summer (August 7th, in case you were curious). But you and I both know that fall is just around the corner, and before you know it, we’ll all be cooped up with the sniffles indoors. You’ll feel better if you’ve edited your possessions— and your space— before then.