House Tour: My Family of 5 in 1,200 Square Feet
Peek into our closets and cabinets
This past week, we brought baby #3 home from the hospital. The week has been a whirlwind, in the best possible way. I figured there was no better time than while introducing a new baby to our home to go ahead and share it for the very first time here.
Our home isn’t tiny, and certainly not compared to families living in downtown areas, RVs, or sailboats. But especially in the suburbs, we’ve been dodging the well-meaning “How will you fit the kids?” and “When will you buy a bigger house?” for several years now. The reality is that we function better in a smaller space for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is lower costs, less cleaning, and a smaller environmental impact. I’m a firm believer that showing others how we make it work might enable them to do the same.
I adore online home tours (some of my favorites are Erin Boyle’s home here and Alison Mazurek’s home here, although now Alison and her family live here). But one of the things that I’ve noticed is what I most want to see— What’s inside your cabinets? How do you store kids’ clothes? Where do you put out-of-season gear?— is almost never featured. So my hope today is to swing open some closets and cabinets, literally, and give you a chance to see how we are making our space work for us.
There’s no storage in our entryway (minus kids’ shoes lining the railing, and a hook for guests behind the door) or living area, so what you see is what you get!
Kitchen
The kitchen was one of the biggest projects in our house to date. We completely revamped the 1980s style cabinets and shallow bar with an island that seats six, and tried to maximize storage with drawers on one side and a pull-out pantry on the other. One of the benefits of planning on being on our small-ish home for the long haul is being able to make pretty drastic changes to increase functionality for our family.
In addition to the island seating that is home to all my work-at-home tasks and countless play dough adventures, we have a kitchen table. The kids have Stokke Tripp Trapp chairs— a hefty investment, but the seats are versatile enough to grow with them and narrow enough to seat lots of little ones around a relatively small table.
Top Left: An upper cabinet with our plates and storage containers. Top shelf holds spare plates for hosting.
Top Right: A drawer under our microwave cabinet holds pans & their lids. Baking sheets are stored vertically in a hide-away cabinet (similar to a pull-out spice rack), and larger cake pans get a top shelf.
Bottom Left: This corner cabinet holds small appliances (like our toaster) on the bottom shelf, and serving dishes on the upper shelves. The cabinets on either side of this hold drink ware (cups and water bottles).
Bottom Right: This corner drawer holds all our utensils, with little compartments for metal bag clips, baking supplies, and other cooking tools.
Storage Spaces
We have a few real workhorse storage spaces in our home, and after years of finessing, we’ve almost gotten it right.
In the kitchen, we opted for a built in cabinet in the far corner that holds, well, not kitchen things.
Left: Our junk drawer. We do, in fact, try to keep it this organized— the drawer dividers definitely help! The drawer holds mail/ receipts and coupons I have to deal with, reusable grocery bags, and charging cords, plus whatever my little ones decide to throw in.
Right: Built in cabinet. You’ll notice that some of the cabinet is currently overtaken with grocery overflow (especially since we are stocked up for the newborn phase!), but my hope is that this entire cabinet can be learning related materials in the near-ish future. The top shelves are currently workbooks, alphabet games and puzzles, and other preschool-adjacent supplies, including Lovevery items and Kiwi Co. kits. And also, Legos (out of reach from curious toddlers) and a fire extinguisher. It is what it is.
Hall Closet
The left side of the closet holds board games and craft/ work supplies. We installed IKEA drawers and shelves here, much as in the kids’ room, and it made the space SO much more functional. I might eventually ditch the game boxes? I keep seeing stunning looking pictures of game closets with tidy games stored in a much more compact fashion. If you’ve tried that, I’d love to hear how it worked for you!
The right side of the closet holds towels and, er, book overflow (I just might have a teeny, tiny kids’ book problem…). At the bottom of the closet (not pictured) is a ‘morning basket,’ where I keep a rotating assortment of crafts, learning games, and workbooks for the older kiddos to reach for in the morning, normally just after breakfast.
Kids’ Room
That’s right, as a two-bedroom home, our kids… share a room! Right now, the girls share this room while baby boy sleeps in our room. When they are all sharing a room, we will swap spaces to give the kiddos the larger room. And even further down the road, we will replace the wall that the previous owners tore down to make our home three teeny-tiny bedrooms again, and give growing kiddos a little more privacy.
But for now, this is what we are working with.
Left: A climbing triangle with foam tumbler— doubles as a playhouse!
Center: The kids’ toys, other than stuffed animals/ dolls, live on this shelf. Puzzles and books on the top and toy rotation on the bottom.
Right: The kids’ shared closet. Each kiddo gets one drawer, and some hanger space. The highest shelf holds travel cribs (not pictured), the middle shelf holds out-of-season and next-size clothes, and the bottom shelf holds out of rotation toys.
Master Bedroom
This master bedroom set-up part of how we make small-ish— and especially, the two bedroom situation— work for us. The bassinet lives right by the bed, and my toddler still naps in the crib so my oldest can enjoy quiet time in her room. Sometimes, everyone piles into this space for nap, which is somehow even more peaceful. We have storage with under-the-bed drawers and a dresser (not pictured), mostly for my husband’s things! My closet is home to my clothes (out-of-season and maternity wear on the top shelf) as well as all the assorted baby gear we want easy access to without the clutter (hello, Dock-a-Tot and baby bouncer!).
It’s also worth noting: We have one set of sheets per bed, so we don’t have many extra linens to store— we just wash our sheets and return them to the bed. I don’t, however, court disaster with our smallest family member, so we do have a back-up crib and bassinet sheet.
Basement
The basement is the space in our home that is most ‘in flux,’ and will almost certainly change down the road. We currently have a seating area on one side, and a small workout area behind the couch (the trampoline is a real sanity-saver for energetic toddlers in the winter!). Down the line, this space might become a bedroom, a home-school craft space, or a teen hang-out zone? Who knows.
The basement is also home to our mudroom and laundry room, neither of which are remotely photogenic (as in, I seriously cringed before pressing ‘publish’— but functional isn’t always pretty!). Both of these spaces are a luxury of living in a suburb rather than an urban apartment, and they are serious workhorses for random storage. We keep swimsuits and other seasonal gear in a shelving unit in the laundry area (our beloved Lomi composter rests on top!). In the mudroom, we have hanging hooks for jackets and bags, a storage shelf (not pictured) for luggage and ‘outward’ bound things (gifts for loved ones, items for donation, etc.), and a row of hooks for travel related gear (backpacks, travel strollers, and a hiking carrier).
Do real, human children actually live here?!
Yes! Three of them, in fact. Which is why our house, as with pretty much everything else on the Internet, doesn’t always look this tidy. Sometimes there is laundry to put away. There is pretty much always someone’s water bottle lying around. We run our robot vacuum approximately 542 times a day. And occasionally, there is a full-fledged fort that takes over half the house.
But with less stuff— and less space— it’s a whole lot easier to keep the chaos under control.
Meet me in the comments: What small-ish space storage tips and tricks do you use, or want to try? I’d love to hear!
This was great to see. As an apartment dweller with kids I also REALLY appreciated that you shared your laundry and mud rooms + basement. So often I feel like I see “small home” tours that make zero mention of that extra space and they have these perfect looking space. I’m like…but where’s the toolset? The tax documents? The holiday decor (if any)? And then later will find out they have an entire basement or garage filled with boxes.
I now go into small home tours assuming they have additional storage I might not see and take what I can from it anyway. Keeping a crib in your room so the middle kiddo can nap and keep the shared bedroom free is super smart. I can see doing that with my second kid when we eventually have one, especially as they’ll be 4-5 years apart. It’s something I’ve wondered about but never considered just keeping a crib in our room for a few extra years!
Great informative post. BTW, we know plenty of people who were raised on small boats. They have all turned out fine, they're all sucessful and many love boats still. Not to mention I was raised sharing a bedroom (and often a tent) with my brothers for the first decade of my life, so it's fine!