Why a Small Apartment?
Bigger Apartment cost more.
It’s as simple as that.
The smaller your home, whether it’s a house or an apartment, the lower the monthly payment
is going to be and the easier it’s going to be to get ahead of your financial situation.
The ability to make a small home seem big is an incredibly valuable one.
It can make a small, inexpensive house or apartment feel like something much bigger
using just a few wise moves and some simple tricks.
Check This out!
1.
Buy Foldable Furniture Instead of devoting extra space to a guest
bed, get a couch or a chair that features a foldable bed inside.
Almost all of the time, it functions perfectly well as a couch, but during those moments
when you need a bed for a guest to use, it transforms into that instead.
Another option: install a wall-mounted foldable bed.
In situations where you have a guest, just move aside whatever items are sitting in front
of it and you have a nice place for them to sleep.
Also, consider a table with leaves so that you can keep it small most of the time and
expand it when necessary.
2.
Use Fewer But Larger Furniture Pieces If your home is small, it might be tempting
to think that small furniture is the right choice.
The problem with that is that people will end up choosing many pieces of small furniture
to take care of their needs and all of those small pieces end up taking up more space and
being less functional than some larger pieces.
Instead of buying a loveseat and a chair, buy one large sofa (perhaps one with a bed
hidden inside).
Instead of buying two or three small bookshelves, buy one giant one.
The large items might take up more floor space by themselves, but you won’t need multiples
of them.
3.
Add Built-In Shelving One great way to maximize storage space in
a small home is to fill an entire wall, floor to ceiling, with shelves that are directly
attached to the wall.
You can use these shelves for many purposes, as they can hold decorations, function as
a home entertainment center, hold many books, and so on.
By attaching the shelves to the wall, you’re minimizing the floor square footage that the
shelves are taking up.
By building lots of shelves that go all the way to the ceiling, you’re adding a ton
of storage space to those square feet.
4.
Put Mirrors on Doors and In Other Places Mirrors trick your eyes into thinking that
you’re looking farther than you actually are.
Thus, mirrors in several places in your home can fool your eyes repeatedly, making everything
seem a little bigger.
One great place to do this is on your closet doors.
Place a mirror on each closet door in your bedroom and you’ll quickly gain the illusion
that your bedroom is a lot bigger than it was before.
Large bathroom mirrors – and even mirrors on bathroom doors – can create the same
effect, introducing a sense of largeness and openness that wasn’t there before.
5.
Hang Large Items from the Ceiling or on Walls Got a bicycle?
Can’t possibly ditch that canoe?
Consider hanging them from the ceiling or on a wall to get them out of the way.
We’ve done this in our garage with several items.
We simply installed hooks in the ceiling studs and used them to hang items such as bicycles
and sleds to get them out of the way.
It allows us to store quite a bit more in our garage without making the garage feel
overstuffed.
6.
Renovate Doorways, Making Them Open and Wide If your home features any doorways that you
largely leave open, consider a home improvement project that widens those doorways and eliminates
the door.
Doing this makes the space feel open and surprisingly bigger than before.
You don’t have to take out the whole wall.
Just enlarge the entryway into the room and remove the door, extending it to the sides
a little and perhaps all the way to the ceiling.
It creates a very powerful sense of having more space.
7.
Keep Your Stuff Organized, Avoiding Duplication I don’t think it’s realistic for most
people to have an exact place for every single item in their home.
However, you should have a system in place where you can easily find everything in your
home.
For example, it makes sense to have an “office supply” drawer where you keep things that
are obviously office supplies – tape, scissors, pens, and so on.
How does this help?
If you can easily find the things you need when you need them, there’s never a need
to duplicate purchases.
If you always keep your scissors in your “office supply” spot, you don’t need to buy a
second pair of scissors.
If you multiply that effect by the many things you have around your home, it becomes clear
how much space duplicated stuff can take up and how much space you can save by simply
having appropriate places for your things with some basic organization rules.
8.
Think Vertical for Storage We tend to think of our living space as a
floor plan.
When there is a spot in that floor plan that identifies storage space, like a bookshelf
or something like that, we recognize that square footage as devoted to storage.
Here’s the trick – that square footage extends from the floor to the ceiling, so
why not take advantage of all of that space?
Choose tall shelves that extend all the way to the ceiling instead of shorter shelves
that only go up a little way.
If you have a media cabinet, choose one with a bit less square footage on the floor but
one that extends, again, to the ceiling (or close to it).
The key is to stretch that storage space upward where it makes sense so that you’re taking
up vertical space, not floor space.
9.
Be Critical of All of Your Possessions My philosophy with most of my possessions
is that if I don’t use it for a year, I can and should get rid of it.
It’s just taking up space, after all, so why keep it around?
I do this with my board games, for example.
Whenever I play a game, it ends up on top of one of the stacks of games on the shelf.
Every so often, I’ll trade away or sell off the games on the bottom of the stacks.
You can apply the same type of philosophy to almost everything you own.
If you haven’t used it in a year, Do you really need to keep it around?
It’s very likely that anything you haven’t used in a year is just taking up space in
your home, so sell it off.
10.
Use As Much Natural Lighting as Possible If you want your home to feel bigger, use
lots of natural lighting whenever possible.
Throw open the curtains or the blinds as much as you can and allow your rooms to be lit
with real light.
Our solution has always been to use thin curtains, preferably white ones, as window coverings
most of the time.
They can easily be opened to allow the view out of the window, but when you want some
privacy, they still allow plenty of sunlight to come through, brightening the room.
11.
Use Trunks for Tables Wherever you might have a table, consider
using a trunk instead.
Trunks provide additional storage space and an old trunk is a nice conversation piece,
too.
It fits comfortably in the same floor area that a table might otherwise fit and works
very well for holding plates, cups, and other items.
Obviously, this doesn’t work for every table, but it can work well for coffee tables, end
tables, and bedside tables in most homes.
It just converts all of that cubic space into storage space very easily.
12.
Avoid Unitaskers Unitaskers are devices that only perform one
very specific task.
My favorite example of a unitasker is a meatball grill basket.
Yes, that’s right – it’s a basket that is designed solely for the ability to grill
meatballs.
You couldn’t do anything else with it even if you wanted to.
Instead of having an item for every possible use, look for single items that can do many,
many things.
Instead of buying a set of bowls, buy two fairly large bowls.
Instead of buying an entire set of pots and pans, stick with one skillet and one pot and
see how that works for you.
Unitaskers take up space and are rarely used.
Avoid them and only buy stuff that you can use for lots of things.