Monday, January 27, 2014

How a family of 5 can live in a 2 bedroom home: Part One

I think there are too many posts out there with pictures of large, beautiful kids rooms. Magazine, quality clean with expensive decor of the parents choice.

Well, here in the real world it's not like that...

My husband and I bought this house a couple months after our daughter was born. Our son was just over a year old and the house was "perfect" for our pocket book. A small, 800 square foot (living space), 2 bedroom and 1 bathroom home with a nice, fenced back yard; perfect for the kids to play and the dogs bathroom breaks. The house was built in the 1940's and apparently back then there was no such thing as a master bedroom or a spacious bathroom. We had to get rid of a lot because there was no room.

This is how I have adjusted for our tight living conditions through the years.

Sense we've moved in we had an addition to our family, my baby Sam (he'll be 2 soon...*screams*). So that is a family of 5, plus a dog, living in 800 square feet. How do I do it.... Most of the time, I don't even know. But over time I have developed some tips and tricks to my living in such tight surroundings.


~

Part One: Kids room

I'll start with the dresser.
Their dresser has 6 drawers! So each kid gets 3 drawers: one for socks and underwear, one for bottoms (pants and skirts) and one for pajamas. This was a great find for my family! If your kids share a room and they each have a dresser, save some space and donate (or sell) the multiple dressers and buy a big one they can share! Keep an eye out at secondhand stores for older, larger dressers! That is a great place to start or online yard sales!


Next, we do not have a toy chest.
The main reason we don't have one is because we've never bought one. Instead we have a small "dresser" and storage bins. If you notice the books in bins on top of the dresser, so we have no need for a book shelf. All the favorite, smaller and go-to toys are in the bins. Where as the bigger, "in the way" toys are in the dresser.


I love hooks!

Hooks are a great way for things to have a "place". I put a hook up just for my daughters dress-up dresses and another coat rack for jackets and backpacks.


Another great place for storing "in the way" items are on the clothes dresser. This last Christmas we got the kids foam chairs, the dresser is the perfect place for storing them sense they can grab them when they want them.

Beds!

Sam is still young and using a crib. The other 2 are sleeping in the bottom 2 beds of a triple bunk bed. We found the bunk bed on Craigslist. GREAT FIND! And something we needed!


One more tip I've done is when they get a new toy, old ones go in the donate box. That is the that fastest way to loose your space! Having too many toys! So get rid of toys! Some say have your kid help you but in my opinion that's not very wise... Your kid will just fight to keep everything. And that is not the point of down sizing. So to avoid a fight with your kids, when they are  gone, go through their toys! You know their favorites and the ones they haven't played with in months, or the ones that are no longer age appropriate. Donate!

So that's it! That's how I have survived 3 kids sharing the same room. When the time does come to selling our home and buying a bigger one I'm not sure how easy it will be to separate them...

Until then, this is what works for us.

Blessings and thanks for reading!

3 comments:

Rosilind Jukic said...

What a helpful post. I like how you have made your home work for your family instead of trying to live beyond your means. That is so wise! It is so easy to grow discontent when we see lovely, polished homes on Pinterest...and forget that this phase of our life really doesn't lend itself to that. Maybe it never will - maybe our pocketbook will never allow us to live that way either...and that's okay, because we have something MORE. We have the love of family and contented children. You can't "pin" that. (and probably no one wants to see what that looks like sometimes. hahahah! Banana smeared walls and couches covered in cheerios), but that imperfection is what keeps us sane, because we're not trying so hard to live up to an impossible image!

3 Little Angell's Mommy said...

Thank you Roz!

evelyn said...

Good job Tiffany !!