Small homes don’t come with oodles of storage room. Old homes are often short on cupboards and closets. Combine the two and you’re left with small closets and few cupboards.

Have you ever wondered just how many items the modern home contains?

Our grandmothers have much to teach us. They didn’t depend on every new gadget that hit the market to run their homes.  Most of the shiny new contraptions aren’t worth the price tag. Carefully evaluate whether a new item will significantly help you become a more efficient or frugal or healthy homemaker before it ever enters the front door. This will dramatically cut down on the need for storage.

Simplicity is best.

Some items, however, are worth storing: Grains bought in bulk or a year’s worth of pasta purchased at a rock bottom price slash the grocery budget. A well stocked cupboard eliminates unnecessary trips to the store.

If you hope to have a large family, it would generally not make sense to get rid of the hand me downs. Storing a “bare minimum” collection of clothes saves considerably over the long run.

A gift stash makes last minute birthday parties or the event that crept upon you unaware (even though it was on the calender for a month) no cause for panic.

But of course, food stockpiles and old clothes take up space. Where should they be stored? There’s the obvious places like under the bed or behind-the-door racks. Here are other ways we’ve made limited storage work.

• Build a shelf: it doesn’t need to be pretty, just sturdy. Most of my “pantry” sits behind the couch on a rough floor-to-ceiling shelf . Cover it up with a pretty cloth and it actually adds to the decor.
• Keep the fridge and freezer full: even if something doesn’t need to be stored in the fridge, most items stay fresher. Plus, a full fridge cuts down on cooling costs. Air is more expensive to keep cool than a bag of flour. (An awful lot of food fits into a regular freezer.  If you don’t have room for a deep freeze, prioritize. Meats fluctuate in price considerably. A freezer full of rock bottom priced meat is a good investment. Brown hamburger, add the spices and sauce and you have dinner almost ready to pull out of the freezer.)
• Use the bathtub: a dirty laundry baskets fits perfectly. The pile of clothes is out of sight but easy to get to.
• Decorate with storage: Jars full of beans, rice or honey add a cute country charm. Hang your child’s cutest outfits from pegs on the wall.
• 5 gallon buckets of grain double as sturdy movable stools for a toddler.
• Fill the trunk: Light weight sports equipment, an umbrella stroller and the return/donate box fit well.

What other places do you store items?

Photo by Eva Schuster

Welcome to my little kitchen!

A kitchen with barely three feet of counter space may work well for a bachelor, but when you have a family and make all your meals and breads and snacks from scratch, the limited space presents a challenge.

Besides the three feet of counter space, a washing machine, fridge, oven and table fill up the rest of the room snugly. At first, our new kitchen felt claustrophobic to me, but with a bit of creativity and organization, anyone can thrive in the little space.

Think up: Shelving is a great way to “add space” in a small kitchen. Joshua added a couple shelves above our table and it transformed the kitchen! Big decorative boxes are perfect for storing less used items like paper goods or snack foods, plus they add charm to the kitchen.

Glasses, jars of food and dishes all are pretty stored on shelves and free up cupboard space.

Limit the gadgets: Sort through your appliances and kitchen extras and only keep the items that are regularly useful.

Whenever possible, find multiple uses for items. For example, my big bowl doubles as the washing bowl. The large pot serves as a compost bucket when not full of soup.

Keep the counters cleared: Of course, the kitchen is the center of much of the domestic life. It is supposed to be used. But don’t permanently store items on the counters. Find an easily accessible spot for items (like the coffee maker) that are used consistently and put them away in between uses. It only takes a few seconds, but makes the kitchen more useable the rest of the day.

Do you have a small kitchen? How do you make it work for you?

Disclaimer: Of course, it is practically impossible to pinpoint a definition for a small house. A tiny home in modern America would be extravagant to medieval peasants or many around the world today.

Here I mean small in the American sense: a duplex with two little bedrooms and living room, a tiny bathroom and a kitchen with just barely enough room to squeeze in a few chairs and a table.

Cramped.

That’s how I felt when we first moved into this little duplex so that Joshua could attend law school. With just barely three feet of counter space, the kitchen was especially bad.

But over the past two years I’ve come to realize the blessings of less space: the impulse to accumulate stuff is balanced by the lack of room to store it and you are forced to be creative. Plus, limited space encourages communication and makes holding a grudge nearly impossible.

Before digging into specifics for each room, there are a few principles that work for the entire house.

Be content: Enough room is mostly a matter of the heart. We have way more than we need. Discontentment with a small home won’t disappear with a move. Choosing contentment makes even a small home seem big.

Gratefully accepting the room you have encourages you to be creative with it. Almost the moment I accepted the kitchen, I thought of simple (and obvious) ideas to make it more functional.

Simplify, simplify: Whether it’s the decorations or the children’s toys-keep it simple. Even when stuff is cheap or free evaluate whether it will really add to the peace and charm of the home. By keeping it simple, you are able to enjoy the things you truly love.

Continually evaluate what you have: pretend to be a visitor walking through the front door. Looking at the stuff through someone else’s eyes highlights things you don’t use anymore, the toys that really could be given away or sold … and the dust on top of that old shelf.

Keep things picked up: Homes are to be lived in. No home with little ones is always tidy, but unabated clutter wreaks havoc in small spaces. Determine a place for everything that you really love (and ruthlessly get rid of the rest!) and then make sure it gets put away. Even little children are able to put their own toys and clothes away. Tidiness not only makes the home more peaceful, it makes it feel roomy.

Do you live in a small home? How do you make it work for your family?

And no, that is not our house, isn’t it cute thought? Photo by Eva Schuster