Living Large In Our Little House

Photo Courtesy of Mother Earth News, by Kevin Pieper

One thing that is hard about liv­ing in a small house is try­ing to explain to peo­ple just how small 480-square feet really is.

Yesterday, a new friend of Living Large on our Facebook page, wrote in response to see­ing Dale’s pot­ting table cre­ation: “Great job; now see if you can inter­est him in mak­ing another one, per­haps nar­rower, to go behind your couch! Or any of another dozen places!”

After I fin­ished LOL at the phrase, “Or any of another dozen places,” I wrote that there isn’t room for one more stick of fur­ni­ture in Our Little House.

In response, another friend wrote: “Do you have an island for the kitchen area?”

Another LOL. Yes, it’s called the sofa (which dou­bles as a pull out bed for guests)!

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Based on a cou­ple of com­ments regard­ing “stuff” last week, I wanted to fol­low up my list of the Top Ten Reasons to Live in a Small Home.

Jessica was pretty pas­sion­ate, feel­ing I had lied about the ease of clean­ing a small home. She com­mented she lives in 600 square foot house and finds that she is clean­ing all of the time. “It is so much harder to stay orga­nized in a small house. The big­ger the house, the more room to orga­nize and store your stuff,” she wrote.

Kathleen also wrote, “What I've dis­cov­ered in mov­ing from a smaller house to a larger one is this: it is eas­ier to keep things tidy in the larger house. There is a place for every­thing and I don't mean the wan­ton accu­mu­la­tion of junk, but just the reg­u­lar amount of cloth­ing and linens and tow­els, keep­sakes and etc., within rea­son­able limits.”

My mother also said the same thing after up siz­ing from about 1,000 square feet to 2,500 or so square feet.

I agreed with her until we com­pleted our own down­siz­ing. I agreed with her because, well, I was much like her, I had too much stuff for the size of home we had.

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When I’m being inter­viewed by the media about liv­ing in Our Little House, the reporter will always ask me what are the advan­tages of liv­ing in a small home.

I thought I would put together a Top 10 Reasons for Living in a Small Home for our com­mu­nity and you all are so great, I bet you will add to it!

1. Smaller Footprint on the envi­ron­ment: There are two peo­ple and an always-changing num­ber of dogs, but we still don’t need mul­ti­ple bed­rooms, baths and space.

2. Less Room for Clutter: Our house in the city was packed with stuff. We didn’t even know what we were doing with all of that crap! At Our Little House, we have room for the neces­si­ties and only the things we love. This, of course, helps us save money on buy­ing more stuff!

3. Lower Utility Bills: Who likes dump­ing their money into the util­ity com­pa­nies. We would like to be com­pletely off the grid, maybe some­day. In the mean­time, we pay a 12-month aver­age of approx­i­mately $50 a month for utilities.

4. Less Time Cleaning, More Time for us: I can clean my house and stu­dio top to bot­tom in about 2 hours. What more is there to say about that?

5. Less Maintenance: Doing yard work, land­scap­ing, paint­ing and clean­ing gut­ters in our 20s was fun for maybe the first 5 min­utes as home­own­ers. We spend a lot less time doing all of those things here, giv­ing us more leisure time.

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Kim's lovely older home

Today, I'm happy to present a guest post by Kim Smith, who is part of our Living Large com­mu­nity. Kim lives in an older home, which is another way to live a green lifestyle:

I was hon­ored when Kerri asked me to write about some aspect of "liv­ing large" fam­ily life in a smaller home.  My fam­ily lives an hour or so from her, and while we share a com­mon per­spec­tive on many things, some of our choices make our life look quite different.

When we moved to small-town Arkansas from big-city Florida, we sought out an old house near the down­town square.  At about 1750 square feet, our circa-1916 home is con­sid­ered by some to be a bit quaint and small to raise a mod­ern fam­ily; we think it's per­fect.  Many of our rea­sons for choos­ing it are "green" in nature:
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