For anyone who's ever lived in a tiny home or had a home with very small spaces, the obsession with wanting to make a room look and feel bigger than it is can take over your life. Though there are many tricks, none are quite as effective and versatile as the four in this post. Trick your eye and fool your mind into thinking you have more space than you do!
Sweeten
When the last of their kids moved out, Hafeeza and her husband decided to make a big change: they sold their 4,500 square foot house in New Jersey and moved to Manhattan. They were tired of the maintenance a big house requires, and wanted to be close to the city and all it has to offer. After a year in a temporary spot, they found the perfect apartment. The kitchen just needed a little tlc.
Has your teeny tiny kitchen got you down? Maybe you barely have enough prep space to make meals for one, or your dishes and pots are overflowing your one lonely cabinet. But you don't have to live this way. Even for apartment dwellers, there are plenty of ways you can expand the footprint of a teeny tiny kitchen. Here are 7 ideas.
File this under inspirational undertakings. It took two college students about 500 hours to build this small, sustainable home in Iowa. They used whatever found materials they could put their hands on, enlisted the help of one handy father, and bought as little as possible in the process.
You can never have too many books, right? If your shelves are overflowing, and your living room is running out of space for more shelves, try one of these clever ideas for squeezing a few more books into your space.
How do you make the most of a small space you've turned into a bedroom, despite the small square footage? A Redditer found ways to maximize space when they turned the solarium of their small Toronto condo into a 8.5' x 8' bedroom by adding a wall. They came up with some simple but smart ways to make the small space feel peaceful and not overcrowded.
Small apartments may seem novel or unusual to us Americans, but in Europe they are pretty much the norm. Europeans, with their densely packed cities, have been making the most of small floorplans for years, and they've gotten quite good at it. This Swedish apartment, though it's only 38 square meters (409 square feet), feels much larger, thanks to a few clever design tricks.
When you're young, the world is your oyster. Unfortunately an oyster shell may be all you can afford to rent. Dutch construction company Heijmans has a vision for what it calls "the Not-Quite Generation: young adults between 25 and 35 years old, who have finished studying, gotten their first jobs, are single and have the world at their feet." Their proposed solution: movable, prefab houses to rent for around $850/month. There's just one catch...
Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to breaking an unwritten decor rule: that a sofa be accompanied by a coffee table. In my home, our coffee table is nearly as long as our sofa and eats up a lot of floor space in our small living room. The room is our children's primary play area so this would open up more space and also make the room feel larger by simply having less furniture to look at. To get my husband on board with the idea I compiled a visual exhibit of others who eschew the coffee table:
A lot of the kitchens we feature on this site are dramatic and beautiful and... well, huge. So today we've rounded up a selection of kitchens that are on the smaller side (some on the really small side) to inspire those of you who want a beautiful room for cooking, but don't have infinite space.
