In this post, I’ll show you around our current home’s common space room to give you an idea of how we live as a family with young kids in a small space. Living as a family in a small space requires creativity and regular modifications, as I’ve written about before when we lived in our last home. It can be challenging, but our family of five (soon to be six) loves living in our cottage home, and we enjoy the challenge of making it work. We rent from fantastic landlords, and are located quite close to my husband’s work. Our huge deck, and our yard/outdoor space is absolutely ideal for a family with young kids. We will be adding a baby (#4) here in a few months. But we’re pretty determined to make this space work for us as long as we can!
Some statistics on our home:
- 650 square feet (60 square meters) + bonus bedroom building of about 100 square feet (10 square meters) = 750 square feet liveable space (70 square meters)
- 2 bedrooms/1 bathroom + detached bonus room
- Open Concept Living/Dining/Kitchen areas
- Time lived here: 2 years
- Ages of our kids: 6, 3, and 1
- Common Space Room Dimensions: 14 ft 1 in x 15 ft, 4 in (430cm x 468cm)
Our common area is one space for the living and dining areas, and a kitchen is over to the side of that space. I’ll walk you through the common space room with pictures and descriptions below.
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Our favorite things about our common space room:
- Two and a half walls of our common space are glass doors, which we love because it opens up the space so much. Visually, it almost feels like there are no walls.
- Although it does make arranging the furniture a little tricky, we love that we have a wood burning stove for heat. It adds a lovely, cozy vibe in the winter!
- We love our wood floors because it makes the space super adaptable. We can flip-flop the dining area and living area according to what works best for us at the time. We can expand one and shrink the other depending on our needs for the moment. We love the flexibility it offers to not have clearly designated dining and living areas.
- The deck that our doors in the common area open onto is fantastic because it is huge! Since two of our doors are sliders and the other is a french door, we can open everything up and just expand our living area onto the deck when we are hosting a big group. Our kids spend a lot of time out on the deck, which makes the small space less overstimulating.
- Our kitchen is just off our living/dining common area, so it is super convenient to be able to see our common space from the kitchen. It is really easy to keep an eye on small children, even while being productive in the kitchen.
Entry Area – One Corner of Our Common Space Room:
Although there are three exterior doors into our common space room, we mostly use the French Door as our main point of entry. The French door opens onto the covered part of our deck, so we keep a shoe rack outside for wet/muddy shoes. We also have a clothes line hung up on this area of the deck (under cover), so it is a great spot for hanging wet rain gear when we come in from outdoor time (we’re shooting to hit 1000 hours outside this year, so having a spot to hang wet stuff to drip-dry is essential!)
We keep one side of the door shut almost all of the time. The space just inside the closed French door ends up being our main landing area. I keep a shoe rack against the small wall area, and a shelf with hooks up above the shoe rack. This works great for guests to hang jackets or handbags, place keys, etc. Of course, we have a well-used rug inside the door, so this also ends up being our main shoe depository!
I keep a basket for each girl on the shoe rack, where they store their shoes. Lazlo’s shoes are starting to accumulate here too (I need to find another basket for him!). Gabe and I keep our most frequently used shoes on this rack, since we don’t wear shoes in the house. That way they are always in a location where we know to find them!
Main Sitting Area:
Moving clockwise around the room, we have our sitting area against our Northwest wall. We have a mid-century mod style blue/grey couch as our main furniture for sitting. This is next to the wood stove for heat (we move it a bit further from the stove in the winter months when we are burning the stove!). The couch is actually positioned with its back in front of our biggest glass sliding door. Since the couch has a relatively low profile, this seemed to make the most sense for us to be close to the stove, open up the floor space in the middle of the room, and maintain the view out the window.
We keep a shallow tray under the couch for Lazlo’s toys right now. This may not be a permanent feature and solution, but it works well for now.
Next to the couch is the wood stove in the corner. On the other side of the wood stove, coming down the Northeast wall, is an extension of the sitting area. I have a small occasional chair tucked next to a 3-cube shelf. We move it elsewhere when the stove is in use, but during the summer, it fits nicely in this spot. The cube shelf stores an assortment of picture books for the kids, as well as all our baby/board books in a cloth box on the bottom shelf. And the cube shelf is tucked next to a hammock chair suspended from the ceiling. The hammock chair is a favorite sitting spot for our kids! It also serves as an ideal rocking chair for when we have new babies!
The rest of the Northeast wall (which is mostly a glass sliding door) serves as a back-door entry for us, and also a pass through to the kids’ room.
Main Dining Area:
Between the kids’ bedroom door and our bedroom door is the only non-exterior wall in the room. This is where we put our dining room table. Our table just fits against the wall in this space, when the extensions are folded down. Since we can sit our family of five around the table without the extensions out, that is perfect for us. Our dining room table ends up being the most common spot for me to do schoolwork with our girls, too. So our table is a real hub of our life.
Side note, I picked up the dining room table off a facebook marketplace sale. I loved that it had two extensions so we could seat more people than just our family and one guest. The surface of the table was in a bit of rough condition with the waterproof coating proving not very waterproof… But my handy father-in-law sanded down and refinished the whole thing for me when my in-laws visited a few months ago. We LOVE our “new” table!
I really value having as much open space as possible in the middle of the common room for kids to play. So I usually push the table against the wall between meals to open up the common area.
Up above the dining table is an old landline telephone cubby hole. We don’t have a landline, so we’ve converted this cubby into our cord storage/charging station. I love having a designated spot to charge devices in the house. It also serves as our phone’s “bedroom,” so we can put our phones to bed in a specific location each night that is NOT in our bedroom!
Bridge to the Kitchen Area/Secondary Dining Area:
The fourth “wall” of our common space is actually a pass-through and bar into our kitchen. We love that the bar and suspended shelves allow us to see between the common space and the kitchen. And the bar with bar stools provides a secondary space for eating. Our kids eat breakfast most mornings at the bar. And it also is a secondary option for crafts or coloring or playdough when the toddler is roaming free, since he can’t reach up to the counter top yet!
Your Turn: What Do You Love About Your Common Space Room?
What is your favorite aspects of your home’s common space room? Is there anything that is a non-negotiable for you to have in a common space? Do you feel like your common space room serves your household well? I’d love to hear in the comments below!
Alexis Escalante
I love the simplicity of this space and how you capitalize on the flexibility of the room. We are moving into our new home next week and I’ve been searching for inspiration so I can further simplify our possessions as we are moving things into the house. Your space is fresh, bright, and inviting. Those are all features of our new place that I want to highlight and maintain, rather than distract from with a bunch of stuff we’ve accumulated over the years. Thank you for sharing! Lovely article 🙂
Dani
Thank you, Alexis! I wish you the best of luck in curating your stuff. Sometimes it’s a chore, but I think it is so worth it in the end!