Small House Living

Lilah: top, Mairead: bottom
Kit & Kanani at the end of the bed.

Since we've made the decision to move our family back to Maine, the last few weeks have been planning on how we will live in a three bedroom home with four children. Our house here in Virginia is large, too large, but, the best thing about our home here is all the kids have their own bedroom. And it is nice, really nice. But, in the last few weeks, the girls have been requesting more and more to sleep in the same room and now, in the same bed. And for the most part, they do really well together.

Part of me is really excited to live in a small house again with a lot of outdoor space, rather than a large house with minimal outdoor space. This house is a bear to clean. I have a very hard time keeping up with everything because there is just so much space, and with homeschooling the kids, my time is not spent cleaning. The kids tend to spread out their toys throughout our large home rather than the toys just being spread in a confined space in a small home :) - less places for toys to get lost. Toys, shoes, etc can get lost for weeks around here, where in our house in Maine, they were usually found in no time at all!

Kevin and I have decided we will be having all three girls share a room. Stupid, you say? Yeah. You're probably right, but I think they will enjoy it for a while. Callum is little still and he deserves his own room. Once he gets bigger then we can decide if we want one of the girls to room in with him, but for now, the prince will get his own space. Lucky boy.

So, three girls all together in one room. That makes my mind spin just a bit. Trying to plan out how we will make it work while ensuring we do not give up any storage space. It's going to take some planning. As of right now we have:

One full size bed/mattress
Two twin beds/mattress
One crib


Pinterest has been one of my all time favorite websites lately. The ideas there are just never ending, and when I saw this set up, I could just see this in our home! It completely fits in with my beachy style while integrating lots of storage compartments, too, which in our house is a must! The problem with this set up is that we would have no use for our full size mattress and bed, and would have to purchase a new twin mattress. Thankfully, Kevin is pretty crafty and we have some friends in Maine who are willing to help us whip this up for our crew!

The other day, my mom called and told me to put on HGTV. They were designing a bedroom for a set of triplets who would be sharing a room. While our girls are obviously not triplets, there are three of them, and we do need space conservation badly! This trip bunk appeases me because it would utilize our full size mattress on the top, and allowing our two twin mattresses to go on the bottom. This also would make it easier to accomodate guests as we could push the twin mattresses together making a king size bed for our parents or any other visitors. This would obviously be much easier to build than the one above.

Clearly, moving into an 1800sq foot, 3 bedroom home is not going to be ideal, but less is more. We will make it work with a little planning. The good news is we know the ins and outs of our home. We know about the space issues, and we know how to work with it, it's not like we are going in blind.

Do you live in a small home with a lot of kids? How do you make it work without costing an arm and a leg? What about awesome storage solutions? I would love to hear any ideas and/or comments you have! Please share!