Celebrating Purposeful Spaces

 

            When we lived at WillowBridge, our support couple had a very small apartment within the building so they could have a home-away-from-home when they covered for our days off. While I don’t know the square footage of the apartment, it was a true tiny home. It had a large-ish living space, a full bath, and one bedroom with a closet that you could technically walk in, but it wasn’t a true “walk-in” closet.

            The apartment was cute as a button but did, admittedly, present challenges to both couples we worked with in our time there. It was hard to figure out how to make such a small space truly feel like home.

            That was when I first found and became fascinated by the Apartment Therapy website. It has tons of ideas for making really small spaces function on the regular. (Most apartments featured on the site are in large cities and can sometimes be as small as 200-300 square feet. It regularly blew my mind and challenged me to learn the art of making every single space work as hard as it can to serve a purpose.

            I’ve also learned that living in regular-to-larger spaces hampers the ability to succeed at this endeavor. If you don’t have to make a space work hard, you probably won’t. But when working with a smaller space, creative juices start to flow – sometimes out of sheer desperation.

            When we moved here to the lake, I knew our bedroom would be a big challenge. It’s not super tiny, but it’s one of the smaller rooms we’ve lived in. And the part that would create the biggest challenge? Storing our clothes.

            We left a decent-sized walk-in closet for a shared reach-in closet. In order to help our efforts, we did purchase a storage system that gave us a little more to work with than a single shelf and long pole – which is what it had when we arrived.

            We do have a dresser that used to belong to my grandma, and we do keep it on our room. But it was crafted before the days of tracks on drawers, so opening and closing those drawers is a muscle-wielding, screech-producing experience that no one wants to do early in the morning or late at night. We decided to continue using those drawers to store things we don’t need to access all that often.

            Our bed has shelf storage in the headboard and drawers in the footboard. And our side tables have 8 small baskets each that have served both of us primarily as endless junk drawers for the years we’ve owned them.

            My goal when we came here was to pare down the amount of clothing I own, and make all of it fit with room to spare.

            It was a tall order, but I was determined!

            I worked for two evenings to weed out clothing I never wear (or shouldn’t wear) and nearly cried with delight when I saw how much space was left for Ryan’s clothing. And the thing that made me the happiest was knowing that every single one of those bedside table drawers now hold something useful. Not one junk drawer remains.

            I learned this week – for the first time – that there is intense joy to be found in owning less and creating purpose in the spaces you have. I think it might become one of the biggest lessons I learn from this different-sized space. I’m eager to see how it goes as we settle our other spaces. What things feel sweeter because they’re lighter and more purposeful?

            I used to tell my dad before he preached his sermons, “Remember. Less is more.” Now I’m learning it for myself.