My home in Bowling Green is small, even tiny (if you don’t count my storage spaces). The official living space is 320 sq feet, with three distinct areas:
- There’s a sleeping area, dominated by my bed. This area also holds a large cupboard with my scholarly work, and a lovely antique desk that holds my art supplies (that’s the intention at least). There’s another interesting desk — I think it is some kind of library furniture — that holds my paperwork. And a cupboard that holds some of my clothes.
- There’s a sitting area, with a comfy chair and side table, a cupboard for technology, and a second clothing/jewelry cupboard. Both doors to the outside world enter into this area.
- Between these two areas is my round table, which serves as a desk when I’m working and as an eating table when I’m … eating!
- Off the sitting area is the kitchen/bathroom, a single space separated by cabinets, a self-contained kitchenette unit, and a curtain. The bathroom section holds a toilet, a shower, and a very tiny sink.
That’s my living space. I have windows on three sides of the space, good heating and air conditioning, and plenty of display space for my art. I love it.
Outside my front door, I have a small deck with a rocker and a little table, plus a big plastic deck box to store cushions and candles and lamps and such. This overlooks a very large yard where I have a fire ring, a hammock on a stand, and a small table with chairs. Enough for four. This is my primary space for hospitality.
Outside my other door is the garage space, which I share with my neighbors/friends/landlords. I have about 120 sq feet of that. I use my space for storage, including a full-size refrigerator, a rack for hanging clothes, and quite a few set of shelves for storage. I’m trying to get rid of everything there that I don’t use, but having stable storage space does not motivate that kind of smallification. I need to figure out how to increase the pressure on that activity. Maybe conceiving of it as a studio/project/shop space would help.
I also am paying for two storage units (100 sq ft total) because I have some furniture that is waiting for transport to my daughter’s home in Maine (will be accomplished in a month!) and a bunch of other things (dishes, books books books) that I couldn’t say goodbye to when I moved out of my “real” house almost two years ago. Now I think I can do that.
Finally, I have a campus office, where a lot of professional material is stored, including most of my physical books. That’s about 100 sq ft, I think. But if I were not being a professor, I don’t know how much of that space I would actually need. Some art display, some book storage, but a lot of it would no longer pertain to my life if I weren’t professoring.
So all told, I am using about 640 sq ft of space in Bowling Green. All of it is my “lab” for living small. Tabulating it here is a first step in documenting this experimentation.